One Big Reason Behavior Charts Fail (And What You Can Do Instead)

Transcript

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Well, hey there, school counselor, Welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast.

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I'm Steph Johnson, so glad that you've joined me for another episode of the podcast.

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Hey, so as I'm preparing this podcast episode, I'm just going to be real with you for a minute.

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I'm going to tell you that it is December.

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I'm recording the Sunday before the last week of school before Christmas break, and so if you're listening to this episode around that time, you know what I'm talking about.

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Things are crazy town right now, aren't they?

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Speaking for myself?

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Things are so busy on campus right now.

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Not only do I have my regular responsibilities going on, but I'm also doing holiday outreach projects.

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I'm organizing hundreds of Christmas gifts to be sent out into the community.

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I'm coordinating deliveries for those, I am coordinating pickup times, I'm coordinating holiday meals, I'm trying to get students' end-of-semester grades all finalized and lined out, and y'all.

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There's just so much going on on top of all of the normal stuff that goes on this time of year, with family celebrations, kids' concerts and events.

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It is just a busy, busy time and I love it all.

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It is just a busy, busy time and I love it all.

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I wouldn't trade it for anything, but you and I both know there are only so many minutes in the day, right?

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So as I was thinking about this podcast episode this week, I decided to pull an episode from the archives.

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But I have a really good reason for this, and it's not just because I'm tired and I'm overwhelmed and I have a lot going on this time of year.

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It's also because it correlates beautifully with a new resource we just released into our Mastermind community today.

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Now in our Mastermind, we seek to avoid all of the print and pray resources that you see all over the internet for school counselors.

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We believe that true counseling comes from knowing your skills very, very well and through professional fluency.

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And if you possess that knowledge and expertise, then that extra baloney is unnecessary because you already have everything you need.

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We love to release our school counseling playbooks that give you a roadmap for common school counseling concerns without having to print a bunch of extra stuff.

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They walk you step by step through the concerns for both younger students and our adolescents and young adults.

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So far in our playbook series we have the School Refusal Playbook, parent and Community Engagement, grief, collaborative Problem Solving, which, as a side note, is just about the best approach I think you can learn in school counseling the behavior intervention playbook and anxiety playbook, and today we just released the oppositional behavior playbook, and so, as I'm celebrating the release of this new playbook with my mastermind members, I thought you know what let's pull in the episode that I did back in April of 2023 about oppositional defiant disorder and what we should really be talking about in schools.

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I hope you love this.

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Let's take a listen.

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Take a listen, hello school counselor.

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Welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast.

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I'm Steph Johnson, here with you again for another week of insight, hopefully some inspiration and some things to really help you get better at your craft, because that's what we're here for right In this podcast is to make sure.

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What we're here for right in this podcast is to make sure that you're consistently growing, you're consistently learning and becoming the absolute best school counselor that you can possibly be.

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In this episode, I want to talk about oppositional defiant disorder, and the reason that it comes to mind especially this time of year is because it seems to me that the longer I'm in school counseling, the more often I hear this term just tossed around when students are difficult, when folks aren't able to understand students or their motivations or why they're getting involved in certain behaviors.

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You know, you often just hear people say well, you know, they're just so ODD, and this is troubling to me for several reasons.

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So I'm going to walk through with you today what true oppositional defiant disorder looks like, why we need to be really careful assigning that term to students, and what we can do if we have a difficult student in our midst, or maybe more than one, right, what can we do to really support those students and help them to be their best selves at school?

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But before we jump into that, as always, I'm going to read a very sweet review from a kind School for School Counselors podcast listener, and I want to urge you now, if you haven't stopped, to give us a review.

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Y'all, this is the currency that podcasts run on.

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This is how folks find out about us.

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This is how people find out if you think we're any good or not.

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You got to let the world know.

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So if you haven't yet and you're an Apple podcast subscriber, hop on over and leave a review in Apple Podcasts.

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For us it's worth more than a million bucks.

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And if you're on a different podcast platform, hop on over and give us a rating.

