One Big Reason Behavior Charts Fail (And What You Can Do Instead)

I'm recording the Sunday before the last week of school before Christmas break , and so if you're listening to this episode around that time , you know what I'm talking about . Things are crazy town right now , aren't they ? Speaking for myself ? Things are so busy on campus right now .

Not only do I have my regular responsibilities going on , but I'm also doing holiday outreach projects . I'm organizing hundreds of Christmas gifts to be sent out into the community . I'm coordinating deliveries for those , I am coordinating pickup times , I'm coordinating holiday meals , I'm trying to get students' end-of-semester grades all finalized and lined out , and y'all .

There's just so much going on on top of all of the normal stuff that goes on this time of year , with family celebrations , kids' concerts and events . It is just a busy , busy time and I love it all . It is just a busy , busy time and I love it all .

I wouldn't trade it for anything , but you and I both know there are only so many minutes in the day , right ? So as I was thinking about this podcast episode this week , I decided to pull an episode from the archives .

But I have a really good reason for this , and it's not just because I'm tired and I'm overwhelmed and I have a lot going on this time of year . It's also because it correlates beautifully with a new resource we just released into our Mastermind community today .

Now in our Mastermind , we seek to avoid all of the print and pray resources that you see all over the internet for school counselors . We believe that true counseling comes from knowing your skills very , very well and through professional fluency .

And if you possess that knowledge and expertise , then that extra baloney is unnecessary because you already have everything you need . We love to release our school counseling playbooks that give you a roadmap for common school counseling concerns without having to print a bunch of extra stuff .

They walk you step by step through the concerns for both younger students and our adolescents and young adults .

So far in our playbook series we have the School Refusal Playbook , parent and Community Engagement , grief , collaborative Problem Solving , which , as a side note , is just about the best approach I think you can learn in school counseling the behavior intervention playbook and anxiety playbook , and today we just released the oppositional behavior playbook , and so , as I'm

celebrating the release of this new playbook with my mastermind members , I thought you know what let's pull in the episode that I did back in April of 2023 about oppositional defiant disorder and what we should really be talking about in schools . I hope you love this . Let's take a listen . Take a listen , hello school counselor .

Welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast . I'm Steph Johnson , here with you again for another week of insight , hopefully some inspiration and some things to really help you get better at your craft , because that's what we're here for right In this podcast is to make sure .

What we're here for right in this podcast is to make sure that you're consistently growing , you're consistently learning and becoming the absolute best school counselor that you can possibly be .

In this episode , I want to talk about oppositional defiant disorder , and the reason that it comes to mind especially this time of year is because it seems to me that the longer I'm in school counseling , the more often I hear this term just tossed around when students are difficult , when folks aren't able to understand students or their motivations or why they're

getting involved in certain behaviors . You know , you often just hear people say well , you know , they're just so ODD , and this is troubling to me for several reasons .

So I'm going to walk through with you today what true oppositional defiant disorder looks like , why we need to be really careful assigning that term to students , and what we can do if we have a difficult student in our midst , or maybe more than one , right , what can we do to really support those students and help them to be their best selves at school ?

But before we jump into that , as always , I'm going to read a very sweet review from a kind School for School Counselors podcast listener , and I want to urge you now , if you haven't stopped , to give us a review . Y'all , this is the currency that podcasts run on . This is how folks find out about us .

This is how people find out if you think we're any good or not . You got to let the world know . So if you haven't yet and you're an Apple podcast subscriber , hop on over and leave a review in Apple Podcasts . For us it's worth more than a million bucks . And if you're on a different podcast platform , hop on over and give us a rating .

We certainly would appreciate that too . It just kind of keeps the wheels turning around here . This week , our review comes from somebody with the coolest screen name that I've seen in a while . This comes from HeyBabe11 , and their review is titled One of my New Favorite Things to Do . The review goes on to say this favorite things to do .

The review goes on to say this

I'm a first-year school counselor . I have told multiple people close to me that I never knew what I signed up for in this position until I started it . Being a school counselor . You are so important to these students and staff members , and that comes with a lot of pressure .

I love this field of work for so many reasons and love all the connections I've made in this first year , but I am completely mentally and emotionally drained every day when I go home . Listening to your podcast for the first time a couple weeks ago gave me a sense of validation that I've been missing in my life since before I began in the school months ago .

I'm a counselor of 380 students and I find myself helping as much and fast as I can , trying to do more and more , but never feeling caught up or like I can breathe . Hearing that others feel the same has helped me so much because I thought I was alone in this .

I've taken pointers from your self-compassion podcast and have tried implementing those strategies as well as finding more time for what I need . I contacted a colleague and now have a weekly scheduled time to discuss whatever we wish in a safe space together regarding our jobs . Thanks so much .

