9 Classroom and Behavior Management Tips for All Teachers
The biggest reason that kids struggle in their general education class is their behaviors. So here are some ideas to make behavior management a little easier! This is set up from the most whole class to the most individualized.
9 Tips on How to Manage a Classroom and Support Struggling Students
Classrooms should be set up to make students feel welcome and to have flexibility. But when things start to go wrong in the classroom, one of the easiest things to do is to quickly check your space. Look at how things are arranged in the room. Are there bottlenecks? Are there spaces you can’t see from the front where mischief can happen? Are there places where squabbles seem to happen a lot? Are there resources that are too tempting to avoid out in an easy to get space– or alternatively are there frequently needed resources that are squashed behind your desk or behind a student?
Now zero in on your seating options. There are pros and cons of rows and more collaborative seating options. If you want to build community, you want desks grouped together. If you want your class quiet, rows might be the way to go. If you have a small class and want space for rug time, you might want a semi-circle. Beyond that, look at the types of seating. Do you want all desks the same height? Do some of your students need to stand? If so, you can up the height of a lot of desks. Then check out the spacing between desks. Are students going to bump each other getting in and out of seats? Can you get to each student to talk to them one on one if needed?
Now look at your walls, lighting, and temperature. Is the environment itself calming or overwhelming? Look at the lights. Bright fluorescent lights can be super stimulating. Does your school allow for desk lamps? Can you do natural lighting instead? Turn on all the lights if you want to wake up the class. Turn them off to chill out the students. Then check the walls. Are they messy, cluttered, welcoming, or inclusive? What are the colors in the room? Colors like red are really alerting while blue is more calming. Now take stock of the temperature. Odds are you can’t control it– but hot rooms make for cranky students. Is there anything you can do? What about noise? Does the room echo? If so, can you put in rugs or things with cloth to break up the reverberations of the sound? Can you play music? If so, think about whether you want to pump up the students or wind them down.
Each of these will shape how your students act in class! We all respond to our environments so figure out what you want– to rev up or wind down your students and adjust the stimulation in the room to match that.
Do you need a cool-down area? That’s an area where kids can go when they need a break. Unlike a time out area, cool down areas are designed to help kids self-regulate. That might be a bean bag in your library, a study carrel at a wall, or just a quiet corner. Some students need to have a space in the classroom to go when they are frustrated or cranky.
To make a cool down area work, you will want to put up guide posts and signs that spell out how to use it. How long can students be there? What is okay and what isn’t okay when they are there?
To learn more about setting up physical spaces, check out the resources on Iris!
It is rarely just one kid in a room struggling with their behavior.
Start by looking at the whole group first. How many kids are on task? How many are struggling?
The easiest way to improve the behavior of a target student is to improve the behavior of the group– kids respond to social pressure better than to anything we can dream up. So start by looking at the whole class first and seeing what you can tweak there– don’t just dive into individual behavior management strategies.
Ideally you should have about 3 to 5 classroom rules. You don’t want a million! They should be positive. Think safe bodies– not don’t hit. They also should be taught. No one is born knowing safe body means! Ideally, they should also be co-designed with students.
If a student is struggling, pause and check your rules. Do your rules cover the behavior or do they need to be shifted? Do the students understand the rules? When was the last time you retaught the rules? How are the rules emphasized during the day? Can you reinforce them even more?
This site has some good resources for how to create and teach classroom rules.
Are there clear classroom incentives? We all do better when we are rewarded for our good behavior whether through praise, group points, or an occasional extra recess. Clearly tie the incentives to your class rules and goals.
One teacher I worked with put a sticker on the hand of every student who had a good day. His students lived for those stickers. I like classroom money. I have a lot of tips on how to get stuff for your store for free– but the goal is to figure out incentives from extra recess to more time with you that don’t cost you money but up the stakes of following the rules for all students.
Are there clear consequences? Consequences don’t need to be drastic– but for the rules to be effective they need to be certain. Consistency is the most important thing with consequences. If you say two warnings and then an email home… email home. The easiest consequences are the withholding of an incentive. Like if you are giving students a sticker, not giving a sticker becomes a consequence. It seems silly– but the best consequences are often the withholding of a positive.
