Seeing Beyond the Presentation: A Personal Reflection on School Psychology, Leadership, and Change

Darrick Lamar Bell, CAGS, MAEP
October 11, 2026

The Responsibility to See More

I believe school psychologists must have imagination. We need the willingness to look beyond what students show us in a particular moment and consider what their behavior, academic performance, or silence may not reveal. A referral identifies a concern. A test score describes performance under specific conditions. An observation captures part of a school day. Each provides valuable information, but understanding a student requires us to bring those pieces together and remain open to what we have yet to learn.

My work as a school psychologist and my previous experience as a director of special education have shaped this belief. I have worked in affluent districts and in schools serving communities with fewer economic resources. Those experiences have prompted me to examine how expectations, relationships, and access to support influence the opportunities students receive. They have also reminded me that a student’s potential is not always immediately visible.

When I speak of imagination, I mean the capacity to consider another explanation, another approach, or another possible future. I mean asking whether the student has the skills a situation requires, whether the environment supports those skills, and whether we have listened carefully enough. Imagination begins an inquiry. Our professional methods help us determine which possibilities are supported.

What My Training Allows Me to Ask

My training in school psychology and educational psychology gives me a framework for examining learning and behavior. Knowledge of cognition, development, executive functioning, emotional regulation, and social communication helps me ask more precise questions. A student who has difficulty beginning an assignment may need clearer instruction, help organizing the task, reassurance about making mistakes, or an adjustment in the demands being placed on them. The appropriate response depends on what we learn.

Working with students who experience school avoidance has reinforced the importance of understanding how a school day feels from the student’s perspective. Adults may focus on arriving on time and attending every class. A student may be struggling to manage the duration of a class, navigate relationships, tolerate uncertainty, or recover from feeling overwhelmed. Attendance remains an important goal. Understanding the barriers helps us develop a plan the student can begin to use.

The same principle applies to students whose behavior draws immediate attention. We need to address safety, accountability, and the impact on others while also investigating the skills and circumstances involved. An explanation can help us select an effective response and identify what the student needs to learn.

I see assessment as a beginning of understanding. Its value extends into the conversations, instructional decisions, interventions, and relationships that follow. I want my work to help a teacher understand what to try tomorrow and help a parent understand their child more clearly. A carefully written report has limited value if its findings never become usable support.

Expertise Requires Humility

Experience can sharpen judgment. It can also make familiar explanations feel certain too quickly. I need to remain aware of that tension. The more experienced I become, the more deliberately I must ask what information is missing and whose perspective has not been heard.

A student’s account may challenge my interpretation. A parent may describe strengths that are not visible at school. A teacher may identify a classroom pattern that changes how I understand a concern. These perspectives deserve investigation. Listening is part of the assessment process, and collaboration helps me recognize the limits of my own view.

I also believe that professional insight should never become a claim that I understand a student better than the student understands themselves. Students may need support expressing their experience, and their interpretations may be incomplete, as ours can be. Their voice still matters. I want to make room for students to describe what is difficult, what helps, what they want, and how they define progress.

My responsibility is to develop the best supported understanding available and revise it when new information emerges. That requires curiosity, careful documentation, and the willingness to acknowledge uncertainty. It also requires recognizing that a plausible explanation is a hypothesis until there is sufficient evidence to support it.

What Leadership Has Taught Me About Systems

Serving as a director of special education expanded my perspective on the relationship between individual needs and organizational decisions. Working directly with students keeps the human consequences of those decisions close to me. I value both perspectives because they help me consider what a student needs and what a school must organize to provide it.

Schools operate under real constraints. Staffing, schedules, resources, competing demands, and procedural requirements influence what happens each day. Teachers and administrators need support as they respond to complex student needs. Effective advocacy requires attention to those conditions and a willingness to help develop workable solutions.

At the same time, recurring concerns deserve examination beyond the individual student. When students repeatedly encounter the same barrier, I believe we should ask whether a routine, policy, or service arrangement contributes to the difficulty. Are students receiving help early enough? Are classroom recommendations feasible? Have staff received the support needed to implement them? Are we evaluating what happens after a plan is written?

