Dealing with Dangerous Behavior in the Classroom with Amy Murphy and Brian Van Brunt
School safety and crisis intervention experts Amy Murphy and Brian Van Brunt discuss techniques for classroom crisis de-escalation with host Scott Lee. Amy and Brian recommend a research-based three-pronged approach to preventing or mitigating crisis situations in a classroom setting: clarifying norms for a safe climate, de-escalation, and teamwork.
Crisis situations in the classroom often times cannot be avoided, but educators can make choices that can help de-escalate or escalate the situation. Understanding the nature of a crisis and the relationship a teacher develops with a student can have a profound impact on the outcome of a crisis or dangerous situation. This first episode of a two-part series provides valuable insight into how teachers can create a safe and healthy classroom environment.
Links
The Invisible Tapestry article by Kuh and Whitt- mentioned by Amy Murphy
Background information on Motivational Interviewing (Milner and Rollnick)-mentioned by Brian Van Brunt
Stages of Change model (Prochaska and DiClemente)-mentioned by Brian Van Brunt
Albert Ellis Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Institute-mentioned by Brian Van Brunt
Transcript
Scott Lee 0:02
Greetings friends and colleagues. Welcome to The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast, the professional educator's thought partner, a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. I am Scott Lee. Today we talk about school safety and de-escalating disruptive students with Dr. Amy Murphy and Dr. Brian Van Brunt, who have co-authored "Addressing Dangerous Behavior in the Classroom" in the September 2018 edition of Educational Leadership and the book, Uprooting Sexual Violence in Higher Education. Amy Murphy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Angelo State University. She was formerly the Dean of Students at Texas Tech University, and has more than 20 years of student affairs administrative experiences, including work related to behavioral intervention, crisis response, prevention, and wellness. She co-authored A Staff Guide to Addressing Disruptive and Dangerous Behavior on Campus. Her research includes the joint development of the ERIS: Extremist Risk Intervention Scale, as well as other tools and resources for behavioral intervention teams in schools and universities. She has authored more than 10 different book chapters and several peer reviewed journal articles on related topics. Amy is past president of the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association, and past managing editor for the Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention. She is a member of the advisory team for the International Alliance for Care and Threat Teams. Brian Van Brunt is the Assistant Deputy Director for training at Secure Community Network. Formerly the president of the National Association for Behavioral Intervention and Threat Assessment. Brian has provided consulting services to schools, colleges and universities across the country and abroad on a variety of topics related to student mental health, counseling, campus violence, and behavioral intervention. Brian has taught at a number of universities and colleges offering classes in counseling theory, ethics, program evaluation, statistics, and sociology. He has served as the director of counseling at New England College and Western Kentucky University. In addition to authoring several books, he has published numerous articles and academic peer reviewed journals and practice based publications. He also recently published his first novel Wolf Howling with two more in the series coming soon. First off, I'd like to thank you both for joining us today on the thoughtful Teacher Podcast. We'll start with Amy and then Brian, if you can follow if you can tell us just a little bit about your background, or each of your backgrounds in education and how you became interested in dangerous and unsafe behavior in schools.
Amy Murphy 3:17
Hi, Scott. Glad to be here. And prior to being a faculty member here at Angelo State University, I was the dean of students at Texas Tech University. And in that role, I responded to a wide array of crisis and incidents involving students safety and wellness. And I also chaired our university care team or Behavioral Intervention Team. In during that time period, I met Brian and his work. And I really learned the value of planning and training and a collaborative approach to these types of situations. And I was strengthened in my role by these different perspectives of those I worked with, whether it be law enforcement or mental health professionals or disability services. And so I started to train with Brian and his colleagues related to the work of these multidisciplinary care or big teams. And I found that I felt so much more prepared and capable of responding to these incidents without preparation. And so as I moved here into a faculty role, I had this opportunity to learn from my K 12 colleagues in the College of Education here at Angelo State University. And I saw that there was so much that these two educational worlds could learn from one another. There are these things K 12. Schools do really well related to school climate and safety. And there's some things post secondary institutions are more experienced in doing and so that is what brings me here today.
Scott Lee 4:39
And what about you, Brian?