Does the classroom have clear procedures? If kids are getting in fights near the water fountain, start by figuring out if they actually know what they are supposed to do. Consistent, well taught classroom procedures prevent an impressive amount of behaviors. You might need procedures for lining up, procedures for getting water, procedures for packing up…. the list goes on.
The teacher toolkit has a nice page on how to teach procedures that you can check out too! If you are stuck, social stories can be really helpful. You can create a social story with visuals for ANY procedure and they double as an intervention too! The Watson Center has some free social stories on routines that you could tweak.
Student relationships are like bank accounts. If you want to do a withdrawal, you had better have made some deposits first. So before you give a kid a consequence or redirection, you need to have built up some capital. That might mean high fiving the student on their way in, sending a positive email home, complimenting them, smiling at the student, eating lunch with them– or something else. Each one of these actions, however, is a way to build up your relationship deposits so that you have some cash to withdraw when you need it!
For every one negative comment you make to a student, you need to make five positive ones. This 5:1 ratio is magic and has a lot of research behind it. That means that if you know you need to correct a student you had better start thinking of positive things to say!
This comes out of marriage research. Couples who maintain the ratio are more likely to stay together. Researchers have then extended the work to classrooms. PBIS has some nice resources on this too.
When a student is struggling, it can be hard to think of positive things to say and ways to build that relationship! OSSE in DC came up with a crazy helpful, eight page document of relationship building strategies that you can use. Strategies range from greeting a student at the door to relationship mapping. But get creative! How can you bond with a student? What besides their behavior can you find to talk to them about?
Self-regulation is a skill that students need to learn. Some of the strategies below were designed for students with Autism– but TBH they work for all students and are worth learning about!
Zones of regulation is a pretty basic idea. Students learn to label whether their emotions are in the blue (sad/down), green (happy/calm), yellow (worried/excited), or red (panicked/angry/over excited) zone. Then they learn strategies to help them regulate their emotions to get back to their desired zone. Zones of regulation is very happy to take your money– but almost all occupational therapists have this! If you think a student needs zones of regulation, ask your OT and it is likely that they will be able to get you materials and train you on it for free!
The Incredible 5 Point Scale does pretty much the same thing with numbers but it is also super flexible. Like, you can make a five point scale for stress from things that don’t stress the student at all to things that make them explode or focus on identifying emotions and strategies. Even better, the company has a ton of free materials online! This base scale is super easy to use with students and really helpful as a tool to refer back to.
Social Thinking is a completely fabulous program that many speech and language pathologists own and can help train you on. One of the core concepts, one that is SUPER useful for behavior management, is expected and unexpected behaviors. Rather than talking about good and bad behaviors, you talk about expected and unexpected and teach students to identify the two and to learn to label their own behaviors as expected and unexpected. There are a lot of resources out there that folks have made related to this– but SLPs should have the real original material and can, hopefully, share.
Finally, there are social stories. Carol Gray is one of the big people in social stories and her website has some good resources. Basically, social stories are a script that allows students to rehearse situations before they happen. Social stories can be about friendships, lining up, challenging emotions, or really anything. While they are thought of for Autism, we all benefit from the opportunity to rehearse hard things before we have to do them for real– and that’s what a good social story does for you (and for students!)
So I am kind of obsessed with mindfulness for students. Everyone needs a pause button, a space between stimulus and response. Mindfulness can give that to students. In fact, I’m so obsessed that I wrote a whole blog post on it.
If you are looking for quick and easy things to try with students check out:
- Square breathing: Also known as box breathing it is easy to teach and for students to use.
- 4-7-8 breathing: Just as easy to teach and use, 4-7-8 breathing has a ton of research behind it.
- Finger breathing: An easy way to get littles focused on their breathing.
- Mindfulness videos: The ones on mindfulness for teens are pretty good.
