As educational leaders, your commitment to nurturing inclusive school environments that value diversity and provide students with a sense of belonging, opportunities for success, and compassionate behavior support will create a profound impact on student growth and development. While many school principals have an inclusive vision, facilitating a schoolwide transition from traditional, often punitive behavior management methods toward inclusive and humanistic approaches can be complex. You likely have staff with many differing beliefs about how to address challenging behavior, which can lead to inconsistent practices, causing confusion and frustration among learners. If you have adopted a standardized behavior support program to create greater consistency, you may notice that the program falls short in nurturing the caring, inclusive, and compassionate practices you’d like to see in your school. 

These are common but not insurmountable challenges! Shifting toward compassionate behavior support necessitates a change in mindset, heartset, and skillset. This article offers practical strategies to help you authentically implement inclusive behavior support for every learner.

Establishing Foundational Understandings

To begin this work, it is important to ensure that you and your school community understand four fundamental concepts about learners, humans, and inclusive support.

  1. Normal is a myth. Help your staff understand that diversity is the norm, and differences in abilities and behaviors are just a part of what makes each learner unique. Support staff to celebrate and value diversity as a strength rather than attempting to fit students into predefined molds. 
  2. Belonging and inclusion are critical. Learners need to feel seen, supported, and included in order to succeed. This means it is important for you as the leader to take a good hard look at whether your school sorts and segregates students based on ability, behavior, or other identity-based factors. You will want to prioritize creating an environment where every individual feels welcomed, accepted, and valued—and fosters a sense of belonging that taps into our innate need for human connection. In fact, schools that focus on providing more inclusive structures and support for all students regularly see a decrease in challenging behaviors. If you need support in identifying and removing barriers to inclusion and belonging, you can use the Inclusive System Change Path we created. It guides you and your trusted leadership team through key milestones, questions, and action steps to increase inclusion for all. (And if you want more detailed support, read our new book, The Way to Inclusion: How Leaders Create Schools Where Every Student Belongs.)
  3. “Bad” behavior is a response to stress. Support your staff to reframe their perspective on challenging behavior by showing them the science behind behavior. “Bad” behavior in our learners often stems from stress, communication needs, and the body’s fight, flight, freeze, or faint response to stress. Keep in mind that our adolescent learners have some of the highest levels of stressors. Help staff to see that students shut down, act out, or are “flight risks” because they do not yet have coping strategies to respond to daily stressors; these behaviors are natural human reactions. See the checklist we created to support your staff in recognizing common daily stressors.
  4. Punishment is not effective. Punishment and zero-tolerance policies only produce negative outcomes for students, such as a mistrust of adults, negative impact on self-worth and self-​esteem, and a lack of opportunity to engage in positive school relationships. They also do not help students understand their behavior, learn new coping skills and strategies, or connect their behaviors to the community or their own feelings of belonging and success. Ultimately, our most vulnerable and marginalized learners are often the ones who are most negatively impacted by traditional punishments and zero-​tolerance policies. 

Once you and your staff begin to commit to these foundational understandings, together you can implement specific strategies and practices to support students more compassionately, effectively, and inclusively.

Effective Practices for Inclusive and Compassionate Support

In this section, we outline several strategies and practices to use with your staff as you move toward more inclusive and compassionate behavior support. We also align each strategy with a practical handout you can download and share. Many more practices and resources are available in our book, From Behaving to Belonging: The Inclusive Art of Supporting Students who Challenge Us, and in our online on-demand course, “Beyond Treats and Timeouts: Supports for Challenging Behavior.”

Star the strengths. Our learners with challenging behavior can spend the majority of their days being told 1) exactly what they’re doing wrong and 2) what they should do instead. When we hyperfocus on fixing a learner or highlight only their deficits, we don’t provide opportunities to nurture their skills and talents and help them shine within the community. Support staff to ensure they carve out time to build positive learner profiles for every student and especially learners with challenging behavior. Starring student strengths can help educators see a learner in a new light, which often helps approach them in more compassionate and caring ways. You can even share an activity we often do with educators called Turning Lead to Gold, in which you use more positive and inclusive language for student descriptors. 

Practices that highlight connection over compliance. Help staff realize that detention, suspension, and public displays of discipline are about compliance. These quick fixes do not produce long-term solutions; they ultimately harm learners, undermine teacher-learner relationships, and get in the way of building inclusive and compassionate communities. This is a “long game,” and you want to help staff consider how they implement hundreds of teaching strategies, actions, and practices in a day that can lead to greater relationships and connection vs. aiming for learner compliance. We recommend brainstorming daily practice ideas with your staff. Here are a few ideas to help you get started: 

  • Make time to listen to learners and encourage them to use their voice and make choices about their learning activities and environment.
  • Use a simple fist-to-five structure to learn how students are feeling about life, about lessons, about anything at all (students who hold up a fist are going to need more support and care that day).
  • Honor diverse ideas, histories, and preferences, and make sure you provide curriculum and materials that function as mirrors to their identities and windows into other identities.

