spitting, biting, kicking, throwing, and
destroying. At the extreme end of the
spectrum are behaviors that are severely
injurious to the student or others, such
as head-banging, cutting, stabbing, and
shooting. But they all occur when the
demands placed on a student exceed
that student’s capacity to adapt.
Although adults tend to focus on
what a student did when he or she was
looking bad, I’m much more focused on
why and when that student did it. The
answers to these questions set the stage
for effective intervention.
Actionable Information
It’s easy to become overwhelmed with
all the information available about
behaviorally challenging students.
They tend to accumulate lots of paper:
reports, evaluations, placements,
behavior plans, functional assessments,
and so on. Of course, that’s often an
indication that all that paper hasn’t led
to a positive outcome.
Moreover, the discussions that often
take place about challenging students
aren’t as productive as they could be
because they tend to focus on things
that we can do nothing about. Too
often, adults focus on the bad things
that have happened in a student’s
history and invoke those historical facts
as causal:
n His parents are divorced. (Yes, but
so are the parents of many of your well-behaved students—and what can you
do about it anyway?)
n Her mother has some “issues.” (Yes,
but so do the mothers of many of your
well-behaved students.)
n He comes from that neighborhood.
(Yes, but so do a lot of kids in your
building who are well behaved.)
n She was exposed to substances in
utero. (You’re too late.)
n He had a forceps delivery. (You’re
still too late.)
n She’s adopted.
n He comes from that foreign country
or that neighboring state.
n Her father’s in jail.
n His older brother was a bad egg,
These factors aren’t completely
irrelevant, of course, but if you spend
a lot of time in meetings talking about
things about which you can do nothing,
staff members may come to the con-
clusion that they cannot help the
student. If you focus on lagging skills
“These students
really need me—I
mean us—to do
something different
around here.”
and unsolved problems, however, staff
members will emerge with a clear sense
of the problems they need to solve to
reduce a student’s challenging behavior.
You want to spend most of your time
homing in on and clarifying actionable
information—things you can actually do
something about.
Solving Problems
So what are we going to do differently
in our school discipline program, now
that we know why and when challenging kids are challenging?
If we’ve completed the ALSUP for a
particular student, then we’re already
looking through the appropriate lenses,
and we’ve identified the unsolved
problems that are reliably and predictably setting in motion the student’s
challenging behavior. There’s only one
thing left to do, and it’s the hardest
part: We need to start solving those
problems.
There are three ways in which adults
solve problems with kids. I call those
options Plans A, B, and C.
Plan A
Plan A—which is very popular in
schools (and in lots of other places)—
involves solving problems unilaterally,
through the imposition of adult will
(and often accompanied by adult-imposed consequences). Unilateral
problem solving actually heightens the
likelihood of challenging behavior in
many students. That’s because when
someone imposes his or her will on
you (something about which most of us
aren’t all that enthusiastic) it requires
skills to handle the situation well—skills
that challenging students often lack.
Adding rewards (for complying with
adult will) and punishments (for failing
to do so) to the mix often just adds
fuel to the fire. Moreover, unilateral
problem solving frequently doesn’t solve
problems in the long run and doesn’t
teach challenging kids the skills they
lack.
Plan B
Plan B involves solving problems collaboratively. I’m much more enthusiastic about this approach. Plan B is
composed of three basic steps. The
first—Empathy—involves gathering
information from a student to achieve
the clearest possible understanding
of his or her perspective on a given
unsolved problem. The second—Define
the Problem—involves entering the
adult’s concern or perspective on the
same unsolved problem into consideration. The third—Invitation—is where
student and adult brainstorm solutions that are realistic and mutually
satisfactory.
Research indicates that the Collaborative Problem Solving model is highly
effective (Greene, 2004; Greene, Ablon,
& Martin, 2006; Greene, 2010b) at
reducing office referrals, detentions, and
suspensions. The hard part is getting
good at Plan B, which requires bravery,