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We certainly would appreciate that too.

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It just kind of keeps the wheels turning around here.

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This week, our review comes from somebody with the coolest screen name that I've seen in a while.

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This comes from HeyBabe11, and their review is titled One of my New Favorite Things to Do.

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The review goes on to say this favorite things to do.

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The review goes on to say this I'm a first-year school counselor.

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I have told multiple people close to me that I never knew what I signed up for in this position until I started it.

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Being a school counselor.

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You are so important to these students and staff members, and that comes with a lot of pressure.

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I love this field of work for so many reasons and love all the connections I've made in this first year, but I am completely mentally and emotionally drained every day when I go home.

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Listening to your podcast for the first time a couple weeks ago gave me a sense of validation that I've been missing in my life since before I began in the school months ago.

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I'm a counselor of 380 students and I find myself helping as much and fast as I can, trying to do more and more, but never feeling caught up or like I can breathe.

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Hearing that others feel the same has helped me so much because I thought I was alone in this.

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I've taken pointers from your self-compassion podcast and have tried implementing those strategies as well as finding more time for what I need.

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I contacted a colleague and now have a weekly scheduled time to discuss whatever we wish in a safe space together regarding our jobs.

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Thanks so much.

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I plan to continue to listen to your podcast during my lunch breaks and during my car rides to decompress.

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What a lovely and thoughtful review, hey baby 11.

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I'm telling you what man you know how to throw some words down there.

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I am so grateful for your thoughts, for your compliments, but most of all, I'm grateful for the opportunity to serve you and so many of our colleagues in knowing that you aren't alone, that this isn't an unusual experience that you're having, and that we can band together not only to support and empower each other, but also to catalyze some change in our field, and we're working really, really hard toward that end.

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I'm glad you're here with us along for the ride.

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All right, guys, again I'm going to ask you if you haven't left a review.

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Join in the cool kids club, like HeyBabe11, and leave us a quick review for the podcast.

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We could not thank you enough for that.

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All right, so let's hop into the idea of oppositional defiant disorder, a term that we hear people toss around all the time, and quite frankly, I don't love that, but it is what it is.

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It just sort of seems to be the world we're living in right now.

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If you don't know what to do with the kid, if they get persnickety, if they're argumentative, if they don't cooperate, all of a sudden we're calling them ODD.

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Perhaps you have some students on your campus that behave this way.

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They're argumentative, they refuse to complete work, they may shout, they may accuse others, they may curse, they may threaten, they may have these severe emotional outbursts.

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Sometimes those get physical.

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Do you have any of those?

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And maybe you've tried incentivizing good behavior right?

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You've tried the behavior charts, you've tried rewards, you've tried positive incentives.

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Perhaps you've tried building rapport right for hours upon hours.

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You've tried gaining parent cooperation.

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You're trying to get teacher buy-in everything you can think of but nothing seems to be getting better.

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Sometimes I think teachers like to slap this label on kids during conversations because it gives them a feeling of control in a very out-of-control situation.

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But here's the thing we're not doing students any favors when we start thinking about them as ODD, right, there are a couple of reasons for that.

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First, it just kind of cements an identity for students, right, oh, they're just ODD, like nothing can be done about it.

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Or man, you know, it's out of my hands, they're ODD, what do you want me to do about it?

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Very, very pathologizing nomenclature really boxes students in.

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I think it really discounts their potential and it kind of gives everybody a pass to stop encouraging growth, right, as if this student is just doomed to a life of the same behaviors, right?

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Well, you know, I washed my hands of them.

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They're ODD, what do you want me to do?

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Very, very dangerous line of thought, especially in education.

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So that's the first problem that I have with this label being thrown around.

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Second of all and you and I both know this it is not a trauma-informed perspective.

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Know this, it is not a trauma-informed perspective.

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There's a lot of crossover between oppositional behaviors, defiant behaviors and traumatic exposure.

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We have to keep that at the forefront of our awareness as we come across situations like this.

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We really need to examine the trauma angle.

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We need to make sure that we haven't just written this off.

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You know that.

