Why I added a clinical credential

I taught for eight years before I ever worked in an office. Seventh grade reading in Roma, on the border. A year in Dallas. Then five years in two Austin high schools. In that time I managed student behavioral crises most weeks — de-escalating in the moment, then coordinating afterward with counselors, administrators, and families. I did not think of it as clinical work. It was Tuesday.

A question that sounds academic and isn’t

Later I spent fifteen years at a national school network, and most of that time I was working on a question that sounds academic and isn’t: what makes it possible for a person to act?

The field had a standard answer. Measure the student. Most agency scales do exactly that, and inherent in that approach is the belief that people possess or lack agency. Some children have it. Some don’t. Find out which.

The wrong place to look

I came to think that was the wrong place to look. What I drafted instead was a departure from traditional measures — an instrument that asks whether the classroom environment is conducive to the cultivation of agency. Not whether the child has it. Whether the room allows for it.

That distinction took me two research memos and a twenty-four-item scale to make in a way anyone could use. It is, I think, the only genuinely original idea I have had, and it is very simple: before you conclude that a person is failing, look at the conditions they are failing in.

I started an MSSW while I was still doing that job. The plan, as much as there was one, was to understand the whole-child side of the work I had been doing from the instructional side for twenty years. What I did not expect was how quickly the same question moved off the classroom and onto the people I know best.

The same error, moved indoors

Because here is what I notice about the mothers I know. They are not lacking anything. They are not short on effort, or organization, or love, and most of them are doing more before nine in the morning than I did in a whole day at twenty-five. They are operating inside conditions that would exhaust anyone — and then holding themselves personally responsible for being exhausted.

That is the same error, moved indoors. Measure the individual, find her insufficient, recommend she try harder.

I had my kiddo at 41 while working in a challenging leadership role. I have answered three work emails while researching eighteen-month-old sleep schedules. I am not writing about this from the outside.

What that means in a session

What I can offer is the thing I spent twenty-three years learning to do, which is to look hard at conditions before drawing conclusions about people. In practice that means we will name the systems you are inside — the ones that made the load this size — and then, because you still have to live on a Tuesday, we will work out what you can actually do within them. Both halves matter. Naming the system without the second half is just a more sophisticated way of being stuck.

I am not going to tell you that you need better boundaries and leave it there. You probably know what you need. The harder question, most of the time, is what it would cost you to take it, and whether that cost is really as high as it feels.