"Fabulous, absolutely fabulous movie! I moved my family out of Newton after 10 years because there were so many students like Randy and many teachers who labeled instead of connecting to reach and teach. And my three kids are better for it. I have shared your movie with many of my friends. I just had to say THANK YOU and well done."

Q: Why did you not want Mr. B. the Behavioral Specialist to work with Randy any more?

A: Understand that in a short movie I can't give all the details of a conversation. While Mr. B was in fact the school's expert on behavior, he was very adverse to "having" to work with Randy another school year! That is a lot of resistance to keep subjecting a student to and expect different results. It wasn't a matter of not wanting him to work with Randy, it was an issue of trying something different. It was the beginning of the school year - a great time to try a new approach.

If I could just get one thing across to make a real, significant, long-lasting difference in education it would be this: You simply can't have an attitude and keep it a secret. If you don't find something to like and connect with student about, you will not teach or help that student successfully.

Q: Why not insist that Randy's parents have more involvement?

A: This school was in a highly transient oil and soda ash mining community, and if you wanted to find some parents, you needed to go to the local bars to do so. What that meant for me as a teacher, was that I needed to be 100% effective in my classroom management and not be dependent on what would or would not happen to a student on the home front. I connected with every parent that I'd run into around town and at school functions, with the intention that they would experience me as a safe and caring advocate for their child and family.

Parents who won't come to parent-teacher conferences generally did not have a good school experience themselves. The generational legacy of pain continues unless, or until, someone connects in ways that heal the past through helping their children have the success that they didn't.

This community was highly volatile. The first summer I moved in, I could hear bar fights echoing from downtown in the middle of the night every weekend. It was a time when (thirty years ago), in that state, you could drive up to a liquor store's Take Out window and get a "whiskey sour to go" - just like any fast food place. You read that right. You could "drive off" with a plastic glass of booze to sip on while you were driving! An alarming percentage of the students in this town were either depressed and lethargic or angry and defiant, daring teachers to try to teach them ... and teach them I did!

Q: Why I didn't intervene or discipline Randy when he crashed over the bookcase?

A: First of all, let me say that I had informed the class that in order for Operation Concentration to be successful, Randy's behaviors could possibly escalate before they fizzled out and things would get much, much better. That's why I told them they could look to me to intervene if need be.

When Randy started shaking the book case, I remember thinking, "What's the worst that can happen if the book case crashes down?" Instantly I determined that no one was close enough to be hurt, and that the books could be picked up, so I did not intervene. Simple.

I had a deep gut feeling that this was a pivotal, defining moment in charting a new course, not only for Randy, but for the entire social-emotional well-being of this class. So I leaned into what was happening, along with the entire class, and instead of fearing it, we all remained neutral, with the "end in mind" of eventually getting to a more peaceful existence with Randy.

By this point in my teaching career, I had my Masters in Educational Psychology, Counseling and Development. I understood that Randy was disturbed because he was "addicted" to negative feedback. If you are going to break through an addiction, you simply must do something different.

His entire grade school experiences were about getting sent to the Principal's or Behavioral Specialist's office for some form of expulsion, lecture and/or exclusion from others as a form of punishment every time he needed an "attention fix." So essentially, what did he still get out of the deal? Negative Attention! In trying to "teach him a lesson" about just how bad and disturbed he and his behaviors were, school officials were actually teaching him to keep doing what he was doing because at least he got attention!

As you can read in my book, Make A Difference with the Power of Connection, attention is a necessary component to life for everyone. Don't make the "need for attention" bad or wrong. GIVE IT! But give it in affirmative ways that fill a cup ...and keeps it full.

If you want behaviors to improve, you must not do what's always been done. Instead, lean into the transformational moment when everything seems to be going wrong, stay neutral, ask questions that allow for individual ownership, and then and only then will you arrive at the "teachable moment" when the two of you can begin exploring replacement behaviors - together.

Q: Doesn't ignoring bad behavior actually give the student permission to continue to do it?

A: First of all, Operation Concentration is actually the exact opposite of ignoring.

Ignoring a student who is chronically emotionally disturbed is simply not being courageous enough to BE with what is happening and leaning into the answers the behavior is providing you. My instructions to the students were significant: do something different than they'd ever done before when Randy was in need of attention, IE: remain neutral and focused while suspending judgment.

