Dear Kid Whisperer,

I teach in a K-5 room for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBDs). I love my job and I run a tight ship. My students know that while they are in my room, their negative behaviors won’t work: they only get what they want with positive behaviors. However, a few of my students know that there are some behaviors that I am not allowed to handle in my classroom. I am required to refer physical violence and threats to my principal, and these behaviors lead to detentions and suspensions. I don’t want this to happen, but I don’t know what I can do about it.

Last week I showed you how to properly prevent and mitigate these types of “ejector seat” behaviors: behaviors that savvy kids know will get them attention, control, and avoidance by forcing teachers to send them out of the room and usually out of school, according to school policies.

Congratulations on being so effective in your room at making negative behaviors non-functional that your students have had to resort to the ejector seat as their only means of successfully getting attention, control, and avoidance. While the Strategic Noticing and Gentle Guidance Interventions described in the last column can help to prevent and mitigate these behaviors, they will not be enough to permanently change behaviors without properly responding to these behaviors when they occur in the present as a calm scorekeeper, and in the future as a calm, loving teacher (not as an angry tyrant).

Let’s be real: suspensions and detentions don’t tend to improve student behavior. We know that many kids, when sent home for negative behaviors, will often be allowed to leave the house, and perhaps ride a bike around their neighborhood so that they can brag to neighbors about getting suspended. Detentions don’t teach anything and tend to just make kids resentful.

The alternative is to

1. Get to Later

2. Teach Positive Behaviors Later

Getting to Later

In the case of your question, the student, because he is smart, has put you into a bind: by using a behavior that requires you to send him out of the room and perhaps send him home, you are forced to give him attention, control, and avoidance through his negative behavior. The scary thing is that these kinds of behaviors: usually threats, harassment, or violence, are usually illegal and dangerous. This ups the ante, because it becomes a matter of life or death to make these behaviors non-functional.

You are forced to refer the student to the principal. Your job in getting to later is to minimize the attention and control that you give Kid. You can’t minimize the avoidance, since he has to leave, according to school policies.

Kid: I will mercilessly beat everyone in this classroom, and I will not stop until I have quenched my rage. That is all.

Kid Whisperer: Oh, dear. (Kid Whisperer calmly moves towards Kid and presses one button on his phone that has alerted a member of his school’s Crisis Response Team to come to his room and remove Kid)

Kid Whisperer: (whispering) Oh, dear. There’s room for growth. I’ll help you do some learning later.

Crisis Response Team member takes Kid away.

To be crystal clear: Kid being taken away is not a consequence. For most kids, it is a reward, because through this very negative behavior, they are getting avoidance. By responding to Kid in this way, you are minimizing the attention and control given to Kid.

Kid Whisperer continues teaching kids who have not threatened to beat everyone until their rage has been quenched.

In the next column, I will show you how to make these “ejector seat” behaviors non-functional in the future. For now, you can use these instructions to be a master of the present.