How to Remain Calm and in Charge at Home and at School
Dear Kid Whisperer,
I am struggling with my calm signal by itself being enough to stop me from raising my voice. I was successful for a while with it at school with my 4th graders. I alternate between “Oh dear” and “Oh boy” as my calm signals. Near the end of the year, my students were starting to mimic me and make fun of me using it. It infuriated me, but I was mostly able to remain calm. I’m just wondering if there’s anything else you do to help you not raise your voice. The calm signal doesn’t always work for me. I’m noticing the same thing at home with my teenagers. I would appreciate any advice.
For the Behavioral Leadership novices out there, the Calm Signal is a word, a short set of words, or a sound that allows the user to separate a negative stimulus from their response:
“Blerg!”
“Oof.”
“Yikes.”
By helping you stay calm, it stops kids from being able to control your actions and the color of your face. Therefore, it helps you to not reinforce the antisocial behaviors that you’d rather not have to deal with.
Yes, what you are doing is insufficient and won’t work. Here’s what you are doing wrong, and how you can start doing it right.
The first point is that you need to pick one Calm Signal and stick with it. You want to be able to pull this out effortlessly without thinking about it. Having more than one makes this harder.
Second point: you need to change a paradigm before you can absorb the third point below. You cannot allow kids (students or your own) to use behaviors that make you resent them.
Which leads us to the third point. Remember that the Calm Signal, when in response to behaviors that are serious or chronic, must also be the first part of your three-part Delayed Learning Opportunity script. Perhaps yours might be,
“Oh, boy. This is unfortunate. You can do some learning later.”
Then, at a time of your choosing (non-instructional time if at school), that kid will be required to either practice not mocking the teacher (or parent), de-stress her by doing significant work for her, instead of her doing it, or doing something else that will solve the problem (upsetting or annoying her) in some authentic way.
Once multiple Delayed Learning Opportunities have been delayed and then completed, using your exact script to delay each time, a couple of wonderful things will have happened. The kids in your care will have learned that when you say there will be a learning-based consequence, there will, in fact, be one.
Also, you have now put some weight behind your Calm Signal! Right now, you are only using your Calm Signal to try to stay calm. You forgot the other thing that it’s for, which makes what you are trying to use it for (staying calm) ineffective. Once you keep using it at the beginning of your DLO script, it acts as a Pavlovian signal that there may be a learning-based consequence for the antisocial behavior, which stops more and more of this resentment-breeding behavior until it is completely gone.
Here’s how I’ve been solving this situation for over two decades:
Kid Whisperer (trying to stay calm because a couple of kids in his third grade class are being slightly annoying): Oh, man.
Kid (mockingly): OOOH, MAN!
Kid Whisperer: Oh, man. This is rough. I’m going to help you learn about this later.
Later, Kid Whisperer leads Kid through a Delayed Learning Opportunity. This antisocial behavior is experimented with multiple times, and is dealt with the same each time.
After that:
Kid Whisperer (now frustrated that he lost his lesson plan book, again): Oh, man.
[a hush falls over Kid and the rest of the class as they think very, very hard about their behavior and if they are being sufficiently polite to Kid Whisperer.]
Just put in a bit of work to teach these positive behaviors, and you can strengthen that Calm Signal so that you can be very calm and very firm at the same time!