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We haven't just said oh, you know, they're just, they're kind of a bad kid.

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They don't listen, they like to argue.

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I don't know how to get them to buy in with me.

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Must be ODD?

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No, no, it does not have to be ODD, and it's really important to keep it in perspective.

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Have to be ODD, and it's really important to keep it in perspective.

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Third, and I've hinted at this earlier, but I think a label like oppositional defiant disorder number one, just labeling a kid with any disorder in general, is really limiting for their own self-actualization and for the growth of the people around them.

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To not only encourage them to step into their best selves but to grow as encouragers, as coaches, as teachers and as educators.

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We have to keep these doors of potential open and when we start arbitrarily assigning these disorder label to kids, we stunt those opportunities.

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Because as we label students and maybe get a little dramatic in our assessment, right through our frustration, through our anger, perhaps through our resentment, we can sometimes encourage students to live up to the negative potential that we've assigned to them instead of what they can truly be.

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So we've got to be super, super careful with these terms getting thrown around.

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I often tell school staff or other counselors that I work with.

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When I hear the oppositional defiant label placed on the table, I'm usually the first one to say hey, hang on.

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A second, let's pause.

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I don't like that phrase.

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Can we think of another way to describe this student that feels a little bit more accurate?

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Now, to be fair, you may have students on your campus that do meet the criteria of oppositional defiant disorder.

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But number one I think there's a lot of flux in this definition.

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And number two as school counselors, we're not tasked to diagnose anybody anyway.

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So what good is it going to do us to determine a label for a student?

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It's not going to change the way we interact with them.

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It's not going to change the way that we try to intervene, and you'll see what I mean in a minute.

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First, let's look at the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria.

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Not because we want to diagnose students, but we do want to be aware of the criteria being used by other practitioners.

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So you've got to have a pattern of an angry or irritable mood, argumentative or defiant behavior or vindictiveness that lasts at least six months, and it has to have a cluster of symptoms from different categories.

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There's a certain number that you have to achieve and they fall under the headings of angry and irritable mood or argumentative or defiant behavior or vindictiveness, all right, and it's really important.

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As we talk about these kinds of things like losing temper, like being touchy, easily annoyed, resentful, arguing with authority, figures, right Defiance or refusing to comply, deliberately annoying other people, blaming other people for their mistakes or their misbehavior, all of these different kinds of things, we have to remember that some of this may be developmentally appropriate.

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Right, to an extent it may be appropriate.

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So there are different criterions depending on the age of the student, depending on the frequency, the intensity of the behaviors, those kinds of things.

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And then we've also got to consider gender, we've got to consider culture.

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So there's a lot of pieces that go into this.

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It's more complicated than you think and that's another reason I really don't like people throwing this term around.

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These disturbances also have to be associated with distress in the student or others in their social context, and it has to have a negative impact on some of their major areas of functioning, like their social relationships, their educational attainment, their ability to hold a job, those kinds of things.

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And then they have to be independent of some other sort of complicating factors, other disorders and things like that.

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So, given the criteria for this disorder, I think it is really dangerous and probably pretty unethical for us to be throwing this term around without a definitive diagnosis.

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But also, you'll hear, you know there's a lot of play in these definitions.

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There's a lot of things that have to be determined and teased out.

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It's not so simple as filling out a screen or handing it in and going oh yeah, they've got oppositional defiant disorder.

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It doesn't work that way.

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One key characteristic of oppositional defiant disorder would be that the student can't understand why or how reward or punishment should impact their behavior.

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It's not that they're choosing to behave in these ways.

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They honestly don't understand what the different alternatives should be.

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If you offer them incentivized choices for behavior, they're not even going to understand why you would do that.

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And similarly, if they get punished for something they do, they genuinely cannot understand why they would be punished for doing what they think everybody would do.

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So it gets pretty complicated once you dig down deep in this.

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And what's even more interesting is Bessel van der Kolk, who many of you know from the book the Body Keeps the Score, has actually proposed a whole different label for some of the kids that are falling under the ODD nomenclature, and he proposes a label of developmental trauma disorder.

