From Behaving to Belonging

The Inclusive Art of Supporting Students Who Challenge Us

Julie Causton, Kate MacLeod

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781416629320
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Behavioural Management

Challenging behavior is one of the most significant issues educators face. Though it may seem radical to use words like love, compassion, and heart when we talk about behavior and discipline, the compassionate and heartfelt words, actions, and strategies teachers employ in the classroom directly shape who students are—and who they will become. But how can teaching from the heart translate into effective supports and practices for students who exhibit challenging behavior?

In From Behaving to Belonging, Julie Causton and Kate MacLeod detail how teachers can shift from a "behavior management" mindset (that punishes students for "bad" behavior or rewards students for "good" or "compliant" behavior) to an approach that supports all students—even the most challenging ones—with kindness, creativity, acceptance, and love.

Causton and MacLeod's approach* Focuses on students' strengths, gifts, and talents.
* Ignites students' creativity and sense of self-worth.
* Ensures that students' social, emotional, and academic needs are met.
* Prompts teachers to rethink challenging behavior and how they support their students.
* Helps teachers identify barriers to student success in the cultural, social, and environmental landscape.
* Inspires teachers to reconnect with their core values and beliefs about students and teaching.

We need to transform our classrooms into places of love. To that end, this book represents a paradigm shift from a punitive mindset to a strengths-based, loving approach and encourages the radical act of creating more inclusive and caring schools.

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Chapter 1

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Rethinking Students Who Challenge Us

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If we are to reclaim our classrooms as inclusive and loving spaces where all students are valued and celebrated, we must actively work on rethinking our students' challenging behavior using a strengths-based, holistic, and loving approach. In this chapter, we aim to shift from a traditional deficit-based way of understanding kids with challenging behavior and instead describe new ways of thinking about student differences, including approaching behaviors as natural and expected means of communication. We then help you focus on the strengths, gifts, and talents of each student and provide specific ways of being and practices to help you reset and reinvigorate your thinking about students with challenging behavior. This approach helps us boost and lean into our natural inclination to support students in creative and loving ways.

Value Student Differences

The richness of our classrooms, schools, and communities is derived from difference. In a classroom community that operates from a place of love, we've watched it take only a few moments for students to notice, learn about, and embrace one another's differences. Often, this process of understanding and valuing difference uses a similar pattern with groups of students:

• Students noticing something different about a peer.
• Students becoming curious about that difference.
• Students learning what that difference means for how to engage and connect with the peer.
• Students embracing the difference and the peer.

We see students engage in this loving work every day. In 2017, a video from BBC News (2017) began circulating the internet and perfectly documented this natural peer process of embracing differences. A group of students greet their classmate Anu as she walks to the playground for the first time with her new prosthetic leg. Her peers bend down to take a look at her new neon pink titanium leg. They ask questions such as, "Did it hurt?" and "Did you pick the color?" They embrace her in hugs. The young girl then shows them how she can run with her new leg. Then her peers begin to run beside her and behind her, matching her pace. Soon, she is leading the way. This brief video ends with the young girl and a peer walking hand in hand.

We can learn so much from our students about how quickly and readily they embrace and celebrate differences (in the case above, in 42 seconds). But first, we must provide students with the opportunity to interact with and embrace one another's differences so they can lean into their strengths and talents and learn from and grow with one another. Students' readiness to embrace differences can often be stifled by school cultures and structures that focus on the concept of normalcy; consequently, schools often sort and separate students with differences before the peer community even has a chance to love and embrace them. The first step is breaking down the myth of normal.

No Student Is Bad

It is this mythical concept of normal that can too often perpetuate barriers for our students' success. It can impede our ability to value student diversity and instead label it as different, challenging, or deficient. Perhaps the most pressing issue with labeling a student as challenging or deficient is that none of these labels are ever true. Isn't that refreshing? Our students are not challenging, bad, or naughty. Instead, student actions and behaviors, influenced by a contextual stew of socioemotional, academic, environmental, and disability-specific factors, present as challenging or disruptive.