The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP, 2020) identifies consultation, data-based decision making, school-wide practices, equitable services, and systems change within the profession’s responsibilities. This framework supports a role that connects individual student understanding with improvements in school practice.

For me, that connection is essential. If I identify a need but do not examine whether the recommended support is available and effective, my work remains incomplete. Leadership can begin in the questions I bring to a team, the evidence I help interpret, and the follow-through I encourage.

Equity Begins With Examining Our Interpretations

My experience across different school communities has made me attentive to how resources and expectations influence educational responses. Those experiences do not, by themselves, establish why differences occur. They do provide questions worth investigating.

I want to know whether similar concerns receive similar attention, whether families can access the supports schools recommend, and whether students have meaningful opportunities to demonstrate strengths. I also want to examine the language we use. Describing a student as unmotivated or a parent as uninvolved may close a conversation before we have explored the circumstances. More precise descriptions of what occurred make it easier to investigate and respond.

As a Black male school psychologist, I bring a personal perspective to questions of identity, expectations, and belonging. I also recognize that my identity does not allow me to assume another person’s experience. It gives me reason to remain attentive and ask thoughtful questions while listening to how students and families describe their own lives.

Equity requires examining patterns as well as individual experiences. Where appropriate, schools can review access to interventions, time out of instruction, referral patterns, and student outcomes across groups. Those findings need careful interpretation, attention to privacy, and discussion with the people affected. The purpose is to identify barriers we can address and evaluate whether our response improves students’ opportunities.

Turning Professional Insight Into Policy

I believe my expertise can inform policy when I translate a recurring concern into a clearly defined problem, a feasible proposal, and a plan for evaluating the result. Professional experience helps identify the questions. Local data, relevant research, and stakeholder perspectives help determine the scope of the concern and the response.

Attendance support is one possible starting point. A school could develop a coordinated process that includes student and family input, identifies barriers, assigns responsibility for follow-up, and reviews progress at agreed intervals. A pilot could examine attendance and class participation alongside whether supports were actually delivered and whether students found them useful. The findings would help determine what to retain or change.

Another opportunity is the implementation of evaluation recommendations. A scheduled review could ask which supports were provided, what teachers and students observed, and whether adjustments are needed. This would create a clearer connection between assessment and daily practice.

Transition planning offers another avenue. My interests in mentoring, self-advocacy, executive functioning, and financial literacy lead me to consider how schools prepare students for everyday decisions beyond graduation. I would advocate for explicit learning opportunities and meaningful ways for students to demonstrate skills, with instruction adapted to their needs and goals.

To advance any proposal, I need to explain the concern in language that educators, families, and decision makers can use. A brief policy recommendation should identify the evidence, the proposed change, the resources required, who will be responsible, and when outcomes will be reviewed. A compelling story can make the concern understandable. Broader evidence is needed to justify a broader claim.

I can contribute through school improvement teams, district committees, professional associations, presentations, and written recommendations to leadership. My strongest contribution will be connecting psychological knowledge to practical decisions and remaining involved long enough to learn whether those decisions helped.

A Commitment to Act

I want this reflection to lead to action in my own practice. I can begin by asking one more question before accepting a familiar explanation, seeking the student’s perspective, and making recommendations clear enough to implement. I can follow up on a plan rather than assuming that agreement at a meeting means the support occurred. When a barrier appears repeatedly, I can help the team examine it as a possible systems concern.

I would invite colleagues to make similar commitments. Choose one recurring difficulty. Listen to the students, families, and staff who experience it. Review the available evidence. Propose a manageable change, identify how it will be implemented, and return to the results. Professional advocacy becomes more persuasive when we can show what we learned and how we responded.

The belief that school psychologists need imagination is, for me, a belief about responsibility. Students deserve adults who can recognize the limits of an immediate impression and remain curious about their abilities, needs, and future. They also deserve schools that act on what those adults learn.

I want my experience and expertise to help build those schools. That means bringing care to individual encounters, discipline to assessment, and persistence to the work of change. Seeing more clearly should influence what I do next.

Reference

National Association of School Psychologists. (2020). The professional standards of the National Association of School Psychologists. https://www.tntech.edu/education/pdf/cp/NASP_standards_2020_current.pdf