it's an art, not a science

i work in a preschool special education classroom, and dealing with undesirable behaviors is pretty constant. kids not following directions, not staying with the group, not being safe, difficulty sharing, yelling, grabbing, knocking over towers, and some hitting--all in a day's work. of course most of the time our students are just wonderful and adorable. during the past two months, however, one of our students developed some pretty severe aggression toward the other kids. hitting, throwing hard and heavy objects, poking, kicking, pinching, making scary faces and sounds--up to 30 times an hour. his primary teachers and i came together as a team and devised a plan for what we decided were attention seeking behaviors: completely ignore all the negative behaviors, heavily praise the good ones. this did not fly with some of the assistant teachers, who thought it would be impossible to ignore the bad behaviors,and did not feel comfortable refraining from saying no and telling our student he was doing things wrong. but the plan was if he hit someone we would attend to the hittee. if he was about to hurl a block at someone we would just take the block from his hand with a neutral expression and move right on. this involved a lot of creative defense and comforting of the students while simultaneously trying to create lots of opportunities for our little aggressor to get positive attention. we had tried giving him positive attention before but not ignoring the negative stuff.

as these things go, the bad behaviors escalated for a while as our little guy tried more and more desperately to get attention. for the past two weeks there were a lot of crying kids, ice paks, and some serious skeptics on staff saying that this would not work, things were getting worse, we should not keep ignoring bad behaviors, this was bad teaching. it is hard to work with people who don't have patience. it is also hard to hear these doubting voices when you are trying hard to implement a plan that may or may not work.

however, the past two weeks things have been much better. some of the kids that our aggressive little guy was targeting the most have, as he probably wanted them to be all along, become his friends. instead of screaming and crying in fear a few of our more passive and scared kids have become noticeably more confident and assertive as they have had so much practice defending themselves. it is kind of amazing and heartwarming to see ( as i did today) a tiny four-year-old who would burst into tears at the mention of the aggressive kid's name actively seek him out on the playground, and take his hand, and lead him away saying firmly "you are my friend."