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.

Answer: 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 they can brag to neighbors about getting suspended. Detentions don’t teach anything and tend to just make kids resentful.

The alternative is to

Get to Later

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.

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