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Are you feeling swamped by the demands of being a principal? From juggling emails, calls, and decisions to boosting test scores and wading through endless paperwork, the pressure is real.
But imagine a scenario where you no longer feel this overwhelming stress. Picture yourself as a more resilient leader, concentrating on enhancing your school rather than merely coping with the daily tasks that currently consume your time.
I‘m Barb Flowers. Drawing upon my eight-year experience as an elementary principal, with a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and certification as a life coach, Along the way, I've mentored and coached school leaders, guiding them to change their mindset, set boundaries and focus on their own well-being while navigating their roles.
Each episode offers practical insights on time management, communication, overcoming overwhelm, boosting confidence, and fostering a positive mindset. We'll also discuss topics like working with stakeholders, implementing new initiatives, and managing discipline. Let's set boundaries, focus on well-being, and reignite your passion for being a principal. Welcome to "The Principal's Handbook."
I firmly believe that to be an impactful educator, you must first become a confident and well-rounded individual. Join us in this journey to empower and enhance your confidence as a school leader.
Team Approach to Challenging Student Behavior
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast. Today we're talking about navigating challenging student behavior. That's all coming up next on the Principal's handbook.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Principal's Handbook, your go-to resource for principals looking to revamp their leadership approach and prioritize self-care. I'm Barb Flowers, a certified life coach with eight years of experience as an elementary principal. Tune in each week as we delve into strategies for boosting mental resilience, managing time effectively, and nurturing overall wellness.
From tackling daily challenges to maintaining a healthy work-life balance. We'll navigate the complexities of school leadership together. Join me in fostering your sense of purpose as a principal and reigniting your passion for the job. Welcome to a podcast where your wellbeing is the top priority. I.
Speaker: Welcome everyone to the Principal's handbook. Today we're talking about navigating challenging student behavior, and I'm talking about those kids that really fall into the tier two and [00:01:00] tier three categories.
So we have our tier one under control. We have a system in place, but then we have those students who are really disruptive. They might have more extreme behaviors, , and we are supposed to figure it out as the principals, teachers are frustrated. In my current building, I'm in a kindergarten, first and second grade building, and a lot of times what I'm hearing all across the country is that there really is extreme behaviors happening with kids at these young ages.
Of course, with kids who are older than second grade, there's different behaviors happening. So we have those challenges as well that this can pertain to, , kindergarten. First and second, really with kindergarten, one of the challenges and even into first, is they are so new to school. We are trying to figure them out.
We think about when a student comes , into our building. Let's say even you're a ninth through 12th grade building. A student might be new to you and you don't really have that much background information, whether they come from another school or you don't [00:02:00] have a transition from each building.
There could be situations where you don't know much about that student, and so when they start to have behaviors, it takes some time. To figure out what's going on with it. And when I think about our youngest learners,
they might not have any experience in preschool. It could just be a lack of exposure to kids in general. I have a lot of students who they've not been around other kids. They're not used to structure. , I've even asked parents, does your child follow one step direction?
And they said no. So it's like these little things, and we're asking kids to sit all day at school, follow expectations, do the things that everybody else is doing, and they're coming in with minimal experience. And so that's why a tier one system is so important. And I do have, , podcast episodes that I will link in the show notes about tier one because having that is very important.
But then there are those students who. Even with tier one supports, they're struggling. They might be having extreme behaviors. I've seen first graders, [00:03:00] throwing chairs, hitting, cussing, all these things, , and they're not on an IEP. They don't have a disability, they don't have a diagnosis. They are just struggling.
And sometimes it comes out of nowhere and then and all of a sudden we have to support these behaviors and support the teachers and figure out how to problem solve. And that can be really difficult because what happens at first when you're not used to these behaviors is the student comes for to the office with an office referral.
But before you know it, the student might be in your office. All the time, which is a huge problem because they're missing out on instruction. It's not fixing the behavior. You don't have time as a principal to just be watching this student all day. If you're in an elementary, you can't just leave them alone.
, And so it really is tricky. I wanted to talk about this topic because I was just meeting with my staff and talking about the frustration of some of these extreme behaviors, and it got me thinking about. Some things that I talked about with clients in a coaching session, in a group coaching [00:04:00] session, and then also some things I did in my old building that I have not done in my new building because in my new building I've been so focused on those tier one supports and really what I was thinking about.
