Behavior Intervention Chaos: The Mistakes You Can't Afford to Make

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Hey there, school counselor, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast.

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I'm Steph Johnson, your host, glad to be back with you for another week as we head into the beginning of the new school year.

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And you know, the beginning of the school year brings so many big emotions to the surface, so many thoughts and things to consider, and my mastermind group and I were working together just this afternoon to reverse engineer a lot of our processes and get ready for the new school year to make sure that we don't forget anything, because we know once those kiddos walk through our doors we're going to be running like our pants are on fire and we want to make sure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle.

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As we start thinking about students coming back onto campuses, one of the focuses inevitably becomes student behavior.

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Lots of different things that we can do as school counselors to support positive behavior, productive and constructive behavior on our campuses, but nothing for nothing.

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We also become sort of the de facto behavior specialists on our campus, and I know this doesn't happen everywhere, but I think it is more common than what we typically talk about, where, if a student becomes very escalated, no one quite knows what to do with them or they're acting out in some way in the classroom.

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A lot of times campuses start looking for their school counselor and there are some mixed feelings and some mixed findings on this.

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We're going to talk through some of the mistakes we may be making as we consider being part of behavior intervention.

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So I hope this is going to be a real eye-opener for you.

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I hope it's going to help you expand your thoughts and consideration of what it means to intervene in behavior as a school counselor and what are some things we need to watch out for and perhaps avoid.

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Now, as I mentioned earlier, behavior intervention and school counseling kind of has a mixed bag.

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When you look at the journal articles and professional articles, you'll find that a lot of the information regarding school counselors and behavior intervention focuses more on tier one sort of response, building positive school-wide behavior incentive programs being that bridge between student and families, those kinds of things and it's almost kind of talked about in a very proactive, constructive frame of mind, not that in-the-moment sort of firefighting triage role that a lot of us play in behavior intervention.

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I think in a perfect world, school counselors would not be as involved with behavior.

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I know some of you are very heavily involved on your campuses and I do think that it takes a lot of time from Tier 1 and Tier 2 services that could affect greater numbers of students on our campus.

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But, with that being said, there are times when I appreciate getting called in to intervene in behavior concerns because it gives me the opportunity to see firsthand what's going on with the student.

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I'm not relying on other people's reports.

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I'm not trying to put fragmented pieces of information together or perhaps figure out what's been elaborated or exaggerated and what hasn't.

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It allows me to see in real time what's going on with that student and so often I'm grateful for the opportunity to walk in and help a student de-escalate in the moment.

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I love and feel like it is a privilege to be able to walk with the student in those moments of distress and in moments where perhaps the adults around them are not as well regulated as they would like to be.

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It really is, when you think about it, a privilege to be able to walk into those situations and bring a sense of calm and peace and putting things back together, and we are very uniquely equipped to be able to serve that purpose.

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I will say that with a caveat, though.

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I do enjoy helping with behavior concerns, so long as it does not become an expectation.

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I don't want to be the behavior person on campus.

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We have folks to do that.

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I don't want to become the first person anybody calls, because often I'm out doing other things.

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I don't have the time to focus on just eight or 10 students on my campus who need significant levels of support.

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I need to be able to hand that off to people who can manage it much better than I can.

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But at the same time, as I said, it's nice to see things in the moment, and often that's when we build some of the strongest relationships with students.

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All that being said, I want to walk through some common mistakes we may be making when we're called to get involved in behavior intervention with students.

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The first category of mistakes that I want to offer to you are common fallacies and beliefs, common things we think or we think we know about behavior intervention that may not be helpful for us.

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And the first one is the behavior isn't my responsibility.

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If I had a dollar for every time I'd heard somebody say that I would be a very rich woman, and I get it.

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I so get it, especially when we're looking at school counseling through the lens of a comprehensive school counseling program.

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We know that behavior intervention on-the-fly assistance is not conducive to the kinds of programs that best benefit kids.

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We need some folks with some behavior expertise, with their own self-regulation abilities, that can step in in the moment to provide support for students in the moment to provide support for students.