PBIS, positive behavior interventions and supports is a multi-tiered approach to supporting students’ socio-emotional success at school. PBIS is a multi-tiered approach. That means that the framework starts with things that you can do for you whole class to be successful and then offers suggestions for the small groups or individual students who need more support. It’s a way to support the behaviors you want to see by being positive and systematic– and it is grounded in a whole lot of research! Like all frameworks, it isn’t perfect– but it has some rock solid strategies and ideas for classroom and behavior management.
This resource from PBIS is a really exhaustive list of supports you can provide students. The charts are laid out weirdly, but the information is good. For example, they recommend setting up routines, writing that you should, “• Post and review schedule for the day or class
period. • Define, explicitly teach, prompt, and regularly
review procedures for common activities (e.g.,
arrival, dismissal, turning in homework, working
in groups).”
All of the advice in there is equally concrete!
The same document has ideas on how to up the support for students who need more. For example, it recommends that the teacher, “Adapt classroom design, layout, and materials to (a) encourage SEB skills and contextually appropriate behavior and (b) minimize
opportunities for contextually inappropriate
behavior. For example, design a designated
space for students to engage in calming
strategies, ensure students have easy access to
the space, include accessible visual prompts for
calming strategies that have been previously
taught, practiced, and reviewed.
• Consider other adjustments to physical space
to meet the individual needs of students in the
classroom.”
In addition, PBIS has a really helpful resource on supporting students with disabilities and challenging behavior. What I like about it is the list of 5 key strategies you can use to support students. Simple and easy to follow. For example, recommendation 5 is: “Provide Prompts, Pre-Corrections,
and Other Reminders to Set Students
Up for Success: Simple strategies, like providing ‘positive greetings at the door’ 11 (i.e., connect with each student as they enter the classroom, prompt routines and expected behavior, and provide specific praise for transition), result in positive outcomes for all students, including students with disabilities (Allday & Pakurar, 2007; Allday et al., 2011; Cook et al., 2018). “
The ABCs of behavior are Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence. Antecedent is what happens before the behavior. Maybe it’s you giving out a mathematics worksheet. Maybe it’s a cutie of the preferred gender smiling. Maybe it’s a really spicy lunch. Every behavior has an antecedent. A lot of times, a behavior will have the proximate antecedent– what happened right before– and a more attenuated antecedent– what happened last night or earlier– and it’s a combination that is triggering the behavior. But by closely watching the student’s behavior you can start to get a sense of what the A is.
Then there’s the B, the behavior. That’s what the kiddo does. Is it tear up the math sheet? Cuss out the cutie? Throw something? What is the behavior that you want to work on?
Finally, you get the C, the consequence. That’s where the money is. What happens after the behavior? Does the student get to avoid the math worksheet because they get kicked out of class? Do they get attention from the cutie? Both of those consequences would reinforce the behavior– the kiddo is more likely to continue the behavior because the consequence is getting them something they want. Or is it instead that the student has to do more math? Or gets ignored by the cutie? A lot of times, we think we are being strict with a kiddo and instead we are creating a consequence that actually increases the likelihood of the behavior repeating because the student is getting what they want!
Once you know the ABCs of the student’s behavior, you are much better positioned to start tackling the behaviors!
This handout on the ABCs from Vanderbilt has a pretty nice overview.
Behavior is a language. Every time a student engages in a behavior, they are telling you something. One of the challenges is learning to speak that language. When you learn the function of the behavior, you are starting to speak the student’s language– and you can communicate right back.
You would think that behaviors would have a lot of functions but in reality folks think of behavior as having one of four functions.
- A student might be seeking attention. That could be your attention. Even you yelling is a form of attention. It could also be attention from a peer.
- A student might be trying to escape something. If the student rips up the math sheet because they don’t want to do math, they are trying to escape the work.
- A student might be trying to get something tangible, like a toy.
- The student might be trying to gain or avoid a sensory stimuli. A student might start yelling if the music is too loud to cope with it or hit someone who brushes by them because the person was too close.
