5 Tips for Preventing and Managing Chronic and Dangerous Behavior in Schools

At PCMA, we’ve spent more than two decades helping teachers, schools, and districts drastically reduce behavioral crises.?Often times these crises were occurring as the result of 5 minor but common errors that were usually easily fixed. If you want to find out if your school or district is making these same errors, keep reading.

Behavioral Challenges

For many, reducing chronic behavioral challenges behavior in a school or district may seem like an insurmountable challenge.?When it is perceived as such, it can have a negative impact on the performance and morale of students, staff, faculty, and administrators.?Unfortunately, all too often well-meaning district or school leaders end up focusing on engaging in “quick fixes” like de-escalation strategies that simply Band-Aid the situation.?While this might provide temporary relief, it usually doesn’t get to the root cause of the problem.?As a result, the same issue raises its ugly head in the future, and sometimes it's even worse.?This is never more evident than when it comes to behavioral crises like continuous aggression, self-injurious behavior, or high-magnitude disruption that are increasingly occurring across our schools. But it doesn’t have to be this way.?Your school can have an environment characterized by happy and successful students, staff, faculty, and administrators—one where behavioral crisis is minimal or even non-existent. ???

Here are 5 things to be on the lookout for that will actually create more crisis behavior!

Training

First, let’s look at the 1st issue, training. If staff is receiving “training” in crisis management that only requires a couple of repetitions of crisis procedures in order to pass the course, you are probably seeing increased levels of dangerous behavior.?You know, we really wish that teaching something new only required telling people what to do, modeling it, and then having them practice it a few times and it would stick. ?Training would be so much easier! But that is NOT the way learning works.?If your school or district has brought a crisis management system in that trains like this, people will forget what they learned inside of a week.?This means good people end up doing the wrong thing when a crisis happens. The result: more behavior incidents, more injury, more litigation, more issues with morale and retention, and ultimately a negative impact on student achievement.?Remember, when a crisis occurs, people are being asked to manage really difficult problems that require high levels of training.?We want to make sure these folks are truly professionals in the area of crisis management. This requires professional training, not "sit and gets" that require 3-5 reps!

Feedback

Now let’s take a look at issue # 2, feedback.?If the crisis management procedures people are being trained in do not have immediate feedback loops built in, then there is a very good chance that well-meaning people are inadvertently increasing crises.?Listen, all learning requires feedback.?Human beings have evolved to learn from feedback.?If your crisis management system does not have immediate feedback loops built into the procedures, students are being robbed of the opportunity to learn and change their own behavior; in addition, practitioners are being simultaneously robbed of the ability to learn and change their own procedures to meet the needs of the student. When a student is restrained, even for a minute, and the adults do not respond almost immediately to changes in the student’s behavior, it often increases the very crisis behaviors trying to be reduced.?Oh, and let’s not even get into the negative impact it has on the relationship between the staff and the student.

Prevention

Issue #3: You probably know people who are really good at de-escalation.?In fact, most crisis management programs focus their curriculum on de-escalation over prevention.?But providing the heaviest focus in this area makes no sense. If students are escalating, that means there is already a breakdown somewhere.?That’s like waiting for your car to start making all sorts of noises before changing the oil.?The goal should be to prevent escalation from occurring in the first place.?For example, if there aren’t clear expectations along with routines and procedures established for both students AND staff, there is a good chance this increases behavior problems, including crisis behavior.?Establishing expectations along with routines and behaviors for all is a simple yet powerful prevention strategy.

Criteria

Now let’s talk about the 4th issue, the criteria for restraints.?If there are not very precise criteria to inform staff when to engage in some sort of crisis intervention, this can lead to:

• Overuse of restraints
• Underuse of restraints
• Staff being too quick to use restraints,
• Staff being too late to use restraints

And all of the above have the potential to compromise safety for both the students and staff. Not having precise criteria would be like there being no speed limit. As a result, one person may drive too slow in a given area, and another person too fast. In both cases, this can inadvertently create safety issues.?Cops wouldn’t know when to pull over who.?And if a cop pulled either person over and gave them a ticket, they would probably quickly escalate.?I know I would! This would likely decrease the likelihood of cops pulling people over, thus increasing safety issues.

Trainers

Finally, for issue #5, let’s look at the retraining of those who end up being trainers in crisis management.?If the crisis management agency only requires the trainers to recertify less than every year, this can lead to a number of problems, especially if they weren’t trained to fluency to begin with! For example, if they are teaching one procedure wrong, that could mean hundreds of people are implementing the procedure incorrectly with who knows how many students. Essentially, the safety of the students and staff are compromised exponentially.

Let PCMA Help

Listen, if even one of these 5 issues is occurring within your school or district, you can be certain the safety of both students and staff is being compromised.?We at the professional crisis management association have helped school personnel systematically fix all of these errors in a way that results in drastic reductions in crisis behavior while at the same time improving the climate and culture.?If you want to learn The Safest, Most Effective, and Humane Crisis Management Solution in the world for reducing crises and making a positive difference, check out Professional Crisis Management at crisisintervention.com

If you'd like more content related to improving outcomes in schools, be sure to check out and subcribe to the Crisis in Education Podcast!