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However, while we should be mindful of over emphasizing our role in behavior intervention and being careful of not bringing on a lot of role, confusion or overwhelm right from just constantly being called on the walkie to go from here to there, to there to there, I do think that there are some benefits to being involved in behavior intervention in limited ways.

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We just have to be careful that it doesn't become so prevalent that it reduces our effectiveness in other areas or again leads to those feelings of overwhelm and burnout.

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And I think that happens to a lot of school counselors where they just kind of throw their hands up and say this isn't what I signed up for and if this is what it's gonna be, I'm out and we're losing a lot of good people because of that.

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So we need to be super mindful of that as we walk through this journey.

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And second, I think sometimes we feel like we ought to be able to walk in and fix the behavior quickly and sort of putting air quotes around the fix the behavior Right.

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We feel like, and are sort of expected to be those magical people on campus.

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Well, you're a school counselor, aren't you?

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You should be able to fix this.

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And you know, and I know, that that's not the way counseling works, but the folks that we work with so desperately want it to fix this.

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And you know, and I know, that that's not the way counseling works, but the folks that we work with so desperately want it to be true, that often they let that cloud their judgment.

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We have to be careful of the thought process that we allow ourselves to follow as well, and remember that the student is the subject of their life experience, not us.

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You know, when you study things like story structure, things like that, you know you always have the hero of the story right and the hero has to undergo some sort of challenge.

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They have to overcome it in order to become the hero.

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And then you also have some sort of a guide in a story, some sort of wise soul or someone who knows more than the main character does.

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That kind of help guides them toward their best outcome.

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We are not the main character in these behavior stories, but it often feels that way to us.

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Our role is to serve as the wise guide, not only for the student but for the people that student comes in contact with every day.

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We have to be very, very careful about how we're casting these roles in our mind so again we can avoid the overwhelm.

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The behavior story isn't ours, we're only there to assist.

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Third, and this kind of goes along with one of the other ideas that I just mentioned but sometimes we think that if the teacher has lost control in the classroom, if something has happened they feel they can't recover from and they have to call us in for reinforcement.

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That behavior intervention is going to be difficult, and I don't think that that's always true.

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Now, sometimes it can be, but I think we have to go in with the frame of mind of I can help.

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I know how to de-escalate students.

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I can walk with them through this journey of regaining their composure and being able to move on with their day in a successful way.

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So it's not always as difficult as we make it out in our minds to be.

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Sometimes that can cause a level of anxiety for us if we're anticipating a difficult path ahead and I'm known on my campus for responding to behavior concerns in a very measured way.

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I don't rush, I'm not hustling to get over there, not because I don't care, but because I know I've got people there that can ensure safety in the meantime and that I need to regulate myself.

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I need to regulate my breathing, I need to try to get my heart rate regulated, I need to be mindful and present the moment that I hit that classroom door so that I am able to activate some of those mirror neurons and help bring that student down into the right place with me.

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So don't anticipate a fight.

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It's almost never that way.

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Usually they'll settle down pretty quick when they see you and if not, you've got the skills to handle it.

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You know what to do next and I think maybe one of the last beliefs that really kind of leads us in the wrong direction is believing that the student knows why they acted the way they did.

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So often the conversation after some sort of behavior, explosion or blow up tends to be you know, why did you do that?

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What were you thinking?

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How did you think that was going to help?

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Those are some of the conversations I hear a lot around school campuses when in actuality students don't always know the answers to those questions.

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Fight, flight, freeze are very base level reactions and sometimes they're instigated and the student doesn't even really know why.

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They don't really understand what triggered them, they just know that it happened.

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And so we need to be really careful about our assumption that they know what it was that set them off and really kind of walk the story with them, help them to discover that for themselves.

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And sometimes, even when students think they know what triggered their outburst, sometimes that ends up not being it at all.

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There's some more insight to be had.

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So just be careful of that.