Brian Van Brunt 4:41
Yeah, so I was running a counseling center. We ran one up in New Hampshire and then over in Kentucky. So occasionally, here's some yells for me. And oftentimes, we'd be asked to give talks as a counseling center director on different topics and one of them quite frequently, was around managing and dealing with probably slightly more level term students who cause problems in the classroom. And we would do those programs. And as, as many times as Amy knows, I do these programs, I'm always looking at punching it up a bit, doing them a little better, and started to realize that, you know, we really should think about the research base behind this a little bit more so put together a book with a colleague of mine called the Faculty Guide to Disruptive and Dangerous Behavior. And then a couple years later was able to write another guide with Amy a staff guide to dealing with disruptive and dangerous behaviors, I will let you in on a little secret our hope was, this could be a cut and paste job for a second book. And of course, that went out the window with the first chapter. So we rewrote really the entire guide, with an aim at the variety of staff who also find themselves in this challenging area managing students who are in crisis. And this is everything I'm sure we'll talk about this from mental health crises, or crisis, I however, want to define it all the way through financial issues, certainly in the COVID space right now, we're seeing a lot of increase in stress and anxiety, uncertainty, fear, a lot of existential crises about the future. And, you know, quite frankly, I'm gonna get hopefully dive into this as well, that it really is a two, it's kind of like a tango, right? Like, it's not just the students that need to be managed. And I'll say this carefully. Sometimes it's how the faculty and the staff and the managers, if you will, approach the students that either escalate or deescalate, those particular scenarios. So a lot of our work is also around, almost setting the table, if you will, if we use an analogy, to get the faculty into the right headspace to approach the problem from equanimity, this perspective. So that's a little bit about where we came from, and maybe a bit of a prophetic take on where we're headed.
Scott Lee 7:03
We definitely are gonna go. Right. Right. They're here in just a minute. One of the things before we get to the table, that you're the table, you're talking about setting, do you find? You know, I don't know who wants to start out with this, either one of you can jump in. But do you find that many schools and school districts focus too much on security, rather than a larger vision of safety?
Amy Murphy 7:31
Well, I would say that, first, let's just acknowledge that school personnel are critically concerned about school safety issues, right. And I think that they work in a multifaceted way to prevent and respond and manage these types of concerns. I do think that there are some areas that receive a great deal of visibility in school efforts, and that they can talk about more than others. You know, our school communities are often very aware when we do facility upgrades related to safety. And more often than not, you know, these efforts relate to keeping people out or locking ourselves in. And the other area I think we hear a great deal about is a response to events, you know, how schools plan to communicate, and notify in the case of an incident or how quick the police responses to incidents. And so school cert safety does require that multifaceted approach. But I think what we are less transparent about and less communicative about are our efforts to prevent incidents with individual students in our classrooms and in our schools. And so to answer your question, and then Brian, I hope you'll jump in. I think it's less about institutions focusing on one aspect of school safety and more about lifting the veil, in some ways on what is occurring in the school environment related to promoting safety in our classroom environments related to reporting incidents of concern in providing these really caring and equitable interventions for students when concerns are raised. Brian?
Brian Van Brunt 8:59
Yeah, no, for sure. And that's kind of where I drifted as well, in my thinking on it that I, it's always fun when we take the question and just pivot right away. We're like three minutes in, but we're gonna do it. Like I think safety and security concerns are fair, I think Amy covered that, well, I'd probably look a little bit more based on my expertise and background on the the difference between theory and application, that I think there's a lot of times where there's some great theory teaching, and I know, Scott, we talked a little bit about SEL and social emotional learning. And that that, to me, is just such a wonderful theory that really undergirds a lot of what's behind the disruptive and dangerous behavior that we see in the classroom. It's understanding those external factors like things like poverty, privilege, challenges within the home, domestic violence, all of the things that find their way into the classroom. So I think there's even in the teaching of SEL I think there's a piece of this too, with the K through 12 teachers who see this as Yes, yes, yes, this is a good idea. Then yes, yes, yes, this is fine. But this child hasn't done laundry in three days and as being teased and bullied or this all sounds great. And yes, they should go see a therapist to work on these problems, but they're actively out of their seat, you know, 1500 times an hour. So I think with the teachers and the theory piece, they appreciate it. And I think it's, it's really important because we know theory, and preparedness really is the way to win this war, and not just the battle. The part that I get into is also trying to give a little bit of that practical guidance to them as well, because I do feel like they're up to their armpits and alligators, sometimes with the challenges that are in front of them. And I think we're remiss not addressing both. So I think we try to address how can we prepare better, but if we err, just on that side, I think we lose the audience because they feel like, Well, geez, they don't really get what's going on. And if we just focus on the technique part, like how to take someone who is escalating and all the different techniques to calm them down, and to build bridges and look for hooks and barbs, and, you know, we can give them the techniques to take someone who's already in crisis, to a calm point. But then we're just kind of putting out fires, right? We're running around fixing the problem. So that's what I really liked when Amy and I wrote the article, which I think you came across that it really blended in our "three prong approach", and Amy's just not a fan of the "prong" language. But the idea that there's three things right, we start with the idea of preparing beforehand for the classroom. And that's really that theory piece, how to manage and apply those techniques when the theory doesn't quite hold up. And we're dealing with the crisis. And then we move finally to the power of referral, that we're kind of it takes a village, it's not just an individual.