If you can figure out the why of the behavior– the function that it is serving for a student– you can start to figure out how to offer replacement behaviors that meet the same need but are less destructive. Maybe they could take a lap before trying the math assignment and avoid it a little or get their peer’s attention by asking to work with a partner. The functions give you levers to use in your behavior management.
To learn more about the functions of behavior, check out this handout.
Once you know the function of behavior, you can be smart about your interventions. This handout from PBIS Missouri maps interventions onto behavior functions really nicely.
What behaviors will you focus on?
While we would love to wave a magic wand and instantly get rid of every single one of our student’s annoying behaviors that is, sadly, not how real life works. It takes time, consistency, and patience to modify behaviors. Even with those, you can’t modify every behavior at once. You have to triage. What are the behaviors that most impact that student at school? Once you have figured out what those behaviors are, you have to figure out what the kid SHOULD be doing instead. Behavior contracts are worded in the positive—what we want—not in the negative. Then, finally, you have to pre-teach and re-teach what behaviors you are looking for. So let’s get started!
Sometimes this is super obvious. If a kid is punching other students in line, target safety. In fact, if the student has any unsafe behaviors (running out of the classroom, hitting/kicking, climbing things) target those first. If the unsafe behaviors are pretty rare, you can include one or two other behaviors on the contract as well.
For non-safety behaviors, think through what is most impacting the student’s success at school. Is it academic behaviors like not turning in homework or classwork? Is it social behaviors like insulting other kids or getting in their space? Is it disrespectful behaviors like swearing or arguing with teachers?
To figure out what behaviors to target, talk to people. When teachers are frustrated with a student they will complain. What behaviors do they complain the most about? What do other students tattle tale the most about? What does the student themselves say is their most challenging behavior?
Come up with a list and then pick two or three that seem the most important.
- Now that you know what it is you DON’T want them to do, figure out what you DO want them to do. This is not scientific—use any wording that makes sense to you and the kid.
Here are some examples:
Negative Behavior Positive Behavior
Hitting other students Keep hands to self
Leaving the classroom Stay with the group/ Be where you are supposed to be
Swearing Use respectful language
Staring at space in class Try your best in class
Not doing any work Complete classwork
Not turning in homework Turn in homework
Late to everything Be on time
Start by choosing how often your student needs their behaviors reinforced– is it immediately? Daily? Weekly? When a sheet is filled up? Once you know that, you are ready to pick a time frame for your behavior contract!
- Students who are very young or have significant challenges with behavior might need rewards right away. They can’t wait until the end of a day or a week. They do best with 5 stars and a reward contracts.
- I print out a copy of my contract and put it in a plastic sheet protector. Depending on where the student is academically and in their communication skills, I either put a picture of what they can earn or the actual item on the top of the contract.
- As we work together, I give them a star for every good behavior. The instant they hit five stars, I give them a treat/high five/break/whatever their reward is.
- These are VERY teacher time intensive. As soon as kids can handle it, move them on.
- Give a child a chart. When they fill up the whole chart, give them a prize from a prize bin or other reward.
- These are often the easiest to use. I have seen teachers use them for independent reading (you get a sticker every day for independent reading if you read), speech pathologists use them to reward good behavior in speech groups, and counselors use them to reward good attendance.
- While you can spend money buying the charts at Lakeshore, you can also print some from Stickers and Charts that are super cute.
- These are the most commonly used contracts for behavior at an elementary school level.
- Basically, you keep track of the kid’s behavior during the day and they get a daily reward based on their behavior that day.
- Daily contracts are ideal for kids who can handle waiting to the end of a day for a reward but can’t handle waiting until a chart is full or until Friday.
- Choose how often during the day you want to check on their behavior– after every activity? Before lunch, before recess, and at the end of school? Just once a day? For these to work you actually have to check in with the child about their behavior at each time written on the contract.
- With follow through (multiple check ins per day, consistent rewards), daily contracts work wonders but without it, they are a waste of your and the student’s time.
- Some students, either because of age or because of the type of challenge they are working on (often ones that are more mild) might only need a reward once a week.