The attitudinal energy around this kid - coming at him from all sides - was highly "disturbing!" His entire community looked at him with fear, disdain, criticism, judgment, total detachment or lack of acknowledgment of him as someone who mattered.

Schools that have implemented school-wide Positive Behavioral Support are using the fundamental strategies for "seeing" what's really going on verses "reacting negatively" to chronic, disruptive behaviors. The goal is to build in replacement behaviors, once the motivation for the negative behavior is understood. The reported success for these programs is up to 66% positive improvement in behaviors. So why not 90% or more?

It's called a CLUE when you see a child's disturbing behaviors erupting in one classroom environment but not in another. One or two things are still in play: the teacher has an underlying attitude that has not been addressed yet, and/or the students in that classroom are being allowed to be attitudinally nasty to their fellow classmate without teacher intervention. What is still needed is safe classroom social/emotional community building development.

To accomplish this, I am inviting you to USE my Make A Difference in 9 Weeks Activities. Any 9-Weeks will do. You can Download it for FREE today. Take your faculty and staff through this exercise and you will see amazing things begin to happen throughout your entire school. Go to: makeadifference.com/Activities

You may be thinking: "Well, what about the parents who are not helping at all with what's happening to this kid at home or supporting what we are doing here at school?"

AS you get acquainted with, and use the simple strategies in my book and activities with the students, you will begin to engage these parents in ways that WILL create a synergistic ripple effect.

Q: Weren't you afraid of Randy's Behavior Escalating and getting far worse?

A: What I knew about "anger" that allowed me to lean into what was happening and not fear or react forcefully to Randy's behavior, is that anger is an effect of one or all of these three issues:

1) Emotional State of Fear of Being Hurt. Anger can be triggered from a perception that things are heading to a place where something harmful is going to happen: past tense, present tense or future.

2) Emotional State of Insecurity. Being insecure can trigger anger. Generally insecurity comes from your perceptions about yourself and your ability to be of value to the world.

3) Emotional State of Overwhelm. Not being able to say no for fear of disapproval, abandonment, guilt, worthiness. Overwhelm can also be a result of caring too much about succeeding, being perfect, intensely impassioned about a cause, taking on too much, worrying too much about what others may think, etc.

Think of anger this way: it's like blowing up a balloon with a lot of hot air. You can blow and blow and blow and eventually the balloon will pop. Or you can blow it up, and then release it. Regardless, at some point, the air will come out and the balloon will be flat again.

Here is a visualization to help you understand the physics of anger:
See yourself really angry about someone.
Now see this anger getting bigger and bigger.
See this anger getting as big as the room you are in.
See this anger getting as big as the building you are in.
See this anger getting as big as the town you are in.
See this anger getting as big as the county you are in.
See this anger getting as big as the state you are in.
See this anger getting as big as the country you are in.
See this anger getting as big as the continent you are in.
See this anger getting as big as the world.
See this anger getting as big as the entire universe and beyond into the next galaxy.


Q: What happened to your anger?

A: It dissipated. It cannot not dissipate!

That's the quantum mechanics of it.

So ... if you don't push back and resist someone's anger, it actually ends sooner rather than later.

When you have a toddler who is having a temper tantrum and you take away his toy to punish him for the tantrum, how long does the tantrum last? Can be up to 30 minutes or more!

But, if you simply acknowledge compassionately what is upsetting the toddler that is making him mad, mad, mad ... the tantrum dissipates in 30 seconds or less 90% of the time!

Randy's chronic emotionally disturbing behavior dissipated completely over the next 9 weeks, simply because I taught the class how to get out of their "attitudinal" - and inflammatory reactions and aversions to their classmate. How to remain focused and neutral to wean him off negative attention, replacing it with affirmative acknowledgment and connection.

What worked to help Randy, also helped the entire class.

R. Buckminster Fuller said it best ...

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try to change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete."

I liken the academic and positive behavioral solutions we seek to Ockham's razor; which is the idea that in trying to understand something, getting unnecessary information out of the way is the fastest way to the solution. It is the philosophical or scientific principle that states: the best solution is the simplest.

Make A Difference with the Power of Connection is an excellent read for all educators who - at this time of the school year - need a shot of inspiration and simple, immediately applicable strategies without spending days mired in text and extensive program implementation and processes.

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