Scott Lee 11:47
Right? And yeah, and let's, let's talk about the article from Education Leadership. You all wrote an article in Education Leadership in May of 2018, or those people who might not be familiar with Education Leadership, there's almost always a theme when several articles, and that one was titled "Classroom Management Reimagined". And in that article, you discuss a "three pronged approach" to dealing with dangerous behaviors, why focus on school climate, and de escalation and teamwork? Why why that? And I don't know who wants to start this? I guess, Brian, you brought it up?
Brian Van Brunt 12:26
I'll take
Scott Lee 12:27
Fire away.
Brian Van Brunt 12:28
Absolutely. I mean, I think that the beginning part, right, what we found, and this was through both, I think the experience, Amy had issue mentioned being at Texas Tech and a really big environment with lots of different areas and questions that would come up, I worked at a number of institutions as well, where the crisis management piece came up frequently. And what I think both of us found was the teachers almost like how positive psychology was founded, we kind of studied the people who were living well, to better understand what they were doing. And I don't know that we went out there and studied them all, individually. But we started to notice what makes a successful teacher what makes us successful person who can manage crisis, and there were some common traits. And that's where we started to think. Let's identify these common traits. And let's start there, even though everyone in our presentations and our talks and who read our books want like answers like, how do we fix this? What do I do when this happens? No one loves long discussions about prevention. But you know, some of the common traits we found on the front end, were things like teachers who were managing classrooms, well, were genuine, they were able to set boundaries, they were able to have a sense of empathy for their students experience they gave respect to get respect that didn't always expect that first. But they demonstrated through a parallel process, this ability to teach their students that kind of respect and communication that they were looking for. And I'll be respectful to Amy and not just keep going and take all the good stuff right off the bat, and let her kind of grab some of this too. So I'll pass over.
Amy Murphy 14:06
I think in addition to that, we were interested in helping teachers see themselves as a part of this larger system related to school safety and school wellness. And when you look across, you know, incidents of school shootings and school violence, you often see this discussion there about information silos. You know, in higher education, this might mean that a faculty member or a housing staff member, a Student Life staff member, you know, they all have information and interactions with a student, but they weren't really shared up to a central place. Nobody was looking at the big picture of what was occurring with the student. We didn't we might not see ourselves as a part of this larger system related to the prevention of concerning behaviors and and incidents and in the three prong approach that we described in the article it's created to really connect together what is occurring in individual classrooms and school settings to the larger school. Will violence effort and to give teachers as Brian said, a really straightforward approach to creating what I keep calling kind of a protective bubble. In some ways around the classroom. I've always been really fascinated by how critical climate efforts are. And there's this article that I always think back to from graduate school, and it's by George Kuh and Elizabeth Whitt they called school climate, "the invisible tapestry", I always refer to this because I appreciate this image of how our classroom expectations and these norms that we weave in how that communicates to our communities about belonging, and about respect and about what matters in our school environment. And so any effort, as Brian said, related to school safety and school, wellness really has to start there. And then that second prong of helping teachers with these very basic crisis, de escalation skills should incidents start to occur. And then the last prong, the third prong, helping teachers understand the importance of connecting that information that they have about what is occurring in the classroom to a centralized team in order to see the bigger picture of what's occurring with the student, whether that be from a discipline perspective, from counseling from a school resource officer, and having that group be able to have an objective and a research base way to consider what's occurring with the student and how and determine how to best support and intervene with the student.
