How to Start Saving Students’ Lives Today (Part I of II)

Dear Kid Whisperer,

I lead an out-of-school program for elementary school students when schools are closed. We have a particular child who has been through family trauma who brings anger and hostility into the group. We've tried various techniques with some success, but this child still becomes physically aggressive toward other kids, especially their siblings.  We want to keep the child in the program, but it is becoming increasingly unsafe for everyone. 

The reason I love this question so much is that it is perfectly simple and that the answer must be appropriately complex.

The question is perfectly simple in that it’s the 65,000-dollar question: How do educators keep a kid who is out of control due to trauma in class and improve his behavior while teaching a bunch of other kids?

There is somewhere between one and thirty kids that fit this description in nearly every classroom (including afterschool classrooms) in this country. 

People like to talk about inclusion, but in terms of schools, no one ever talks about the most important way that we can include everyone, even kids who have traumatic experiences happening at home.

The reality is that kids cannot be fully included in a classroom or school environment if the teacher is using Traditional Discipline.

Traditional Discipline in schools suggests that educators use some combination of warnings, threats, and punishments to somehow cajole kids into being compliant.

There’s no judgement here. I did nothing but scream and yell for my first two years as a teacher because I, like every teacher I’ve ever met, didn’t learn anything about behavior management in college. The result was horrible behavior from both me and my students. You may be doing much better than I was, and to be clear, there are great teachers all over the country who do their best to avoid behaving the way I did. But without explicit and systematic behavior management instruction, teachers’ best is often not good enough.

While Traditional Discipline isn’t good for anyone, kids who come from trauma have such (understandably) high control needs from feeling out of control for so much of their childhoods that they can’t take having control also being ripped away from them at school in the form of constant demands, threats, and punishments, often administered with anger. Even kindly made and seemingly reasonable requests may feel like unreasonable bossing around to a student with high control needs.

These students cannot handle the emotional load of being called out in front of their friends about their behavior, and they cannot handle a teacher who only knows to threaten them into behaving. As every educator knows, the result of these Traditional Discipline practices is kids being sent to the principal’s office, where they get attention, control and avoidance, which reinforces the worst behaviors. Since they’ve become reinforced, these behaviors are repeated, explored, and heightened. This leads to suspensions and more control, attention, and avoidance (now of the entire school that is trying to scare the student into compliance).

Eventually, the suspensions and then expulsions add up to something horrifying. Half of all students who enter ninth grade with three or more suspensions on their record will drop out of high school (Balfanz, Byrnes and Fox, 2014) and 11% of all high school drop-outs are currently in prison (Eley, 2009).

I know that you know all of this because you’re an educator. I’m just making sure our readers are also aware of this.

So, America, do I have your attention?

Next week in this space, I’ll give the appropriately complex answer of how to teach this kid to learn positive behaviors that will make him able to remain in the classroom and keep his classmates safe in the short-term, allow him to claim an education in the mid-term, and set him on a course to become a happy and healthy person in the long-term.