Be a safe harbor. Even during moments of emotional turmoil, educators must serve as a safe harbor for students. It is important to remind staff that our adolescent learners are still learning to cope with stress and have a deep need to belong and feel safe. Encourage staff to model calmness, curiosity, and empathy to guide their learners through moments of distress. Help educators prioritize students’ feelings of safety and acceptance to foster optimal teacher-student relationships. You can support your staff to help students feel seen, safe, soothed, and secure by sharing the “4 S’s for Educators” handout we created.

Reframe misbehavior as stress-behavior. Support your staff to shift their perspective on misbehavior. Recognize it as a response to stressors and barriers in the environment rather than defiance, manipulation, or “bad” behavior. Ensure staff provide consistent, private feedback on expectations and support, and avoid strategies that undermine safety and trust. Support staff to help reduce student stressors (you can share the handout, “Top 10 Ways to Reduce Stressors,” that we created), and teach coping skills to address the root causes of stress-based behavior.

Collaborative Processes for Inclusive Support

Successful implementation of inclusive behavior support requires a commitment to the foundational understandings we highlighted, ongoing implementation of practices that honor student diversity and prioritize relationships, compassion, and learning. But even then, you will still need to support staff to create behavior support plans with students for continued challenging behavior. To that end, we invite you to use what we call a “collaborative success plan.”

Collaborative success plan. This process entails a shift from creating the more traditional Behavior Intervention Plans (BIPs), which are grounded in educator expertise and often focus solely on reducing and replacing challenging behavior. Instead, our process focuses on 1) increasing belonging, success, and joy for a learner, 2) centering learner voice, dreams, and wishes, and 3) including families and other loved ones in designing a success plan. We have detailed this process in our book but provide you with an overview here. 

Step 1: The team providing support gathers with the learner for the creation of the collaborative success plan. 

Step 2: The team identifies learner strengths, interests, dreams, and things that are going well at school.

Step 3: The team discusses the learner’s challenges/behaviors.

Step 4: The team considers the holistic context, involving strengths, skills, needs, family, and history about what may be contributing to the challenges.

Step 5: The team designs ways to increase the learner’s increased sense of belonging and well-being at school while supporting the learner with new skills, strategies, and supports to decrease the difficulties/issues and challenging behavior.

Step 6: The team agrees on action steps, responsible parties, timelines, and success indicators.

The team should plan to meet again to gain momentum around implementation. As a school leader, you want to provide teams with the necessary support to hold ongoing meetings alongside all of their other responsibilities and duties. We have had success using this process with adolescent learners of all backgrounds, abilities, and diverse needs, and it has even served to inform school system visions centered on possibility-thinking, compassion, and inclusion. 

Success Plan for Leaders

Reflecting on your leadership role during this transformation is an important part of the process of creating more inclusive and compassionate behavior support in your school. We encourage you to engage in daily reflection to support your staff with grace and empathy while you work to promote a more compassionate school culture. Here are several questions you might ask yourself before the day begins: 

  • How do I want to show up for staff and students today? 
  • Who on my staff might need extra connection or compassion today?
  • What learners may need extra connection or compassion today?

And throughout the day, as difficult situations arise, we encourage you to ask: What can I learn from this, and how can I use possibility-​thinking instead of problem-thinking? 

As educational leaders, you have the ability and capacity to support your staff and learners to foster inclusive and caring communities grounded in trust and support. We celebrate you, as you work to establish a foundation of inclusion and belonging, support your staff to implement more effective and compassionate practices, and engage in more collaborative behavior support processes with all learners. 

Kate MacLeod, PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at the University of Maine at Farmington and an inclusive education consultant. Julie Causton, PhD, and Kristie Pretti-Frontczak, PhD, are professional partners who lead Inclusive Schooling, an educational company that provides school districts with professional development focused on inclusion and access for all learners. Learn more at inclusiveschooling.com.

References

Causton, J., MacLeod, K., & Pretti-Frontczak, K. (2021). Beyond treats and timeouts: Support for challenging behaviors. Inclusive Schooling. inclusiveschooling.com/beyond-treats-and-timeouts

Causton, J., & Pretti-Frontczak, K. (2020). Checklist of common stressors. Inclusive Schooling. inclusivehandouts.s3.amazonaws.com/General+Handouts+/checklist+of+common+stressors.pdf

Causton, J., & Pretti-Frontczak, K. (2020). 4 s’s for supporting all students. Inclusive Schooling. inclusiveschool.s3.amazonaws.com/4s+of+for+teachers.pdf

Causton, J., MacLeod, K., & Pretti-Frontczak, K. (2023). The inclusive system change path. Inclusive Schooling. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://thewaytoinclusion.s3.amazonaws.com/the+inclusive+systems+change+path.pdf

Causton, J., & Pretti-Frontczak, K. (2021). Top 10 ways to reduce stressors. Inclusive Schooling. inclusivehandouts.s3.amazonaws.com/General+Handouts+/10+ways+to+reduce+stressors.pdf

Causton, J., & Pretti-Frontczak, K. (2020). Turning lead into gold. Inclusive Schooling. inclusiveschooling.com/leadtogold