Tony Di Giacomo:

This expert interview, we’re joined by Dr. Alisa Dror, head of Pinnacle School and Charlie Manos, Pinnacle’s director of education. The Pinnacle School is a Stamford, Connecticut based school that serves students grades two through 12, with unique learning profiles, through individualized programs that meet their intellectual and social needs. We’ll discuss their unique approach to a more holistic student focused education and the key to identifying and addressing areas of student underperformance. Hi, I’m Dr. Tony Di Giacomo from Novella Prep, and this is A Novel Take.

Alisa. Charlie, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.

Alisa Dror:

Thank you, Tony. It’s great to be here.

Tony Di Giacomo:

I was wondering if you could share a little bit of more about your background and the mission and approach of the Pinnacle School.

Alisa Dror:

I’m Alisa Dror. I’m the head of the Pinnacle School. I’ve been here for almost 10 years, right from the beginning. My background is in education special education, and I’m also a behavior analyst. So I bring a more of a clinical perspective around data collection data-driven decisions, as well as understanding the deep social, emotional challenges of our students.

Charlie Manos:

It is great to join you today and talk about the kinds of things you’re going to ask us about today that we were both still very passionate about. I’ve worked for decades as a school psychologist and marriage and family therapist, and educator, and a leader in special education, mental health. I bring to pinnacle that sort of integrated approach in furthering the mission of Pinnacle School.

Tony Di Giacomo:

The things that you describe on your site and in some of our previous discussions is a special approach that is called CPS or collaborative proactive solutions, which is a model that helps guide students development of social awareness decision-making and bolsters, identified skill gaps. Tell me a little bit more about this model and how do you identify areas of under-performance and, and in turn, how do you support growth?

Charlie Manos:

The collaborative and proactive solutions model was originally developed by Dr. Ross Greene, who worked at Harvard medical school, and he developed an approach that was quite revolutionary at the time and continues to be quite revolutionary and unique. It’s a highly evidenced and research based model that takes into account children’s developmental level, their temperament neuro-biological factors, best practices in special education and mental health. And so he has done a lot of research and surveying a lot of areas of child development, education, and mental health to come up with this model on the surface, the model seems rather straight forward and it is, but at the same time, it has a depth to it that really impacts children. It has three components to it, the empathy stage, which involves developing a deep awareness of the child difficulties through questioning and interviewing the second phase allows the adult could be the educator or the parent to share their concerns that they observe about the student.

Charlie Manos:

And the third phase, the invitation phase is for the adult and the student to problem solve the issues that came up and say is one and phase two, the model is not based on diagnosis or identifications, but based upon identifying lagging skills and unsolved problems is that the heart of the assessment phase lagging skills can include such things as processing time, mood regulation, reading skills, a variety of about 45 skills that Dr. Green identifies and his assessment tool referred to as the assessment of lagging skills and unsolved problems. So during that initial phase, when the adult is interviewing the student at this empathy stage, which does a deep dive into the skills, the adult is being mindful of this list of 45 lagging skills that the student may be struggling with. Of course, the student doesn’t identify them as lagging skills. They talk about the things that are most difficult to them or the skills and subjects and areas of concern that they’re avoiding or struggling with, or maybe having a problematic behaviors around.

Charlie Manos:

The simple example is let’s say that a student consistently asked to go to the restroom during a particular aspect of math or reading. So here, the questioning begins with trying to understand what they might be avoiding. So as opposed to labeling a student as avoidant or disruptive or inattentive, the goal of that first phase, which is actually the most important phase of the model is to understand deeply what it is the child is struggling with, but may not have the words to articulate those and come to a very deep understanding of the child’s difficulties. What makes this phase so challenging is educators and adults tend to quickly want to move on to problem solving, which is the last phase. And problem solving is best done when there’s a deep understanding of the child’s concern. And then the adult has an opportunity to share their concerns during the second phase of the model.