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So four belief fallacies we often have when helping to intervene with behavior that behavior is not our responsibility, when we know there are some benefits to limited involvement with behavior, that we should be able to fix behavior quickly, and we know that that is not our story, that is the student's story.

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We're just there to serve as a guide that if the teacher has lost control in that classroom of the situation, then behavior intervention is going to be difficult, and we know that's not necessarily true.

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Going to be difficult, and we know that's not necessarily true.

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And fourth is assuming that the student knows why they reacted the way they did.

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Sometimes, when we push that line of thought, it just escalates them more, and so we've got to be really mindful of where they are in their reality.

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There are some other things we need to be thinking about as we consider intervening in behavior on our campuses, and one of those things is reacting too quickly, running to the scene of the unrest like we're going to be the hero and save the day, and as we're doing that and we're elevating our heart rate, our breathing is increasing, our adrenaline is pumping.

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We're not going to be in the best place to help if de-escalation is needed.

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So we have to remember the more we do that to ourselves, the more likely we are to become emotional in the situation.

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We may make some rash decisions that we wouldn't have made otherwise, and so it's really important to be somewhat methodical in that, very mindful, very intentional in the way that we work, so that we are able to co-regulate with that student Super, super important.

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But so often we feel like we should just go racing to the situation, right, maybe not.

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Maybe hold off a little bit and see if you come into the classroom a little bit more prepared to handle what's going on.

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Second and I think this is a big one for school counselors is not assuming control once we get to the situation.

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So often we get to a classroom, for example, and feel like we need to help intervene, but we abdicate responsibility for the classroom to someone else.

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We feel like we're invading someone else's space or that we shouldn't be able to call the shots, and nothing could be further from the truth.

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If things have gone so sideways that someone is asking for your help and is saying that they need intervention with a student, once you arrive, you need to take control of that situation.

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That doesn't mean shouting and telling everybody to sit down, all that kind of stuff.

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What it means is you have to take control of what needs to happen in that moment.

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Let the rest of the environment be taken care of by someone else.

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You may have someone following you to the classroom to help.

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The teacher in the classroom can help manage the environment, but you don't need to focus on anything other than the student you've been called to help.

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The other thing is avoiding the rundown at the door.

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This one annoys me and I understand why it happens.

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No judgment there.

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But you know, so often when we're called to help with behavior intervention, we're met in the hallway or at a door with someone going well, let me just tell you what happened.

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First this happened and then they did this, and then they and they're escalated and they're talking like this and it doesn't help anything Because in the moment we don't need to know the story, we don't need to know all of the details, we don't need to hear all the minutiae of what's gone down that day.

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All we need to do is help that student regulate enough so that we can bring order back to the classroom.

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That's it, and so we don't need to stand there and entertain all the details.

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And often if the student who's having a hard time is listening to that, it's going to agitate them even more.

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It's just not helpful for anybody.

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I often remind teachers on my campus hey, I'll come back and get information from you later.

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Right now I need to be focused on the students and they've worked with me long enough and, I think, trust me enough to understand how this is going to work.

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Sometimes it takes a reminder or two until we get everything going the way we want it to go.

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But I'm not going to stand at the door and entertain the play-by-play as the teacher's trying to explain to me what happened.

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It never, ever helps to know all that detail right at the outset of the situation.

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So first, we talked about reacting too quickly.

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Second, about not assuming control of the situation.

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Third is over-focusing on behavior and ignoring student strengths.

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This kind of alludes back to again what I talked about when I said you know, we tend to really focus on what were you thinking?

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Why did you do that?

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What bothered you?

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And students don't always know the answers to those questions.

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Same thing when we hyper fixate on the behavior itself.

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You know, why were you turning over chairs?

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Why did you raise your pencil in the air?

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Why were you doing these things instead of focusing on the students' strengths?

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Have you ever felt like you were having a hard day but you managed to hold it together?

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What was different?

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What are some things that are great about you?

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What are you amazing at in the classroom and focusing on students' strengths instead of constantly hammering at them about their behaviors?

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And why did you do this and what were you thinking?