Brian Van Brunt 16:22
That middle prong, too Amy that I think is it was kind of a passion for both of us really teaching some of those practical skills. And I know for me, and I think for you, too, it was taking some of the things that we've learned in graduate school and doctoral programs and common practice and books that we've read, and really distilling it down to the core concepts. So whether it was Stephen Covey's Habits of Highly Effective People, whether it was motivational interviewing techniques by Miller and Rollnick, or Prochaska and DiClemente's work. For us, all of these approaches, and for me, especially like the counseling approach is teaching people, reality therapy concepts, or Albert Ellis's work on the ABCs are his Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, something as simple as understanding, for example, that an activating event, the bad things that happen around us are uncontrollable, so a teacher or is going to have a student who talks out of turn and causes us a problem. If we see that activating event, then occurring and then move to our belief about it. Our belief then feeds into a consequence, so A activating event, B, belief, C consequence. So we can control our beliefs. So if we basically work ourselves up to say, "the students disrespecting me, they're not caring about who I am as a person, they're not prepared or taking advantage, I need to set limits" and they get angry, that often leads to a negative consequence, they escalate the situation. If they're able to have some empathy and understanding for where that student might be coming from, to realize that they're probably not the problem, that it's more likely a problem they've brought with them into the classroom, those beliefs actually lead to more positive consequences. So I'd say there's probably about a dozen of those concepts, whether they're building a bridge of connection, to really look at the strength of connection between, say, a teacher and a classroom and the individual students, different techniques around I mentioned hooks and barb's you know, finding things that pull us closer in a crisis to a person that helps the individual feel calm and understood. You know, we like to take advice and feel persuaded by people that are resonating with us on that same level. Same thing with barbs, when we find a hotspot, or something that escalates or aggravates, we want to try to avoid those, obviously, there's times where we have to set limits, but identifying the things that set the student off, or escalate them, those can be things that we're aware of, as well. So that's kind of the middle ground of it, we want to prepare, talk about some of those practical skills. And as Amy said, the importance of referral. I usually make my last reference here with Sawyer, about the long con, [from the tv show "Lost"] you know, we're not trying to con anybody, but the idea here is that we can't have crisis management, be a one and done proposition. So we have to think about the long game here, that it's not just about dealing with the one problem in front of us, but really getting that up to the Behavioral Intervention Team, the care team commonly in K through 12. They call them the PBIS teams or every school does this a little differently. The commonality there is they're looking at the long version of this issue and trying to address it through a systemic and multifaceted multi department approach, you know, culturally competent approach to dealing with the problem getting out in front of it.
Scott Lee 19:49
It is so interesting. I'm going to take a little bit of a segue here just because you reminded me of something that I saw in a school recently I was doing some consulting work and another consultant and I observe a situation in the hallway. And it becomes very clear that the teacher is the one who is when you were talking about beliefs, it was very clear that the teacher's belief was that the student intentionally was acting out to prevent the teacher from doing her job. And that punishing the student would somehow learn a new skill by being punished. Even though it was clear to those of us observing that the student's actions were based on events outside the classroom. As a result, the teacher actually escalated instead of de escalating. And this other person was very frustrated, because his role was to help teachers intervene in a calm and empathetic manner. And he had worked specifically with this teacher, I keep thinking about that and thinking about teachers beliefs. I was wondering, and this is for both of you. How do you deal with pushback from teachers, especially on situations about de escalation? I often hear complaints from teachers about de escalation, either we're not trained or we don't have time. But you brought up a third thing, which is, some teachers don't believe, and I'm wondering if you all can talk about more specifically about what it is you do more work with teachers on that de escalation prong? Because I think that that's an area where teachers oftentimes are, have less confidence.
Amy Murphy 21:48
Brian, you probably remember this from some of our presentations that we would often start right by asking about and talking about the elephant in the room. And that often the audience and many times teachers would think that we're talking about maybe the students, right, and student behaviors. And really, as we drill down, the elephant in the room is each of us. Right? The beliefs that we bring with us are, how we're feeling that day. And having that awareness of mind of our beliefs and of our emotions, before we ever enter that classroom. And before we enter into any situation. And so I always found that that was interesting to start from that place. But Brian, do you want to? Do you want to jump in and share a few things here? And then I can pick back up?
Brian Van Brunt 22:35
Yeah, you know, this is we haven't actually had this conversation. But I found that the picture we were using for that was actually a Bansky project, the the controversial kind of artist. Is it banks key Bansky. Banks. Yeah, I see. Yeah, it was it was a I think Walt Disney worlds or Walt Disney land where he actually brought the elephant in and became fairly controversial for painting the elephant that way, in that space. So it was a very captivating image, unrelated to this, but that's what podcasts are right the case. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Hey, it's all about the rabbit hole, right? Yes, it will find that image. Yeah, you know, it. I'll give away a trade secret here. And that's another great thing to get on these. Whenever you're teaching classroom management disruption that teachers, if you have an hour spend the first 20 minutes forming a connection with spend that time with them, really forming a connection with them. So you hear their stories, because I've had those similar experiences, Scott, where I don't know if you know this about people, but but I find just telling them what their problems are, doesn't always actually lead to a solution and often leads to that wandering away,
Scott Lee 23:41
leads to a bigger problem.