- There are a few ways to do this. In my groups, I keep track of stars for good behavior over the course of a week. On Fridays, we count their stars and they get classroom money to spend. Other teachers have a weekly behavior contract for individual students. They keep the contract in the student’s homework folder or on their desk for the week. On Friday, the student adds up their positive behavior points and gets a reward.
- Some students need to have their contract right in front of them at all times and others are cool just seeing it once a day.
Choose the reinforcements
Behavior contracts are part of a positive approach to behaviors. Instead of focusing on what we can take away from kids when they make bad choices we focus on how we can reinforce their good choices. The fact is that we can only take away so much—there aren’t that many recesses in a day, field trips to miss, or times a parent will answer the phone when we call raving. Rewarding kids is a lot easier because there is almost an infinite list of ways we can reinforce them. Talk with a kid about what they want to earn—but make sure you have some ideas of what you CAN give a kid. All kids probably want $100 to spend at Target or a new gaming system but you probably aren’t actually going to give them that….
- Students LOVE to earn time. A lot of my students work for free time on the computer. They get one minute of free time for every yes on their contract which they can cash in at the end of school every day. Some of my friends let kids earn double recess— the kids who get it are normally on a weekly contract. If their contract has been good all week, they can get double recess on Fridays.
- I run a classroom store. My students can earn fake money for positive behaviors (yes I do print my own money. Hopefully Treasury doesn’t care too much) which they spend at my store once a week. I like using the money because I can also teach they about saving, financial responsibility, and how to count money. My friends mostly use a prize box.
- With a store a student would earn money for positive behaviors on their contract. Each week they would have the choice to spend or save that money. With a prize box a student gets to pick out a prize every time they fill up their contract.
- While you can spend money buying the charts at Lakeshore, you can also print some from Stickers and Charts that are super cute.
- You need to keep your prizes/rewards fresh and you don’t make enough to keep buying stuff. New teachers are awesome and spend about half their paycheck on cool stuff for their classroom but I promise—sooner or later you are going to want to keep your money for selfish things like vacations.
- Here is an important thing to keep in mind. Kids are not picky. Really. We think they just want the cool new toys but they like weird gifts they can give their parents, stickers, time with you, sitting on a bean bag…. After about a decade of running a store my take away is that kids like EVERYTHING. I have sold picture frames, stickers, scary mangy cat dolls, glass statues, pieces of paper, song lyrics, seaweed, and belts. So be open minded when you are stocking your store or prize box!
- If you do decide to do a store you need to print your own money. Just as an FYI it is REALLY hard to get the money to copy correctly two sided. Run demo sets through the copier and try cutting them out before you copy. I made each of my students a “bank” out of an envelope that they keep in a hanging file folder with their teacher’s name on it.
Here are some places to print money:
Hit up co-workers
- I like to blindly email my co-workers to get donations for my store. I get the most incredible donations from Barbie dolls to picture frames. Co-workers who are moving or having growing children are the best. They love getting rid of stuff and will bring bags and bags of things in for you! I once got an entire bag of sparkly purses.
Sell copied/printed coloring pages
Print off a bunch of popular singers/superheroes/cute animal coloring pages. Make a few copies and sell them. We also make copies of the pretty mancala style pages that older students like.
Places to get printable coloring pages:
Sell song lyrics
This sounds weird but kids really like to buy song lyrics. For a price, they can tell you what lyrics they want you to print. We sell each song’s lyrics for $10.
Places to get printable song lyrics:
Sell coupons
Students LOVE coupons. You can sell coupons for writing in pen, sitting in a teacher’s chair, getting a phone call home—pretty much anything! I keep mine in a binder. There are lots of pictures on the internet of fancy, color printed and laminated coupons in cute bins. If you have that much time, more power to you. Mine are black and white copies in sheet protectors in a binder. It took me about ten minutes to set up—including the copying and cutting.
Places to get free, printable coupons:
- Sanchez Class Coupons
- Progress Cards Coupons
- PB Works Coupons for Rewards
- Franklin Elementary
- We Are Teachers Coupons
How often will you check in with the student?
