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Free Monthly Newsletter From Brad Mason, LPC
Teaching Tips
School is back in session. Summer is over. What can teachers do to help our children who at times fall short of behavioral expectations?
Focus
This is a common complaint about many of the children who come to see me. Anytime we have disruption in our lives from stress, depression, grief, change, ADHD, and so on, our ability to ignore distractions and remember becomes compromised. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on focus and leave other behavioral issues to future newsletters.
1. Remember you have the power to choose. You can pay attention to a student when he or she is not paying attention, or you can put your energy into them when they are. Waiting until they are off-task and then re-directing can become draining for both the student and the teacher. Build confidence and energize yourselves by emphasizing intervention that targets being on task and paying attention.

2. Make it fun and easy. Establisesh a credit system for on-task behavior. Before lunch and at the end of the day, privately rate the student’s efforts on a chart. For example, poor=0 points, fair=5, good=10, great=15, awesome=20. Allow the student to exchange points for in-class privileges or easier yet let the parents create a menu of rewards the student can purchase with points at home.

Dating the point sheets will also create a log that provides data that can be useful to analyze later. This type of system will also circumvent the problems in attitude and self-esteem that can be created when privileges are lost or the child gets a sad face or an “X.” Finally, Problems with satiation are avoided by providing a menu of rewards so the student does not get tired of the same old thing. Distractible children like novelty. You can also carry tickets or class bucks with you that you can drop on the student’s desk for paying attention and staying on task at your convenience and without interrupting instruction.

If you vary the amount of points or bucks you drop off on them, and vary the schedule and interval to keep it random, you will keep the student responding because they never know when you might notice them doing good or how much the reward will be. Like a slot machine, using the same principles that keep people dropping quarters and pulling the lever as often as possible. How’s that for slick?

3. Be very explicit and teach what you expect in terms of listening and staying on task. I like to teach “Whole body listening.” You can draw the body parts that follow on your chalkboard as you explain what is expected so you have a visual cue when you ask if the students are showing you whole body listening.

Take a picture of your student on-task and put it on his desk. You listen with your eyes by looking at the speaker. You listen with your lips by keeping them closed. You listen with your hands by keeping them still. You listen with your feet by pointing them at the speaker. Listen with your shoulders and chest by keeping them open and directed towards the speaker. Finally, you listen with your brain by thinking about what the speaker is saying. So you don’t just listen with your ears!
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Right before non-compliance, the most frequent behavior that brings people in to see me is the tantrums. The aggression. The rages. Let me share with you some of the techniques I have used with families that have been successful.

The first question I often ask is What is the right way to be mad in your family? Your child may need some practice and coaching in the right words and body language to demonstrate the intensity and type of feeling he or she is having. We may use some anger scales to help the child first be able to recognize that they ARE having an emotional response, so they can learn to detect their own signs of internal distress BEFORE they hit the top of their anger scale, by this time, they are often no longer responsive to words or reason. We want them to catch it earlier, communicate it appropriately, and have a menu of options to use to manage the feelings. I often use a visual menu that shows levels of emotion, how the child looks, feels, and sounds, and things they can do to manage the feeling and return to their emotional baseline when they are better able to talk and reason. Parents and teachers can be very instrumental as coaches through this process. They can notice the child is showing outward signs of initial levels of distress, verbalize what is going on, and suggest to the child how they might be feeling and what they can do about it. We can identify thinking tools, social tools, relaxation tools, and activity tools (tonyattwood.com) the child can use to get their stress response down to a manageable level. As the child works though this with support, they become increasingly independent in the skills of emotional recognitiion, expression, and management.

We can also help the child become more stable and receptive to training by identifying triggers and pathways that underlie outbusts, and work with the environment and teach the child thinking skills to successfully adapt to changes in the environment. (cpsseminars@gmail.com)

Many questions come to me in the form of "What do I do when he does this unwanted behavior?" Thus placing focus on the problem behavior and a reactive stance to parenting and behavioral management. While this may be convientional wisdom, I propose this is the least effective and potentially most damaging way to manage behavior.

The problem lies in putting energy and descriptions of the child in terms of when things go wrong. Not only is this a drain on you as the caregiver, it is a drain on the child, your relationship, and the child's abilty to view himself in a positive and healthy light. Furthermore, rather than creating an attitude and model for how we want the child to be, we may inadvertantly be extending and magnifying what we don't want. Ask yourself this: When I punish or take away from my child, does their behavior get better, or worse? Bingo. So if we want the behavior to get better, what do we do? We become intentional about putting more energy into when the rules are not being broken. (See Howard Glasser www.difficultchild.com).

The truth is, as long as nothing is going wrong, they are doing everything right! But generally that's when we go about our business, returning calls, cooking supper, starting the laundry. We stop and pay attention when we hear the screaming. Instead of when we don't. I say that's a mistake, because of the type of interaction we end up having, because of the message it gives to the child, the way it drains our energy and makes us feel, and because we waited until it was too late. Had we noticed the child and shown our appreciation when the rules were not being broken, we could have done it at a time of our convenience, we could have been creating our child's self-image in the form that is true, that they are wonderful, good, being respectful of Mommy and Daddy, working hard and doing a good job of being gentle, sharing, and so on. If we want our children to remember this positive self-image, we need to think it and say it with greater frequency and energy than when things go poorly. Or else they will give up, giving rise to oppositional defiant behavior, depression, anxiety, and misbehavior specifically targeted at "getting" you.

That's right, sometimes your child really is out to get you! I understood this in my head but not in my behavior when my first son was 10 months old. He taught me a lesson. We would get home and he would head for the (no-no) Ozarka water machine, and let out the water, eyes gleaming playfully at me after I already said "Oh-oh, no thank you please Jack!" I thought about it and realized that as long as he got his barn and animals or Thomas the Train out on the rug and played quietly, I put my attention elsewhere! I needed to be saying "Yes Jack, good boy.”