Tony Di Giacomo:

That’s really interesting because one of the things we observe and working with students is when families call us looking for one-on-one support with our child, whether they’re high-performing and they’re stressed, or they’re lower performing and struggling, there’s a desire to get to the solution as fast as possible. They want to hurry up and get to the fix. And what we’re finding is it takes some time to unpack and understand some of the challenges that they’re facing from the student’s perspective before we can even conceive of an appropriate solution. And one of the things that with this podcast we’re looking to do is dive deeper into how to raise healthy children and support their holistic development. I think what you’re talking about ties into the spirit of this. So how does your school work to more comprehensively support student needs, interest and growth, extrapolating that more to a mainstream application? How do you see how some of these lessons or observations might apply to a wider mainstream world of education and maybe some elements or ideas that they could borrow from this methodology?

Alisa Dror:

At the core of our approach at Pinnacle is building strong relationships with our students that involve trust mutual respect. Understanding. We often work with students who have not been successful in previous school environments. A lot of students have experienced feelings of failure at school or feelings that school doesn’t understand them or their teachers don’t know how to teach them. And don’t necessarily know how to express that. Some of them express it by becoming withdrawn or actively avoiding going to school or certain classes. So what we find is really essential before any of the work can begin as having that really strong relationship that’s built on trust. That’s built on really knowing the student, understanding them, respecting them and liking them and the students pick up on things like that very quickly. There’s no way to fake it. You really need to be invested in the relationship with the student first and foremost,

Charlie Manos:

If I can add to Dr. Dror’s point Pinnacle’s philosophy in many respects goes against common mental health practices, which tends to be symptom focused and driven to eradicate symptoms rather than doing the deeper dive in understanding what’s happening below the surface. So oftentimes children may get symptomatic relief, but don’t have sustainable interventions. I think the relationship piece is so important and the relationship is built on the first phase of Dr. Greene’s model, which is that empathy stage building a sense of trust and confidence and mutual respect, where a child will let you in their life. And we’ll peel back the more symptomatic manifestations of the, of their struggles to get to that next level of understanding them. It does fly in the face. A lot of current mental health practices, which really focus on treating diagnostic classification rather than underlying problems, which oftentimes gets in the way of actually helping students understand themselves, how helping parents understand their students on a deeper level and not resolve and not resorting to oftentimes in schools, more punitive or disciplinary measures to address a student’s core issues.

Alisa Dror:

And I think a big shift in understanding students through the lens of lagging skills, rather than through the lens of the behavioral manifestation. So students are not that disrespectful avoidant. They might be doing those things, but really understanding why they’re doing them and that they’re coming from both a place of communication, as well as a place of not having developed more adaptive skills to communicate what they’re communicating from some of those things that we might call inappropriate behaviors.

Charlie Manos:

One of the things that parents have said to us when we shift the frame and use this lens to understand and speak about their students is they consider this revolutionary and just the mere shift in lens without doing anything else helps adults than interact differently with students. Because once you see a student, as manipulative adults tend to respond or react in a particular way. But if you understand, as Alisa talks about that, it’s an adaptive mechanism to deal with a lagging skill or unsolved problem. Now, you understand that it becomes more of a survival mechanism to deal with some skill. And once they have that skill, there’s no need for them to continue to use those maladaptive mechanisms.

Tony Di Giacomo:

That’s one of the things I’ve found really impressive about pinnacle and this approach from my own observations, I’ve seen students who are parents sometimes will be seeking a classification and by doing so, they’re able to explain a way certain behaviors when it’s really behavior is often a form of a tool of communication for something else that’s happening. The other thing I observed some schools doing, I won’t say incorrectly, but it ends up being perhaps too narrow. A field of view is when there is a classification to simply focus on that classification, as opposed to continuing to focus holistically on the entire student, because that one classification does not necessarily represent the full manifestation of challenges that they’re facing in school. It just explains part of certain attributes of behaviors. That’s one thing that sets your school apart, going back to relationships for a minute, that’s something that we talk about. And in our programming, the three R’s, one of them being relationships. And that is between the educator and the student. And we often see the lower, the performance that the student has in a school, the more fractured or distant the relationship is with the teacher. And so we help seek to repair that, how you view the importance of relationship building and what might some lessons be generally speaking for educators and students to cultivate better relationships, not only now during a very digital time period, but generally speaking.

