How Teachers Can Teach Life’s Most Important Lesson
Dear Kid Whisperer,
What if a student completely refuses to participate in a Delayed Learning Opportunity? I don’t mean he just sits there until he eventually starts doing it, but instead runs out of the room and out to recess, or something along those lines?
While this is a challenge, it may be the best opportunity anyone will ever have to help this kid have a good life.
A Delayed Learning Opportunity (DLO) is an alternative to punishments. Behavioral Leadership does not involve punishment. Punishments simply are meant to change behavior by creating some kind of pain in a kid’s life: either by taking away something they want (maybe going on a field trip or hanging out with friends), or by putting something on a kid that they don’t want (writing “I will not get out of my seat” fifty times). Either way, it’s about arbitrarily making kids’ lives worse in order to change their behavior.
Behavioral Leadership doesn’t do that. It involves kids being required to learn the positive behavior through practice of that behavior, or to learn to be more responsible by solving the problem that their serious negative behavior caused. While kids may not like DLOs either, not liking them is not the point. Learning to be a better citizen is the point.
The answer to what to do when a kid refuses to do the DLO and runs out of the room to do something else is… to rejoice!
That is because if a student refuses to do the DLO, they are communicating to you the following:
I think that becoming belligerent and refusing a reasonable request from an adult authority figure can get me out of trouble and get me what I want.
If a kid believes this, they have no chance of being happy and successful because people who believe this cannot live functionally within any unit: they can not be a functional member of a family, school, business, or country, because all of these units have rules that need to be followed for the good of the unit. We call learning that this is not true “The Primary Lesson”, because it is the one lesson that makes learning all other lessons possible. Once a kid learns to not use increasingly worse behaviors to get what they want, they have a chance of being happy in the future.
Therefore, when a kid is sitting somewhere refusing to do a DLO during non-instructional time, this is fantastic! It’s fantastic because they are learning The Primary Lesson:
Refusing a reasonable request from an adult authority figure does not get me what I want and does not get me out of trouble.
As long as no one gives this kid any of the three things kids want:
Attention
Control
Avoidance
during his refusal period, he will eventually solve the problem or practice for the allotted time successfully. This may take minutes or hours, but is a small price to pay for having a chance to be happy.
But that’s not what you asked, is it? You asked what to do if the kid leaves the learning area and goes somewhere else. You mentioned him going with his friends to recess. I am sure that you have astutely noticed that he has given himself #3. Here’s how I have handled this situation as a teacher while minimizing giving him #1 and #2.
Kid (while sprinting out of the room): YOU CANNOT TAKE MY FREEDOM!!!!!!!!!!!!
Kid Whisperer: Yikes.
That’s it.
To review, Kid has gotten #1, #2, and #3, but we have minimized getting him what he wants by not reacting further by chasing him around, yelling, etc. Yes, he’s maximizing his avoidance, but we are minimizing attention and control.
Later, we find a time and place during which Kid has nowhere to go to get avoidance, to get attention, or to get an unhealthy feeling of control. It may be outside of school hours or during a time when the school has made extra non-instructional time just so the student has time to do this important learning. There is always, always, always a way to do this. Remember, the goal is not to get the student to be cooperative. The goal is to put him in a situation where he can learn the primary lesson, so he can then learn the other lesson he was there to learn in the first place.
Whether or not he learns The Primary Lesson is the difference between whether or not Kid has a chance at a happy life.