In other words, we must remember that kids are not bad. All kids want to be loved and understood. All challenging behavior is merely evidence of kids asking us for that love and understanding in a way they know how. The more significant the presentation of behavior, the more we need to use love, support, and understanding in order to address the student's needs.

All Students Want Love and Understanding

All students want love and understanding, so it is critical to rethink deficit-based thinking about students and student behavior. We're sure you have, at some point, said or heard a teacher say something like, "He's an attention seeker. He only acts out because he knows it will get him attention from the teacher or his peers." This is a very common way to describe and explain students and their behavior. Ultimately, though, this way of thinking is fundamentally flawed. Consider the following examples:

• Deficit-based thinking: We assume only kids with challenging behavior seek attention from adults and peers.
• Truth: All kids seek attention. Attention is proof that we are loved and understood, which is a fundamental need for all humans.
• Deficit-based thinking: We assume that kids only display the challenging behavior because it gets them something (i.e., attention).
• Truth: All students would display the expected behavior if they knew how to get attention in appropriate and expected ways. The student exhibiting the challenging behavior simply doesn't have the skills, tools, or knowledge about how to display the appropriate behavior yet.

Let's look at another common phrase we sometimes say or hear about students with challenging behavior in teachers' lounges and meetings: "She's manipulative. She asks me questions that have nothing to do with the lesson, argues with me, and tells me all about what other kids are doing wrong. She often says, 'The other kids don't like the way I talk about them, so they avoid me.' And I know she does all this just to avoid work!"

Again, we understand the student's behavior is working in her favor! But here, too, this deficit-based thinking about a student and her behavior is fundamentally flawed. Let's consider another set of beliefs around student behavior:

• Deficit-based thinking: We assume that kids who display challenging behavior have planned the behaviors out using skillful forethought, impulse control, planning, and organization.
• Truth: Most of us behave in ways to get our needs met. That does not make us manipulative. Most students with challenging behavior don't have the very skills (i.e., impulse control, planning, and organization) needed to manipulate an outcome. In fact, if the kid had those skills, she would most likely be able to attend to the tasks at hand (e.g., focusing on the lesson and building positive relationships with peers) and avoid getting in trouble and isolating herself from peers.

Rethinking the deficit-based approach to working with students that attempts to incorrectly identify student behavior as normal or abnormal, good or bad, or malicious or innocent is the first step in reclaiming our classrooms as places of love. We must commit to the understanding that all kids want to behave because they all want love, understanding, and success. For kids with challenging behavior, we must remember that they want to attend to the math task like you've asked. They want to engage with peers in appropriate ways that lead to strong peer connections and friendships. They want to have positive relationships with adults, including you. But for kids with challenging behavior, they might not have the specific skills, prior knowledge, or opportunities to succeed in the ways in which schools expect them to succeed and behave.

Kids Do Well if They Can

Ross Greene, a scholar who writes and speaks with great expertise about how to implement better, more effective ways to work with kids with challenging behavior, explains in his important school-based text Lost at School (2008) that we must shift our thinking from "Kids do well if they want to" to "Kids do well if they can" (p. 10). This paradigm shift is powerful because it helps us reimagine our students using a strengths-based and compassionate perspective.

When we realize that all students want to do well, it helps us approach students in new ways. Even when students are demonstrating that they don't care or don't want to try, we must look past the actual behaviors and language to the meaning behind it. Students might act as if they don't care because they are fearful they won't be successful. Students might say they hate us because they are scared we will be disappointed in them. Supporting a student who is scared or anxious is much different than looking at the behavior as defiance or manipulation. We not only need to rethink student motivations; we also need to reexamine our larger structures that are based on the myth of normalcy.

Normalcy Is a Myth

In schools across the country, the concept of "normal" often marginalizes students based on issues of differences, such as perceived ability, behavior, race, and language. We often do it with the best of intentions, but it still happens. The student with dyslexia who doesn't read as well or as quickly as her peers is often educated in a segregated reading room down the hall. The student who is more verbal than others is told again and again to be quiet. The African American boy who displays challenging behavior in a predominately white school can be quickly disciplined, or even wrongly labeled with an emotional disturbance. Though there are many issues to grapple with in these examples, ultimately, they represent the damage deficit-based thinking can inflict on student structures such as placement, labeling, rules, policies, regulations, and ideas about what students can be.