Is behavior has to be a team approach. We can't do behavior alone. We can't fix behavior alone As the principal now, there is an expectation as the principal that you support teachers with behavior, and I am in full belief that you have to discipline and give consequences in all of those things. But I do see in education that there are two different types of behaviors we're dealing with.
At my last building that was K five, I had behaviors that were one time situations where maybe it was a fight on the playground or maybe I was investigating a bullying situation or. I was dealing with social media coming into school, investigating that, how to handle it, a bus issue, something like that.
That is really my discipline process that reminds me of the discipline blueprint that I have, where it's actually having a process of how to investigate [00:05:00] situations and deal with discipline. That is one type of discipline we're dealing with. Another type of discipline that I'm really dealing with in a K two, which is completely different.
Is these tier two, tier three extreme behaviors that it's less about isolated incidents and it's less about kids just making an impulsive decision and it's more about what is going on. , Maybe with a student that's deeper than that, right? It's. These ongoing issues that we have to figure out how to address, but they are extreme behaviors happening in the classroom.
And so what I was thinking about though is, I can investigate and handle a situation all day long by myself, right? If a kid fights another kid or something like that, I can investigate that, handle it, whatever. But when it comes to these extreme behaviors. I don't have a background in behavior like our special ed teachers do or like a behavior coach in the building does.
And so I was thinking about how in my current building. One [00:06:00] of the problems I'm facing as a principal is I was taking it on myself. I don't have an assistant principal. I only have a counselor two days a week. We don't have a behavior coach, anything like that. And so here I was frustrated. The teacher's frustrated.
I totally get it, and I thought to myself after a coaching call with a couple of clients. I am choosing to take on behavior on my own. And that's really not how these extreme behaviors need to be taken on. They need to be, , handled with a team approach. And that's how I did it in my last building, and I just didn't think about it like that.
I thought we needed to focus more on our tier one, which we did. But I also needed that tier two as well. So I wanna talk today about having a team approach with behavior, because with these extreme behaviors as a principal, you cannot carry it all on your own. I just was telling somebody that when , a teacher calls me with these extreme behaviors and says, oh my gosh, they won't even move or listen for the principal, it's because it's so deep.
These kids [00:07:00] don't care that you're the principal. They don't care that you're coming and telling 'em they need to move and come to the office. There's such a deeper rooted issue that it's more than that, and so. It's not about just you as the leader giving a consequence and fixing the behavior.
It's about getting people who have experience with behavior to support you, to support the student, and to support the teacher because you can't do it alone. And so really, that's why I think it is so important that we take a team approach. And so what I'm going to talk about today is I'm going to give you.
Three steps to creating a team approach for handling behavior. And so I just did this with one situation in my building right before I recorded this. And it made all the difference, right? It made all the difference for me as the principal. I know the teacher felt more supported and more seeing more success with the student.
And so I'm like thinking to myself, I wish I would've done this sooner. And so this is why I wanna talk to you about this. So first of all, our team approach. So [00:08:00] you wanna think about. If you have PBIS, I know some people don't like PBIS, but whatever your behavior supports are, you should have a tier one system and team.
I truly believe there should be a tier one team, so I had that in my building. I had a tier one team. We talk about expectations. We talk about what rewards kids are gonna earn. We talk about consequences. But at the end of the day, I needed. A team that stepped it up even more. That was my tier two three team who could help with these extreme behaviors.
So the first step that you're going to do when putting together a team like this is think about who are the right people for the team. Now I decided to use my MTSS team, which is MTSS for academics attendance, behavior. But the reason I decided to do that is because when I thought of who the people were on the team, I had a special ed teacher who has a behavior background.
So she's very educated in behavior and she's wonderful with the behavior kids in her, , resource classroom. I had my [00:09:00] school psychologist on that team. I had a speech pathologist who is great with behaviors. I had two reading coaches, , who are see all kinds of kids. So I thought they would have some good insight.
And I also had some gen ed teachers who could give that gen ed perspective. So I thought I am going to use my MTSS team now. At my other school I had A-P-B-I-S tier two slash three team and we had a behavior coach. So that was great because she was on the team, our school counselor was on the team.
Our, an intervention specialist who was really good at behavior was on the team. A specialist. It was actually our music teacher was on the team because she got to see the kids in a different setting. And then a gen ed teacher was on the team. And then what we would do was we had that team. And together we would have resources.
