Transforming school ‘I can’t’ into school ‘I can’

End of week one, and I can’t keep this news to myself. One of my beautiful students just finished his first week of the term, after arriving to our clinic last July saying he just could not go to school.

He hadn’t attended any classes for months, nor done any work, nor left his room. As we began doing a Davis Life Concepts program together, his life started to shift. He began doing his homework, slowly went back to school, a day at a time, then got himself a job and now he has just completed a full week of school.

In the past few years I have seen the same outcome, over and over again, for teenagers who have been saying ‘School I can’t’.

This year one of my research goals is to keep testing whether this Davis approach, which was designed for Autism originally, is also effective in helping to lessen or resolve school refusal for Autistic and non-Autistic students. I love this job and seeing what happens when we meet young people where they need us to meet them. As teachers, we do not need to be frightened of letting go of our own rigid or existing ideas of how it needs to be when we are working with our teenage students.

We have to meet our teenagers where they’re at - not where we want them to be. When we go to the spot where they are stuck and slowly move forward together we transform the problem.

By Anna Berghamre