What strategies can educators implement to prevent or address challenging behaviors?

Transcript: Kathleen Lane, PhD

Oftentimes, I think, to some students in school, maybe even a lot of students in school, they feel like everything is just like lockstep. It’s very a didactic experience. I come in and somebody with a really big desk is telling me what to do all day long. And a lot of students want to push back. Maybe I would have done that normally, but I don’t want to do it because you just told me I had to kind of a thing. So offering choices is a way of gaining momentum to help students participate instructionally by allowing them to have an opportunity to choose. And this is actually really important to building their self-determined behavior and helping to motivate them. And when I talk about choice, choice is not like, “Hey, do you feel like working today?” Instead, it’s something like, “There’s three assignments that we’ve got to do today.” And after you’ve checked for understanding to make sure they know what to do, then they get to choose which one to do first. Or it might be kids walk into a classroom, there’s two journal prompts, they can pick one to write on. Or it might be there’s a closing activity and you have five math problems on the board, and you tell students, “Pick any three that you’d like to do.” And then you let that student choose and then whatever they choose, that is what they do. And sometimes I’ve seen students try to do a choice in the form of a group where the teacher says the class vote on the one you want to do. But that’s not the same as instructional choice for all, cause the downside of trying it as a group is that some students are going to get access to what they want to do in the first place, and other students are going to have to go with whatever the majority rule was, so they didn’t get their choice. So instead, you want to make sure that each student has the opportunity to pick whatever their first choice is. So we need to think carefully about how we present those choices. For example, some students may have huge test anxiety and they don’t know what to do. And so you might offer them a choice when it comes time to take a test. “Would you like to do half this test on paper? Would you like to do the other half on the computer?” So we can even build in choices to assessment situations as well. Again, it’s just a way to give students this feeling of autonomy and independence and let them know that the choices they’re making influences their day. It can be as simple as, “Would you like to use crayons or would you like to use sparkly markers?”

In addition, you can oftentimes allow students to do more of what you need them to do if you give them an option on how to show what they know. You might offer choices by doing things like, “We’re going to have a picture and we’re going to have two sentences to describe that picture. Which would you like to do first? Draw the picture or write the words?”

So in brief, choice making is something that can be embedded all throughout the day. It can be done in starter activities during independent time. It can be a way for kids to show what they know. But the idea is that choices are presented. You have clarity on what those objectives are, what you’re hoping to learn from each of those activities that might get selected. And then when the student makes their choice, they’re given that opportunity to engage in what they themselves chose.