Alisa Dror:

So I think what helps us navigate a lot of these relationships that have often been fractured in the past, either between the family and the district or providers and the student or teachers and the student, there’s often a lack of trust, a lack of focus on the students and their needs and more about having the adults goals met. So what we try to do is start with reframing everybody’s attention around the student and what that student needs in order to move forward. We focus initially on, on a deep and shared understanding of the student, both in terms of what they bring to the table as strengths, as well as what some of their challenges and lagging skills might be, and really create a team that is focused on understanding the student at a deep level, and then meeting them where they are and slowly moving them forward.

Alisa Dror:

And if we’re able to change the focus on onto the student and what has, and hasn’t worked in the past, we’re generally able to see a lot of forward momentum and really bringing the team together to support that student. A lot of our work extends beyond the student. We find ourselves working a lot with families as well because families often come to us from a place of feeling, pretty mistrustful of the school environment as well, feeling like schools have failed their child in the past. So part of our work will often include deepening the family’s understanding of their child, communicating with them in a way that we can rebuild that trusting relationship, because they’re really crucial in terms of their involvement with their child and with us and what the school district and with outside providers. And so everybody really needs to be on the same team.

Charlie Manos:

Couldn’t agree more. I think that during the admissions process that we talked to parents about our relational based approach with students and how we understand students. And while we recognize that having diagnosis and identifications is she the entry point to getting specialized services the way our laws are built, they don’t really provide much benefit to students beyond that point, because unlike in medicine, there are no treatments that are directly associated with diagnosis. There are these diagnostic categories based upon symptomatic presentation, but after that, there’s really nothing left for the practitioner to do. If they don’t have a conceptual model, that’s based upon understanding students beyond the symptoms. I think the trust and the respect and the relationships are built on that we can see beyond the student’s symptomatic behavior because by the time students come to Pinnacle, these are the students who have been lost in the public school on based upon Ross Greene’s one, his first book, one of his first books lost at school. So we know they have been traumatized by repeated failures. Parents have been, uh, stressed and traumatized by repeatedly being told their students can’t perform, or they’re not doing something right, or they’re unmotivated or manipulative or lazy, or those disparaging terms that creates such discouragement and mistrust. So we realized that there’s always something that no, no child is born bad or wanting to displease the adult population. We know that there’s no science that would support that. So we understand that once we begin to peel back those layers and understand what are those lagging skills, unsolved problems, issues that the students and families are struggling with that sense of gee, you understand me builds. That’s what really cements the trust in the end, because we can see beyond what the child presents out of the surface.

Tony Di Giacomo:

That’s true. The trauma is interesting, the way you phrase that because we observed that students develop an identity around their under-performance and often feel hopeless, the family, and sometimes the students feel hopeless and feel that wrongly, that it’s somehow tied to their intelligence when it’s not. And that there are ways to overcome, to overcome and to grow in both the character and behavior and ways that you can perhaps not only perform better academically, but find things that bring you joy that may result in a productive career as you define it, or areas of interest, once you’re able to identify things that might be obstacles now in this moment. So a couple of final questions that I have for you. One is related to what you’ve learned during COVID that you feel how you’re able to serve students. Now, during this time, we can kind of end by talking more about the kind of student and family are seeking and how they see the best way for them to get in touch with you.

