How to Improve the Behaviors of ALL Students

Dear Kid Whisperer,

I am a substitute teacher looking to obtain my Special Education teaching license, and I am reading your book. Given that the practical tools you offer work well with the most challenging students, does this also include special education students with behavioral challenges, including autistic students?

First, you are a hero to me for expanding your own education so that you can help more kids, and it is an honor to answer this excellent question!

To do so, let’s play a game. Remember those assignments in school where you’d draw a line between a word on one side of the page and connect it with a word that goes with it on the other side of the page? Maybe you do these with your students now.

On the left side is a special education diagnosis. On the right is an element of Traditional Discipline. Go ahead and draw a line from the diagnosis to the element of Traditional Discipline that would be appropriate to use with a child with that diagnosis. Here we go. Maybe use a pencil so you can erase if you make a mistake:

Visual Impairment                                                                                                                    Anger

Autism Spectrum Disorder                                                                                                  Lectures

Traumatic Brain Injury                                                                                                           Punishments

Intellectual Impairment                                                                                                         Threats

Orthopedic Impairment                                                                                                         Power Struggles

Specific Learning Disability                                                                                                  Losing Your #$%@

Did you notice that you were unable to draw any lines?

That’s because what really doesn’t work with kids with special education diagnoses is Traditional Discipline. Traditional Discipline is defined here as the totality of methods being cobbled together, over time, by teachers in the great vacuum that is created when colleges of education fail miserably to explicitly and systematically teach effective procedures and strategies for managing student behavior.

Now, please look back at the column on the right. Would you want any kid to have to endure those methods?

To be fair, many heroic teachers figure out some effective means of managing and changing behaviors by adopting effective strategies and procedures from older, wiser teachers who also got what they do from teachers a generation before them. Over the course of their careers, many teachers can, through far too much trial and error, figure out how to avoid the tactics in the right column.

But should they have to? You are about to pay an institution of higher learning to teach you how to teach. Shouldn’t they teach you how to manage behaviors? I’m here to tell you that they won’t, and that this is a crime. If people knew how much needless suffering of educators and kids was happening in our schools simply because educators are not trained to manage behaviors, they would be horrified.

To (at long last) answer your question, yes, Behavioral Leadership is effective with students with special education diagnoses because it is the cure for Traditional Discipline. It allows teachers to be calm, firm, and loving so that they can deliver quality instruction for all kids.

Since you mentioned autism, and since autism spectrum disorder diagnoses have skyrocketed, let’s drill down on that specifically. The reality is that without Behavioral Leadership (explicit and systematic control-sharing, relationship building, and teaching of positive behaviors), teachers will be doing things they’d rather not do. Otherwise, they will just be flying by the seats of their pants behaviorally. This will, in many, many classrooms, lead to what we’ll call “right column strategies.”

See right column.

How do those work with autistic kids? Ever tried angrily lecturing an autistic kid? It doesn’t go great. How about punishing an autistic kid? Have you noticed that lots of kids with autism hate stuff that is unjust and doesn’t make sense? This is true of punishments that are merely meant to cause pain to change behavior.

Have you also noticed that many autistic kids tend to love stuff that makes logical sense? Have you also noticed that many autistic kids are academically inclined? So, when we don’t punish to just cause pain, which is inherently unjust, and instead we require kids to learn a behavior just like they learn academics, this tends to be way more effective. By the way (are we noticing a pattern?) wouldn’t this way of doing things be best for all kids?