Weekly Series — Behavior Made Easy
When working with challenging kids it is important to have a guiding philosophy.
A philosophy sets the stage for how we interpret and respond to unexpected behaviors. A philosophy enables us to approach student problems in a consistent way for everyone on the team.
Choosing the right guiding philosophy will have big implications on the future outcomes of student success. Without any philosophy, the situation or situations are almost guaranteed to get worse.
There are basically two camps of thinking. One says kids do well if they want to. The other says kids do well if they can.
The timer was set, she just had to write two simple sentences in her journal.
She could go to the art center when she was finished.
“I’m going to get a drink of water,” she said.
That was the third time in the last 15 minutes. This time, she did not come back.
It was my turn to go find Martha. I called into the bathroom, there was no answer.
I heard a sound, and noticed her sitting behind the trash can.
I asked, how much time do you need to come back to class?’’ No answer.
I set the timer for 5 minutes. But as expected, when the timer went off, she still did not move.
I was already frustrated by her actions. She was getting out of work again. She was taking me away from the other students. She was pushing my buttons just to get attention.
I knew these natural thoughts and emotions were not helping the situation. I was reacting to the situation. I was surprised how easy it was to think “she just doesn’t want to work”.
Even if it were true, there was only one road to take “to make her want to do well”. The automatic responses were always to provide incentives, or rewards for good behavior. To punish or provide consequences for “bad” behaviors.
I set in motion a more productive way of thinking — “kids do well if they can”.
Dr. Ross Greene, the creator of Collaborative Problem Solving and Lives in the Balance describes it this way.
Why would any kid not want to do well (with circumstances). Don’t we all do well when we can. Unmotivated, limited testing, coercing, secondary gain, attention gaining, when put to the test, don’t make sense?
When we start to see the problem as “kids do well if they can’ we see that something must be getting in their way. Our focus then becomes how to help remove the obstacles.
With this philosophy we helped Martha discover the things that were holding her back. One by one we eliminated the obstacles, and she began to spend most of the time in the classroom with her peers. She went on to become one of the hardest working students in the school.
Now, many years later she is a confident honor student in high school. She is an accomplished pianist and singer with a bright future ahead of her.
All that we did was figure out how to remove the obstacles that were in her way.
I hope this was helpful. All your comments and input are greatly appreciated. Don’t forget to follow us on Medium and join our newsletter at daVinci Publishing
