Debate: Remove Disruptive Students?
A new discussion is highlighting strategies for severe K-5 disruptions like screaming or throwing. One teacher advocates for immediate classroom exit and direct behavioral reteaching by another staff member. Others suggest that 1:1 check-ins often reveal knowledge gaps are the root cause of the behavior.
Frameworks like Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) offer a tiered system of support to prevent disruptive behavior. Tier 1 involves universal strategies for all students, such as explicitly teaching behavioral expectations. More intensive support is provided in Tiers 2 and 3 for students who need it. Research indicates that disruptive behaviors can lead to significant loss of instructional time, with some estimates suggesting teachers lose up to 2.5 hours per week. These disruptions not only affect the learning of the disruptive student but also negatively impact their classmates' academic engagement and achievement. Trauma-informed practices are gaining traction as a way to understand and address the root causes of disruptive behavior. This approach recognizes that behaviors can be a response to adverse childhood experiences and focuses on creating a safe and supportive environment to help students regulate their emotions and build resilience. Restorative practices, an alternative to punitive discipline, focus on repairing harm and rebuilding relationships. Instead of simply removing a student from the classroom, restorative approaches involve conversations and problem-solving circles to help students understand the impact of their actions and find ways to make things right. A systematic review of interventions to reduce disruptive behavior found that the Good Behavior Game is one of the most frequently studied and effective strategies. This classroom management technique involves dividing students into teams and rewarding them for following rules, which has been shown to have moderate-to-large effects on decreasing disruptions. A close student-teacher relationship can be a powerful tool for managing disruptive behavior, as it can reduce aggression and improve prosocial behavior. Teachers who seek to understand the underlying causes of a student's behavior, such as challenges at home or undeveloped self-regulation skills, are often more successful in building these crucial connections. For non-violent misbehavior, alternatives to suspension can be more effective. Strategies like "restorative chats," restitution, and skills coaching aim to teach new behaviors and allow students to repair the harm caused by their actions, keeping them in the learning environment. More than two-thirds of children report experiencing at least one traumatic event by age 16. Understanding the potential impact of trauma is crucial, as it can manifest in behaviors that appear to be willful non-compliance but are actually trauma responses.