Brian Van Brunt 23:42
Yeah, they're not listening to you anymore. You know, so getting that money in the bank. And this is almost a parallel process for teaching as well with students when there's a respect, when there's a connection when they know that you understand what they've gone through. And it was, you know, it's almost counterintuitive, because when you have a limited time with faculty, which we often do, or teachers, we want to, you know, jump in and try to get across as much as possible. The reality is getting that buy in upfront is so critical. And I think that addressing the burnout, addressing their difficulties addressing their frustrations is important. And Amy, I remember the saying that we'd have kind of near the end of that I would say we can spend here this time and do our kind of kumbaya around the campfire moment and share our war stories about how horrible and difficult students can be sometimes. The problem with that is at the end, we'd all feel slightly exhausted, maybe a little better from the venting, but we still have no solutions. So we'd really set the stage with this approach. What we're going to give you are tools where your toolkit that you can reach into and deploy and they work you know, this is the thing we know that they work. It's then your choice to decide if you want to use them so you know the things Like we've talked about here, whether it's the ABCs of this or approaching students, and trying to understand asking open ended questions, the motivational interviewing concepts of rolling with resistance, you know, when a student comes at you, metaphorically upset and pissed off, and it's like, why are you even a teacher, you're bad at your job. You know, if we respond in kind, right at that content level, we're going to be less effective, we're going to have that escalation, if we're able to respond and say, it sounds like I didn't live up to the expectation that you wanted. So tell me a little bit more about what a good teacher looks like in your mind. And the best thing there is, this is the closest we get to like a Jedi mind trick, right? Like, these aren't the droids you're looking for. That's a powerful statement that kind of throws the student off the pathway of escalation. And they're like, Well, I was not expecting that question. I was expecting you to tell me to sit down and shut up. So it unexpected diversions, even in bystander empowerment are one of the techniques that we teach. It's not always a direct confrontation. But this power of getting them to think or you know, we talked about, sometimes the, the meeting fire with fire or when someone comes at you or is upset, we respond in kind, when a student's charging at you emotionally and as upset, we can respond in kind and shut it down, we have that power. Or we can step aside, let them bang into the wall, again, metaphorically fall to the ground and say, Well, can I help you now. And I do believe that from a humanistic perspective that students are able to find their true north find their their weeble wobble, kind of you might have to google that one if you're younger, kind of sense of balance, when they're given the right environment. nurturance positive regard and caring. And I know that feels a little touchy feely, even as I'm saying it I get the teachers are like, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. But the reality is, I've had actually a fairly knock on wood, easy experience teaching, because I've naturally applied a lot of these principles. So the number of times I've had classroom disruptions and they've occurred are fairly minimal, because I'm practicing some of these ideas of listening and paying attention to kind of those undercurrents that might be going on, which is very close to the SEL. I think some of the core principles of social emotional learning, Amy, what was your take on that?
Amy Murphy 27:27
I think so often, we have that desire to avoid the things that make us uncomfortable, or the situations where we feel unsure about how to respond. And sometimes what that means is that we end up further isolating, instead of engaging when there are signs of concern. And so that results in that less preventative stance, and one where we just wait until things do escalate. And until you're forced to react, and I read, I read the book recently upstream by Dan Heath, and it's a book he frames it around that old public health prevention parable about going upstream to see why people are falling in the river instead of just staying downstream and pulling them out of the river one at a time. And we sometimes don't see the problems that are there in front of us or it just seems inevitable that the problem is going to happen. Regardless of what we do, or we just don't feel like we have the time to deal with the problem. And I think that the hope is by connecting together these three prongs of violence prevention in the classroom that it helps to convey the importance of going upstream to classroom climate and de escalation as these really critical and valuable pieces for for teachers to invest in.
Scott Lee 28:41
We'll continue our conversation in the next episode, as we'll discuss training, and we'll go deeper into working with more disruptive students, and how to help promote wellness. The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is brought to you as a service of Oncourse Education Solutions. If you would like to learn more about how we help schools and youth organizations, embed social emotional learning within their cultures and implement strength based restorative interventions, please visit our website www.oncoursesolutions.net. This has been episode four of the spring 2022 season. If you have enjoyed this podcast, please tell your friends and colleagues about it either in person or using social media. We also greatly appreciate positive reviews on the podcast app you use. The Thoughtful Teacher Podcast is hosted and produced by R. Scott Lee who retains copyright. We encourage diverse opinions. However opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of producer, partners, or underwriters. Guests are never compensated for appearance, nor do guests pay to appear. Transcripts are available following podcasts publication at our website, thoughtfulteacherpodcast.com. Sponsorship opportunities or other inquiries may be made on the "Contact Us" page at our website thoughtfulteacherpodcast.com. Please follow the Thoughtful Teacher Podcast on Twitter @drrscottlee.