When you write a behavior contract, you need to choose how many times a day you want to check in with a student and monitor their behavior. Behavior contracts only work when you are consistent. If you know you can’t check in with a kid after every single lesson, don’t write a contract that says you are going to check in with them at the end of every lesson!
Generally, younger and lower students need you to check in more often while older and higher functioning students are cool with you checking in less often.
You need to check in more often when you are establishing a new behavior and less often when you are maintaining the behavior.
By check in, I mean actually talk to a kid. Contracts are learning and teaching tools. Ask them how they think they did—talk with them about it and what they could do differently or did well. You secretly filling in a contract doesn’t teach the kid anything. Talk to them about what went well and what went badly and make a plan for next time. Treat behaviors like you would any other skill—do exit slips and re-teaching as needed and remember to pre-teach the hard stuff.
As a student’s behavior begins to improve, increase the time frame of their contract and decrease the check in frequency. Behavior contracts should never be fixed—they need to change as the child’s behaviors and the teacher’s available time/energy change!
- There are students who struggle with behaviors like paying attention during every single activity of the school day. They might need a quick check in at the end of every activity—“How do you think math went today? How much work did you get done?”
- These are pretty common for older students who change teachers. The student needs to bring the contract to each classroom to get the teacher to sign. The goal is to increase communication within a team about a student and to reinforce the positive behaviors across teachers. However, if you get one teacher who won’t fill it in or who always forgets the whole contract can fall apart. In that case, you will have to choose either letting a student self-report how they did, leaving that teacher off the contract, or switching to a daily check in instead.
- When most people think contracts, this is what they are thinking about. It is incredibly powerful for a student to get feedback (positive and negative) on their behavior constantly during a day. However, it is really hard on teachers to check in that often with a kid. What tends to happen is that a teacher starts out checking in with a kid at every time period on the contract and then, after a week or two, starts to forget. Instead of filling it in at the end of every activity the teacher will go back at the end of the day and try to back fill.
- Consistency is what makes contracts work. If you notice that you aren’t checking in with the kid as often as the contract says, change how often you are supposed to check in.
- This is the next step down. Instead of checking in with the kid at the end of every activity, check in with them a few times a day. Maybe check in with them on the way to lunch, right before recess, and at the end of school.
- If you have a student who needs frequent check ins (they call out during every activity) but checking in after every lesson isn’t working for you, try this. You get to choose how often you want to check in. A student of mine struggled in line on the way to class, right before lunch, coming in from recess, and kind of overall. So we checked in with her when she got into the class in the morning, as she was about to walk to lunch, after recess, and right before she went home. It wasn’t often enough to drive us crazy and was frequent enough to change her behaviors.
- As student’s behaviors start to improve, decrease how often you are checking in with them. Students aren’t always going to need you hovering. Once they start to get what you want them to do, you can start checking in with them only once a day.
- If you are only checking in once a day, make sure that you have a real conversation about the day. “I noticed that this morning seemed kind of rough but then you really turned it around after lunch. What changed? How could I support you in making your mornings look as awesome as your afternoons?” Don’t just focus on the negatives of the day. Call out a few good things that the student did during the day. If these conversations are just another lecture, a kid is going to shut down and the contract won’t work.
- Use the daily check ins as a chance to make a plan for the following days and weeks. “I noticed that you had some trouble being focused in math today. There is going to be a test tomorrow in math. What can you do to stay focused during the test? How can we help you?”
- I get kids every year who are great in the classroom and hit kids out at recess. If that is your kid, make a recess contract. Check in with them after recess every day and make a contract just for recess. If you kid is great at math but shuts down in writing every day, make the contract just for writing and remember to check in with them at the end of each writing class. Talk to them about how they did during the writing lesson and how their work was compared to other days.
- This works really well for kids who consistently struggle with only one or two activities in a given day like recess or writing.
- This is the least work for you!
- Don’t promise to check in with a student at the end of every activity. Instead, create a reward chart where you will give them a star whenever you happen to notice them doing the good behavior.