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Kids with a trauma history do tend to show more oppositional, defiant behavior, and so he's kind of leading a charge currently to tease out the differences between these two.

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But all that aside, knowing kind of what oppositional defiant disorder looks like, what students who have been exposed to trauma looks like, we need to take a trauma-informed lens anytime we're confronted with a student who appears to be oppositional and or defiant.

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So what can we do to support these students at school?

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Number one you know I'm going to say this, you can hear it coming, I'm sure build relationship right, no matter what they may imply.

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Relationships are important for all students.

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You have to be able to invest in your difficult folks or you have to be able to find somebody else who can.

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Yeah, and you've got to remember this is a long game.

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This is not going to be a matter of sitting down together two or three times and all of a sudden you're campus besties.

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It doesn't work that way.

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Depending on their age or their grade level, a student may have been ostracized, they may have been marginalized in school for quite some time, and so it's going to take a while to gain their trust.

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They may have written everyone off around them, you know, or they may have had experiences where folks looked like they were attempting to get to know the student, but really were trying to build that relationship for the purpose of manipulation, and once the student didn't comply in as quickly a manner as the adult would have liked, they retreat, right.

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They pull away from that relationship and just go.

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Oh well, I just don't know what to do with them.

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I tried, right.

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This is a long game, and when I say long game, sometimes that's weeks, sometimes it's months, sometimes it's years.

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And so are you prepared to invest in that?

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You really need to take a good long think about it.

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Second, to support students with these types of behaviors on campus, let's just take all these little behavior charts, rip them up in little tiny pieces and set them on fire.

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Please get rid of the behavior charts.

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For a student who doesn't understand why reward or punishment should influence their behavior, a chart ain't gonna do it.

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Behaviorism with these oppositional behaviors, in my opinion, fail spectacularly, and so what I would propose instead is skill building with students, right, teaching them how to utilize some skill subsets in their classroom.

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What I mean by that is, if you have an oppositional student and they're directed, you know, to get to work on that assignment, get that completed, of course they're going to say no right, or they're going to shut down, or they're going to refuse to complete the work.

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Lots of students with these types of behaviors really appreciate a choice.

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You can do this or you can do that.

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If you can craft these choices correctly, you're going to be giving them two options.

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Either one would be what you would want to see, and so that's kind of the game on this is to give them two desired outcomes and let them choose the one they want to pursue.

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You can also teach students how to pursue alternative activities when they're just not feeling what they're supposed to be doing Now.

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Does this give them the opportunity just to completely disengage and not do it?

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No, but if you set limits, if you set some parameters for this, give them the option to at some times choose some alternative activities, you may see some improvement overall.

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And again, this is a long game.

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It's not going to be one or two times and all of a sudden they're a new person.

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But giving them choices, giving them some control in their environment, typically helps.

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And then we've got to practice these.

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It's not something that we can just direct them to do in the classroom.

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If they're presented with a request they don't want to follow, their brain is immediately going to fly toward how can I get out of this as quickly as possible, right, and so they're not going to be able to think through their options, they're not going to be able to reason through what they want to do next.

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So we must practice with them beforehand, at different times during their day, to really make sure that we're setting them up for success.

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And then, last, in that line of thought of getting rid of the behavior charts, of skill building and practicing exercising appropriate choices, we've also got to maintain consistent routines and schedules in the classroom.

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Y'all, some of our classrooms are really struggling in this area.

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Our masterminders talk all the time about walking into classrooms that feel like free-for-alls.

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Students are getting up, they're wandering around, they're calling out, they're talking over the teacher.

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We heard a story here recently about a teacher who was teaching over students who were talking over the teacher, and it just kept getting louder and louder and louder on both sides.

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We really have got to support our teachers in good classroom management.

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We've really got to support them in asserting their authority in the classroom and so that they can provide these consistent routines and schedules.

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It's a lot of work on the front end to get these systems in place, but, boy oh boy, does it make everybody's lives easier when students know what to expect, they know what's coming next and they know what they can do in the moment.