Alisa Dror:

Back in March, we had about a week to prepare for moving our in-person learning to remote learning. And we basically did that by outfitting everybody with the technology that they were going to need, and then just superimposed a virtual schedule over our full day class schedule. So our students moved pretty seamlessly into a full day of synchronous, remote learning. We made some tweaks along the way. We decided that students, it should be, let’s say off zoom during lunch and recess and various other things, but really stayed true to providing the full day of remote learning to our students. While some of our students responded very well to remote learning. Others really struggled in terms of some of the organizational skills, some of the screen time, some of managing multiple sprains once they had technology available, but some of our students really thrived. And as we pulled back a little bit and examined that it seemed to be related to the lack of interpersonal relationships that you need to navigate when you’re on a screen versus in a classroom, which given the nature of our students removed some of the challenges that they have, that we’re working on a day-to-day basis that really relate to their social, emotional development.

Alisa Dror:

As we think about how we move forward. And I should pause and say that we have been back in person learning since September, we’ve had a couple intentional moves to remote learning after Thanksgiving and after the winter break, so that we could test all of our faculty and students and return knowing that we had a, a COVID free environment. But other than that, we’ve been back with in-person learning. And I think as we in the future, as we have time to reflect back on this, we often talk about being anxious toget back to normal. I don’t think that that normal post COVID is going to look the way that it did pre COVID. I think that there are a lot of lessons that we need to learn from what’s worked, what was effective, how we understand our students and that we’re successful versus those students who had more challenges with remote learning. And I think that there are a lot of possible modifications to education that we can think about making based upon what we’ve learned during this time. So I think there are some silver linings we may or may not know what they are yet, but I think it’s definitely worth examining what it is that we can take from this experience that has been positive for our students.

Tony Di Giacomo:

I agree. When faced with any obstacle, one would hope that we wouldn’t go back to exactly the way we were before, and hopefully we can learn and grow from such an experience. So as we wrap on our discussion today, help us understand better. The type of family that you think might be best served by going to pinnacle. And what are the best ways that you would recommend that they reach out to you?

Alisa Dror:

Our typical student profile is an academically capable student who really struggles, understanding the nuances of social, emotional development, who struggles in social situations. Oftentimes this might be a student who has a diagnosis on the autism spectrum. Sometimes a student with ADHD, sometimes a student who has a learning disability who has not received the intervention that they need really to move beyond that learning disability. We often find that our students have multiple layers of diagnoses by the time that they get to us. And so it’s our job really to peel back those layers and understand at the core who they are or who they were prior to maybe some school settings that didn’t necessarily understand them or meet their needs. So what we might say as a student who started out with a reading disability that wasn’t well addressed, and then they become anxious and then they become depressed and then they become school avoidant, and then maybe they become a behavior problem. So all of those secondary diagnoses are really a result of not understanding some of those core deficit. Some of those core lagging skills earlier on

Charlie Manos:

There tend to be complex students who require more coordinated and integrated services. So for example, the student who may be in a class, a small resource room with learning with other students with learning challenges, and it may see the school psychologist once or twice a week is going to be probably not successful in that environment because in the pinnacle environment, the approach is integrated. That is all the services are brought in with the chomp in an integrated way. So the teacher may be just as capable of providing a social, emotional intervention as the school psychologist. So the student doesn’t really have to wait to receive those services. And a lot of in the moment, social, emotional coaching to address the challenges as they manifest themselves in the environments where those lagging skills and unsolved problems exist.

Tony Di Giacomo:

Before we go, where can people learn more about the Pinnacle School?

Alisa Dror:

Sure. The best place to reach us is on our website, which is thepinnacleschool.org. And you can also take a virtual tour of our building and new facilities there.

Tony Di Giacomo:

Thank you. And so Alisa, Charlie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today and we appreciate the conversation and all the knowledge you’ve shared with our audience today. Have a good day. Thank you. That’s all for this episode of A Novel Take. Thanks for listening. Remember to subscribe for more discussions on the latest education headlines, key topics and expert interviews. As always, you can learn more about us at novellaprep.wpengine.com and find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @novellaprep. I’m Dr. Tony Di Giacomo, bye for now.