Tonight we ordered my daughter’s senior pictures. It's a beginning to all of the “lasts” of her senior year of high school. We are prepared for the inevitable question, “What are your/her plans for next year?” She has tossed around a few ideas over the years like interior design, boarding horses, cosmetology and elementary education. She would be great at any of these things, but without any start-up money, or experience beyond Y-Camp, the horse boarding business might not be the easiest career to start. When my daughter suggested elementary education, my first inclination as a 20 year school social worker who worked in challenging behavior and just resigned to start my own consulting business, was to talk her out of it. If you’re in the business, you know how difficult it has been the last few years: tax dollars are being reallocated to private school vouchers, budgets are unable to keep up with the cost of inflation which results in fewer positions getting filled or the ability to give pay raises, and an overall lack of respect for the profession. A young adult by the name of Yvin Shin summarized it best at the IIRP World Conference in 2023 during a panel discussion titled “Reimagining Schools: Harnessing Student Voice and Leadership, when she said, “...we are seeing a concerted, mobilized effort to transform the education system into a battleground for these manufactured culture wars.”
Instead of trying to convince my daughter to stick with interior design, I suggested she work at the local childcare center to make sure she likes large groups of children because loving children is a prerequisite for a career in education. The first day she came home and exclaimed, “Mom! There is a room full of chubby babies and I get to squeeze all the chunky babies. And there’s another room full of smaller babies and they told me that if I was having a bad day, I could just come in and rock all of the babies and it would make me feel better.!” Her whole face lit up as she talked about all of the children she got to love and care for and play with. She told me how the 4 year olds like to hold her hand so she can twirl them and that she makes them daisy chain bracelets and crowns when they are out on the playground.
One day she came home and said, “Mom, you know how you tell us about the kids you work with at school? Well, I think there’s a kid at the daycare that you would work with.” She told me how he had gone into the bathroom and had been in there awhile, so she went to check on him. She called out his name and didn’t hear anything. She saw his feet under the stall and said, “Ok, we are all done. Time to wash hands.” She waited and still didn’t hear anything and he didn’t come out, so she opened the stall door and saw the little boy gleefully unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet. My eyes got wide as I asked her what she did next. I assumed she would have recruited help from an adult or more seasoned employee at the center, but she replied, “I told him we were all done and guided him to the sink to wash his hands. I then gave him a couple of options of things he could play with in his classroom and walked him back to the room. Once he was playing, I went back to put on gloves and lift all of the wet, soggy toilet paper out of the toilet.”
My behavior analyst heart was beaming. “Natalie, you handled that perfectly! How did you know how to do that?” She responded that she was really just trying hard not to laugh because she knew that would only make it more likely that he would unroll toilet paper in the toilet again in the future.
Strategies for handling Mild Problem Behavior:
Tell children/students what to start doing rather than what to stop doing. When you tell them to stop doing something we make an assumption that they know what to do instead. If we tell a child to stop running, is skipping or rolling down the hallway ok? However, if we say “walk, please,” it doesn’t leave the behavioral expectation open to interpretation. Younger children, children with ADHD or autism may over or under attend to certain stimuli, so it's always best to keep directives short and explicit for what we want them to be doing.
Use a neutral tone of voice. Sometimes firm voices or raised voices can seem effective in the moment, but for some children knowing that their behavior caused an adult to have an emotional reaction, especially laughing, can actually reinforce their problem behavior and make them more likely to engage in the behavior again in the future. For other children who may be deprived of adult attention, they may take attention any way that they can get it, including in the form of reprimands. By using a neutral tone of voice, while giving short, explicit directives, it will help reduce the likelihood that behavior will inadvertently be reinforced.
Redirect and offer choices. For mild behavior, redirection and offering two or more acceptable choices is a great way to get children back on schedule. Would you like to play in the block center or at the water table? It takes their mind off of what they shouldn’t be doing and back onto what they can be doing.
When Natalie employed the strategies above innately, I knew then that she was called to be an educator. She loves children. She loves your children and she understands that when children don’t know how to behave, that she needs to teach. She is called to be an educator and I can’t stand in the way of that. Now more than ever we need to support those who are called. Honor them, respect them and pay them what they are worth. Afterall teachers write a piece of our children’s educational histories and inscribe on their hearts forever.
How did you know you were called to be an educator? Did you line up your stuffed animals and play school? Did you have an amazing teacher that inspired you?
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