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It's just phenomenal, the change that good routine and structure can make.

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Third, when we're working with students who are showing oppositional or defiant tendencies, we need to build relationships.

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Oh wait, I already said that, right?

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Yes, I did say that and I'm going to say it again.

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Why?

00:24:30.567 --> 00:24:37.746
Because it is so important Find who the student gravitates toward.

00:24:37.746 --> 00:24:42.917
Who do they seem like they might want to spend a little bit more time with on campus?

00:24:42.917 --> 00:25:00.357
Are there some students that tend to be more positive peer influences, who may be able to, you know, sit closer to your student in question, who may be able to mentor them a little bit or, you know, just be a positive role model?

00:25:00.357 --> 00:25:03.615
I think there's a lot to be said for those kinds of relationships.

00:25:03.615 --> 00:25:11.454
So, if we can encourage those, help teachers find potential candidates, offer some lunchtimes for them to sit and talk and get to know each other.

00:25:11.454 --> 00:25:24.136
Whatever it is we need to do, we need to try to help students build relationships on campus, and then we also need to be able to find or offer resources.

00:25:27.405 --> 00:25:31.555
There are usually very high ACE scores for these kids.

00:25:31.555 --> 00:25:41.098
Do you remember the ACE scores, which are a measure of the adverse childhood experiences that a student has had in their lifetime?

00:25:41.098 --> 00:25:43.167
What's going on at home?

00:25:43.167 --> 00:25:45.554
What do these students need at home?

00:25:45.554 --> 00:25:47.458
What do they need at school?

00:25:47.458 --> 00:25:50.491
What do their parents need?

00:25:50.491 --> 00:25:52.759
Do the parents need some sort of support?

00:25:52.759 --> 00:25:56.307
If you have a social worker available, deploy them.

00:25:56.307 --> 00:25:58.192
Get them involved with this family.

00:25:58.192 --> 00:26:04.911
If there's no social worker, determine what the family needs through some person-centered means.

00:26:04.911 --> 00:26:15.787
Build those relationships, have some real conversation without the urge to jump to a worksheet or jump to reframing or jump to identifying emotions.

00:26:15.787 --> 00:26:21.185
Just talk to them like a person, like a human being, and build those bridges.

00:26:21.185 --> 00:26:28.626
Determine what they need, what their family may need, and then find those resources and offer them.

00:26:30.832 --> 00:26:39.477
Also, don't forget that if you think a child has experienced a significant level of trauma in their life, they may need a level of support you can't provide in school.

00:26:39.477 --> 00:26:46.989
That would be when you would need to refer them out to a therapist in your area.

00:26:46.989 --> 00:26:58.792
Investigate some programs available within your schools on-site therapists, telehealth therapists, community therapists, whatever you can find.

00:26:58.792 --> 00:27:01.405
Get them involved in some services to help them with their oppositional or defiant behaviors.

00:27:01.405 --> 00:27:09.619
And my last tool when you're dealing with suspected ODD is build relationships.

00:27:09.619 --> 00:27:12.087
For the third time, y'all.

00:27:12.087 --> 00:27:21.160
I cannot stress this enough Relationship is going to be your golden ticket, y'all.

00:27:21.220 --> 00:27:29.115
I think it's so important that we recognize the potential for students that we do not box them in with these crazy labels.

00:27:29.115 --> 00:27:45.113
And if I had my way, I don't think I would hear anybody say oppositional, defiant disorder on a school campus, except maybe once every I don't know few years, because that should be so far from our frame of reference.

00:27:45.113 --> 00:28:00.919
We need to be in the business of supporting students, identifying what their needs are, helping them learn how to make healthy choices in the classroom and helping their teachers learn how to work with them as well, so that everyone can move towards success.

00:28:00.919 --> 00:28:03.931
I hope this has been helpful for you.

00:28:03.931 --> 00:28:16.147
I hope it's helped you kind of re-examine how you think about students with difficult behaviors, how you approach those situations and how you talk to your staff about them.