So again, I used my MTSS team. You could create A-P-B-I-S team, but have different people on the team with different expertise. So that is step one, is to gather your people, [00:10:00] figure out who those people will be. Step two is to determine a process for how to refer kids to tier two or even tier three.
But I would start with tier two. So this was always a struggle at my last school because we tried to put some concrete things into place, , and we would look at office referrals. And we did have some things in place, but a lot of, because our behaviors looked different, a lot of our office referrals were incidents that happened over the years.
Over the school year, I didn't have typically like one kid doing one thing three times in a week. So we said we looked at frequency of behaviors to determine from office referrals if they would be referred, but the main way that they were referred was the teachers would fill out a form. They would come to the meeting, they would talk about the issue they're dealing , with the student, and we would have that conversation about the student, about, what is going on, what the teacher has tried, and how we can put supports in place, and who is going to support that teacher and the student.
And so that was really helpful. [00:11:00] So what I decided to do in my current building is just do it by referral. It's basically kids that I'm seeing in the office all of the time from classroom referrals. It is teachers who are frustrated with students and who feel like they need something more.
They're referring the kids and we are having conversations at the meeting. Okay, so that is our step two that you really need to think of is how are you going to refer kids to this behavior team? So step one, it's the people on the team. Step two is a way to refer kids, and step three is having very focused meetings.
So when I say having very focused meetings, it is easy to spend 30 to 40 minutes complaining about a student's behavior. So you have to keep it very focused and solution driven, not focusing on the problem. So you wanna give the teacher time to talk about what the problem is, but you also wanna give them time to talk about what they've tried, what could be causing the behaviors to get to that root cause of it.
And talk about the frequency, what they look like, and from there, develop a plan as a [00:12:00] team. So some different things. I've seen One thing we did a lot in my last school was we did a lot of check-in and checkout plans, which is huge with tier two PBIS. So that's a great way to do it. In, , just recently we just revamped the student's behavior plan.
, The teacher had a plan, but we were talking about it wasn't necessarily reteaching the behavior a lot, and it was a lot of writing and just a lot of words on the plan. And so we did it picture focused. , The other thing we talked about that was in our focus meeting was picking two behaviors that we wanna focus on for that student.
And so. Only picking those two behaviors and focusing on those two behaviors. And I think by having these focus meetings, by having teachers and people who are really good with behavior supporting this teacher, it's also a time to teach about how we actually transform behaviors. It's about teaching those expectations.
It's about focusing on one or two behaviors at a time. It's about rewarding those behaviors, , more frequently [00:13:00] so students feel success. And it's easy to sit in a professional development and tell teachers that, but until they're dealing with it with one student and can actually see it play out, it's really not that effective.
So that's the other thing about having a behavior team. Is you're actually giving that teacher who's coming to the meeting, some professional development, professional learning from the people who have more experience with these extreme behaviors in the building. Okay, so these are the three steps to that behavior team.
Step one, you gather your people who are going to be a good fit for the team. Step two, you have a referral process that people follow. And step three, you create very focused meetings. ,.
I have a product called the Team Approach to challenging student behaviors, and it's a toolkit where I have this three step process. I have templates, I have Google Forms, I have the referral sheet. , You can use a PDF copy from Canva and you can edit that, or I have them in Google that you can go through and edit them [00:14:00] and use them.
And I also have a lot of strategies that you can use for addressing different behaviors in the building and then many PD activities you can do with your staff. That's the other piece of this that I've seen a lot is we have to change mindsets around behavior, but we can't just have one or two big trainings.
It's just gotta be these little snapshots of pd, whether it's through staff meetings, just spending some time. But it's really important that we support teachers with these challenging behaviors and do it as a team.
So I hope as you're listening to this episode, you find some strategies that work for you. You start to think about how you can create your own behavior team. Maybe you have one, but you think about ways that you need to tweak it. . Just remember, you can't carry these extreme behaviors on your own.
We're not meant to do that as a principal, but so often we feel like we have to take that on our own because we're the leaders of the building. We're the principles. We should know how to discipline all of these things. , I wanna encourage you to take some time to think about how you can take a team approach to behavior, [00:15:00] how you can use your staff to better support the teachers and students in your building, and to actually help you lead that better.
, I'm also going to link the team approach to challenging student behavior toolkit in the show notes. So if you wanna check that out, it's in there. , I hope you take some of these strategies from this episode, implement them, and really try a team approach for behavior in your building.