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Let's let that part go to the wayside, because we know what's really driving those actions and driving those thoughts needs some more discovery, and the only way really that we're going to be successful at approaching them in a school realm with the limited time that we have as school counselors is through more of a solution focused and strengths-based lens, and again, we're uniquely equipped to do that.

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So we really need to be looking at things through that perspective instead of just constantly hammering about well, what'd you do next?

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Well then, what did you do next?

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Well, why did you do that?

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It's very rarely as productive.

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Last, I think one of the big mistakes we make in behavior intervention as school counselors is not following up intentionally.

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Now, you know our time is limited.

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We have about 11-d bajillion students that we're responsible for on our campuses right, you know what I'm talking about.

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But we've got to be intentional about following up with things after we've kind of put the fire out.

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So let's say, for instance, we have some sort of big incident with a student in a classroom.

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We're called to intervene.

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We're able to de-escalate the student and we've talked with them a few times since to really work on identifying strengths.

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What do they have to contribute in the classroom?

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What are the strengths that are going to carry them through when things get difficult, all of that kind of stuff.

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Once we feel like we kind of have things in hand, we need to be intentional about following up on that, just checking in.

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It doesn't have to be anything super formal, but just touching base with the student hey, how's it going?

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I remember you said you are really great at XYZ.

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How is that helping you?

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Have you felt like that before?

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Have you been feeling like that since we last visited?

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What are some reasons you didn't act out?

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I'm proud of you.

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That's great.

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We need to really be mindful and intentional about that.

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When, again, we have such huge caseloads, we have so many things we're responsible for on our campuses, sometimes those kinds of touch points can fall by the wayside.

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But for students they are so important, right, and it means so much to them that you've taken the time to just come in and check in with them.

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Hey, I've been thinking about you, how's it going?

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It just means more to them that you'll ever know.

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All right.

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So our four common behavior intervention mistakes that we sometimes make as school counselors reacting too quickly, not assuming control of the situation, over-focusing on the behavior while ignoring the student's strengths, and then not revisiting or following up with the student just to let them know we're proud of them, or to adjust our approach to whatever the concern may be.

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All right, I hope this was helpful to you as we kind of walk through some behavior intervention.

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We're going to be focusing on behavior a lot in our mastermind coming up in September.

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We already have our lineup planned.

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It's going to be amazing.

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We're going to be talking through behavior and de-escalation.

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We're going to be looking at behavior data what kinds of data we want to capture and how we're going to do that and we're also going to be talking about things like being a trauma-informed practitioner what non-suicidal self-injury looks like?

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What do we do with that?

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How do we employ polyvagal response into behavior intervention?

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Lots and lots of things going on in our mastermind and we'd love for you to be a part of those conversations.

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You can join us by going to schoolforschoolcounselorscom.

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Slash mastermind.

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All the details are right there for you and I promise you it will be the single best investment you have made in your school counseling year to date.

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I guarantee it.

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As we leave, I just want to remind you that intervening in behavior, either directly or indirectly, is kind of a mixed bag, right, it's kind of a gray area.

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We never quite feel like we're doing things exactly right, and we have to remember that, just like our students, we're learning and growing too, so we shouldn't expect perfection from ourselves all the time.

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If we do, we're going to be disappointed almost all the time, aren't we?

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But that's okay, because we're trying to get better.

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We're trying to serve our students to the best of our ability every day, and at the end of the day, that's really all that matters.

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Be an informed practitioner, engage in professional consultation and then just give it your heart every day.

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That's all anybody can ask.

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You're probably doing better with behavior intervention than you realize, and we want to be here to support you and cheer you on as you walk that journey.

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All right, that's all I have for you this week.

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I hope you have a great week coming up.

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I hope that if kiddos are starting school in your area, that you're seeing some bright, shining, excited faces very soon, and that it fills your heart and reminds you of your purpose on your campus to serve students to the best of your ability every day so that they can be successful in school and in life.

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I hope you have the best week.

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I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast.

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Take care, my friend.

Behavior Intervention Chaos: The Mistakes You Can't Afford to Make

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