The more equitable, effective, and loving way to work with kids with diverse backgrounds, abilities, and needs—including behavioral needs—builds on the peer process of diversity acceptance we shared earlier. First, we acknowledge that difference is the norm. This means that normal behavior, normal academic achievement, normal communication styles, and normal social skills—frankly, whatever you are attempting to normalize!—are myths. You and your students are thankfully too diverse and amazing to behave, move, think, communicate, and interact in the same standardized ways.

It is often easy for us to value diversity, but when it comes to students with challenging behavior, it is common for us to quickly jump to conclusions and beliefs about the student. Instead of these knee-jerk reactions when we are faced with behaviors that challenge us, we must pause and take the time to acknowledge and value the individual differences that have carried the student to this particular point in her life, education, and, of course, the specific challenging behaviors.

Embracing diversity means we must also abandon the idea that normal behavior is the only valuable behavior. This idea can be very hard because we know classroom disruptions happen due to challenging behavior, and we'd rather those disruptions didn't happen at all. But if we take a moment to reimagine our well-behaved students and expand our thinking to include all our students, even if they have challenging behaviors, we then begin to expect that all our students will behave differently and will need to learn different skills.

If students are only valued when they are quiet and compliant learners, never question our authority, and do what they're told, we run the significant risk of devaluing and underestimating too many of our students. Instead, when we seek to understand the whole student, we can begin to celebrate how they show up every day, even without all the skills it might take to succeed the way they'd like to (or in the ways we'd like them to). Only then can we begin to consciously create a classroom environment that values and addresses not only the needs of our diverse students but also the individuality they each bring to our world. Only then can we truly begin to understand our students as valuable—not despite the individual ways they move, think, play, and communicate but because of those differences.

Star the Strengths

Often, our kids with challenging behavior can spend the majority of their days being told what they're doing wrong and how to do it—whatever it is—the "right" way. Sit still. Be quiet. Do your work. Walk in a straight line. Write neatly. Speak clearly. Raise your hand. It can be exhausting for educators and students. When we hyperfocus on fixing the behaviors and require kids to achieve that mythical norm, we often miss out on opportunities to give them a chance to nurture talents and skills. Let's push against the traditional school mode of obedience and lean into radical love in the classroom. We begin by starring students' strengths.

Carve out time and space to help students develop and build upon what they are interested in and good at. Starring the strengths helps you to approach students from a place of love and respect, and it helps you build their confidence so they feel, perhaps even for the first time, successful and confident at school. For example, take the way 10th grade teacher, Patrice Smith, approached a student named Song and starred her strengths to help address challenging behavior and simultaneously improve her feelings of success and belonging.

Song was often in the principal's office for "defiant and loud class disruptions," particularly during her English class with her ELA teacher, Tom. Tom was at his wits' end because, as he said, "Song is such a bright student, a good student, but she just can't keep it together in ELA. And with her outbursts, I just can't have her constantly disrupting the class. I don't know what to do." Song's geometry teacher, Kim, knew Song to be an excellent student with minimal to no disruptions in class. Kim suggested that she and Tom brainstorm about Song's strengths and talents together. They discovered that Song

• Is a strong student who loves math and problem solving.
• Has two younger siblings and works very well with younger students.
• Loves comic books.
• Is interested in her Asian American heritage.
• Is musical.
• Is a kinesthetic learner and likes to move about when working.
• Is a leader among her peers.

Maybe you're thinking that you're at the beginning of the school year and you couldn't possibly know all the relevant information about a student yet, not to mention a list of their talents and strengths. We recommend engaging students in this work by asking them to think through their strengths and talents during class meetings or morning circles, or even by handing out a survey or multiple intelligence quiz in class. These practices can help students identify and star their own strengths, talents, and interests so they know how best they can learn, interact, and grow.

Once you do this with your entire class, you can create a po...