Problem Behavior: Openly challenges teachers and has explosive confrontations with peers
Probable functions: Social avoidance or Task Avoidance
Common Mistakes Made by Teachers:
- Engaging in a power struggle with the student
o Power struggles are no-win situations for teachers. The other students become less comfortable in the classroom when teachers engage in these confrontations with students and the pufferfish usually continues to escalate to the point of daring punishment.
o Sometimes teachers end up acting in ways that try to get the rest of the students to side with them against the puffer. While perhaps instinctive, this response is corrosive to the class culture.
- Becoming emotionally affected by the student’s behavior
o Taking the behavior of the pufferfish personally is a natural response, but is counter to all that we know about the functional relationship between behavior and the environment. The behavior likely has very little to do with the teacher or peers and is instead motivated by the student’s own needs.
o Raising your voice, becoming visibly upset, and arguing with the student are likely to intensify the behaviors of the pufferfish, which are often motivated by a desire to avoid social interaction. Also, emotional responses by teachers lead to communicating in threats that we are unwilling or unable to carry out.
- Interrupting the upset student
o Often motivated by frustrations with others, our tendency to interrupt defiant behavior often exacerbates the pufferfish’s feelings of unfair treatment
o Giving a task to an emotionally escalated student very rarely leads to compliance and very often leads to a laundry list of ineffective commands.
Communication Strategies:
- Use intentional verbal communication that minimizes the pufferfish’s need to defend herself. Use paraphrasing and restatement of the student’s feelings and perspectives. Invite the student to clarify where you misunderstood or mischaracterized her viewpoint.
- Use “I” messages to lower the triggering potential of corrections. For example, saying “You are disrupting the class” could better be expressed in terms like, “I need for everyone to be able to concentrate and therefore I need you to raise your hand to speak.” It keeps the emphasis on the task- and team-orientation of the classroom and couches the correction in language that is less threatening because it refers to the thoughts, opinions, and needs of the teacher.
Other Ideas:
- Compliance momentum: A trick that can be very effective particularly with younger children or students with developmental delays is to rehearse compliance by giving the student a number of requests/commands with which the student is likely to easily comply before giving a less desirable request/command.
- Predetermine behavior consequences with the student. Pufferfishes are notorious for complaining about unfair treatment. By clearly outlining the consequences in advance of the behavior, the student is less likely to use complaint of mistreatment as rationale for opposition. Additionally by deciding on consequences ahead of time, the teacher avoids the challenge of being fair in the proverbial “heat of the moment.”
- Setting limits: Another tip related to I-centered messages is to communicate in terms of controlling the one person’s behavior that you actually CAN control…your own! Speak to the pufferfish in terms of your own behavior and set limits about what you will or will not do. For example, instead of saying “Quit yelling in this class!” the teacher might say, “I choose to listen to people who talk to me with respect.” This technique can only work if you have made sure that you can follow-through with your behavioral standard.