- Let them know that sometimes they might do the behavior without you seeing it—you will give the stars when you happen to see the behavior NOT every time they do the behavior.
- This is also the best training for the real world—no one actually notices every time we do something good.
- This time frame works to generally increase positive behaviors but isn’t as good at teaching specific behaviors like raising your hand.
- Normally, random check ins are used for students who have already learned a positive behavior and just need some reinforcement to maintain the behavior.
No one actually knows what safe hands, nice hands, or keep hands to self really means. Keep hands to self? Can I hug my friends? Touch my markers? It is up to you and the student to negotiate a definition.
Talk though what the expected behaviors are. Use examples. Be prepared to re-teach. They will forget what you meant and forget what they are supposed to do and just generally forget stuff. The biggest aha moment for me in teaching was when I realized that it really WAS my job to repeat myself. Kids are human and need to hear things—and learn things—more than one time.
Now you are ready to start writing the contract! To get you started, download the bundle of free contracts from the store. With 15 easy to customize contracts, it should get you started!
Think of a student who is pretty calm. Then they get some bad new from home and get a little agitated. Then they find out that their girlfriend is walking with someone else and get enraged. Then they see a pic of her kissing someone else and they explode. Then post explosion they stay agitated for a bit, yelling and cussing. Then maybe they cry or put their head down and look sad. And then they are calm again.
This is called the crisis cycle. As students move through it, we have to change how we interact. When a kid is throwing a table, it isn’t the right moment to have a philosophical conversation.
Here are the basics of the cycle– but there is a lot more to learn! This site has a nice graphic of the cycle. This one has a more detailed explanation. Finally, this one has a nice list of what to do/say at each stage.
Yawn. Boring. This is before the drama starts, when you have a deep conversation with a student and there are no red flags. You can plan for the future, talk through options, and act normal.
Then bam. Something happens. The student gets triggered. They haven’t exploded yet but they aren’t acting normal. If you can, you figure out the trigger and address it– but mostly you try to do a lot of rehearsal at baseline state so that the student is ready to cope when that trigger hits.
If you’re lucky, the student uses their self-regulation strategies at the trigger and they go back to baseline. If you aren’t, the student starts to escalate. Little things suddenly matter a lot and it might seem like everything you say or do is wrong. Try to offer contained choices– this or that. Show empathy. Offer a safe space to calm down. See if you can help them use their coping strategies. The goal is to get them to move down the escalation ladder back to baseline.
This is the explosion. The fight, the throwing of a desk, the storming out of class and punching a wall. Your job is to focus on safety. Move other students away. Back away yourself. The focus here is on safety. Call for help. Keep what you say to the student short and simple. At this stage, students aren’t processing what you say so you have to be as simple as possible.
No crisis lasts forever. At some point, the worst of the crisis seems over, but the student is not calm. Maybe they get mad all over again and re-escalate. Maybe they are just breathing hard or doing atypical behaviors. The goal here is not to engage in deep conversation to keep the student coming down the ladder. Give them a safe space to be. Keep things simple and calm. Don’t talk through what happened– just focus on calming the student.
The student is now de-escalated. They are acting and talking normally– and breathing normally. This is when you start to rehash the incident and to work on problem solving and learning from what happened so that the crisis doesn’t happen again. This is where you plan for the future and discuss any consequences. Once that is done, if the student stays calm, you are back at baseline, really hoping the cycle doesn’t start again.
Behaviors can be hard to manage on your own. Reach out! Talk to people in your department– and beyond it. Occupational therapists can be really helpful for sensory focused behavior. Speech and language pathologists can help out with social and communication based behaviors. School counselors get the emotional piece. School psychologists are behavior experts. All of these people are resources in your school to help you when things get challenging!
IEP Success Kit for PreK-5th Grade
This mega bundle has assessments and resources from PreK-5th grade!
Accommodations & Modifications Matrix
The Matrix is designed to make your IEPs stronger and faster to write!
Socioemotional Goal Bank
32 strengths and skills focused socioemotional goals with intervention and baseline ideas!