00:28:16.147 --> 00:28:33.636
In the moment, I think it's really important that we be able to be confident enough when these conversations come up to say you know, I know that term gets tossed around a lot, but I'd feel much more comfortable if we just talked about difficult behaviors.

00:28:33.636 --> 00:28:43.007
I think we're going to get a lot further that way, because we know difficult behaviors can be changed right, and that's what we're here for.

00:28:43.007 --> 00:28:49.667
We're here to guide and inspire students toward their best, most fulfilling outcomes.

00:28:49.667 --> 00:28:57.769
Hey, listen, I know I've told you before, but I want to tell you again how important the work is that you're doing.

00:28:58.612 --> 00:29:01.679
As we release this episode about mid-April.

00:29:01.679 --> 00:29:04.390
This is the tough time of year, right.

00:29:04.390 --> 00:29:06.434
Things start feeling really hard.

00:29:06.434 --> 00:29:16.029
So I just want to remind you that, even on the hard days, even when it feels like there's so much to do, right, how are we ever going to get this done before the end of the school year?

00:29:16.029 --> 00:29:29.311
Your students are so lucky to have you on campus supporting them, believing in them and learning so that you can be the best school counselor for them you can be, and you've been here learning with me today.

00:29:29.311 --> 00:29:33.733
I can't thank you enough for that and I can't wait to talk to you next time.

00:29:34.847 --> 00:29:38.692
I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast.

00:29:38.692 --> 00:29:42.997
Until then, I hope you have the best week ever.

00:29:42.997 --> 00:29:44.789
Take care, my friend.

00:29:44.789 --> 00:29:54.564
You know it's funny when I pulled that episode and thought, hey, you know, I better re-listen to that.

00:29:54.564 --> 00:29:57.049
I bet it's probably pretty entertaining.

00:29:57.049 --> 00:30:10.372
Being that it was almost two years ago in my podcasting journey, I was still pretty new to this whole thing, wasn't really sure what I was doing and it was taking me hours and hours to get one episode ready.

00:30:10.372 --> 00:30:15.387
But I gotta admit I think it wasn't bad and I hope you felt the same way.

00:30:16.210 --> 00:30:37.569
Hey, if this got you thinking about oppositional behaviors and reframing maybe the way you see some of your most challenging students on campus, I want to remind you we have this oppositional behavior playbook, as well as our entire playbook collection, available to our School for School Counselors Mastermind members.

00:30:37.569 --> 00:30:42.739
This is what we do month in and month out in the Mastermind Membership.

00:30:42.739 --> 00:30:53.635
It's an amazing collaborative community of school counselors unlike anywhere else you could ever join, and I would love for you to have a seat at that table with us as well.

00:30:53.635 --> 00:30:57.815
You can check out all of the details at schoolforschoolcounselorscom.

00:30:57.815 --> 00:31:10.946
Slash mastermind to up level your school counseling game, build your professional fluency and finally be seen as a go-to authority on your campus.

00:31:12.509 --> 00:31:20.550
Hey, also, if you enjoyed this episode, would you do me a favor and go ahead, subscribe to the podcast.

00:31:20.550 --> 00:31:23.750
That way you know you're never going to miss a future episode.

00:31:23.750 --> 00:31:31.096
And then, if you're feeling super charitable, go give us a rating or a review in your podcast platform.

00:31:31.096 --> 00:31:42.700
That's worth more to me than anything else, because it lets me know if I'm on the right track and if I'm serving you well, and it also helps other school counselors find this podcast.

00:31:42.700 --> 00:31:49.794
So if you could find a few minutes in your heart to go give a rating and review, I would be forever in your debt.

00:31:49.794 --> 00:32:00.037
All right, I'm going to bid you goodbye, but I do promise I'll be back again soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast.

00:32:00.037 --> 00:32:06.578
Happy holidays to you, no matter what you celebrate, and I can't wait to visit with you again.

00:32:06.578 --> 00:32:08.101
Be well, my friend.

One Big Reason Behavior Charts Fail (And What You Can Do Instead)

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