I plan to continue to listen to your podcast during my lunch breaks and during my car rides to decompress . What a lovely and thoughtful review , hey baby 11 . I'm telling you what man you know how to throw some words down there .

I am so grateful for your thoughts , for your compliments , but most of all , I'm grateful for the opportunity to serve you and so many of our colleagues in knowing that you aren't alone , that this isn't an unusual experience that you're having , and that we can band together not only to support and empower each other , but also to catalyze some change in our field ,

and we're working really , really hard toward that end . I'm glad you're here with us along for the ride . All right , guys , again I'm going to ask you if you haven't left a review . Join in the cool kids club , like HeyBabe11 , and leave us a quick review for the podcast . We could not thank you enough for that .

All right , so let's hop into the idea of oppositional defiant disorder , a term that we hear people toss around all the time , and quite frankly , I don't love that , but it is what it is . It just sort of seems to be the world we're living in right now .

If you don't know what to do with the kid , if they get persnickety , if they're argumentative , if they don't cooperate , all of a sudden we're calling them ODD . Perhaps you have some students on your campus that behave this way .

They're argumentative , they refuse to complete work , they may shout , they may accuse others , they may curse , they may threaten , they may have these severe emotional outbursts . Sometimes those get physical . Do you have any of those ? And maybe you've tried incentivizing good behavior right ?

You've tried the behavior charts , you've tried rewards , you've tried positive incentives . Perhaps you've tried building rapport right for hours upon hours . You've tried gaining parent cooperation . You're trying to get teacher buy-in everything you can think of but nothing seems to be getting better .

Sometimes I think teachers like to slap this label on kids during conversations because it gives them a feeling of control in a very out-of-control situation . But here's the thing we're not doing students any favors when we start thinking about them as ODD , right , there are a couple of reasons for that .

First , it just kind of cements an identity for students , right , oh , they're just ODD , like nothing can be done about it . Or man , you know , it's out of my hands , they're ODD , what do you want me to do about it ? Very , very pathologizing nomenclature really boxes students in .

I think it really discounts their potential and it kind of gives everybody a pass to stop encouraging growth , right , as if this student is just doomed to a life of the same behaviors , right ? Well , you know , I washed my hands of them . They're ODD , what do you want me to do ? Very , very dangerous line of thought , especially in education .

So that's the first problem that I have with this label being thrown around . Second of all and you and I both know this it is not a trauma-informed perspective . Know this , it is not a trauma-informed perspective . There's a lot of crossover between oppositional behaviors , defiant behaviors and traumatic exposure .

We have to keep that at the forefront of our awareness as we come across situations like this . We really need to examine the trauma angle . We need to make sure that we haven't just written this off . You know that . We haven't just said oh , you know , they're just , they're kind of a bad kid . They don't listen , they like to argue .

I don't know how to get them to buy in with me . Must be ODD ? No , no , it does not have to be ODD , and it's really important to keep it in perspective . Have to be ODD , and it's really important to keep it in perspective .

Third , and I've hinted at this earlier , but I think a label like oppositional defiant disorder number one , just labeling a kid with any disorder in general , is really limiting for their own self-actualization and for the growth of the people around them .

To not only encourage them to step into their best selves but to grow as encouragers , as coaches , as teachers and as educators . We have to keep these doors of potential open and when we start arbitrarily assigning these disorder label to kids , we stunt those opportunities .

Because as we label students and maybe get a little dramatic in our assessment , right through our frustration , through our anger , perhaps through our resentment , we can sometimes encourage students to live up to the negative potential that we've assigned to them instead of what they can truly be .

So we've got to be super , super careful with these terms getting thrown around . I often tell school staff or other counselors that I work with . When I hear the oppositional defiant label placed on the table , I'm usually the first one to say hey , hang on . A second , let's pause . I don't like that phrase .

Can we think of another way to describe this student that feels a little bit more accurate ? Now , to be fair , you may have students on your campus that do meet the criteria of oppositional defiant disorder . But number one I think there's a lot of flux in this definition . And number two as school counselors , we're not tasked to diagnose anybody anyway .

So what good is it going to do us to determine a label for a student ? It's not going to change the way we interact with them . It's not going to change the way that we try to intervene , and you'll see what I mean in a minute . First , let's look at the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria .

Not because we want to diagnose students , but we do want to be aware of the criteria being used by other practitioners . So you've got to have a pattern of an angry or irritable mood , argumentative or defiant behavior or vindictiveness that lasts at least six months , and it has to have a cluster of symptoms from different categories .

There's a certain number that you have to achieve and they fall under the headings of angry and irritable mood or argumentative or defiant behavior or vindictiveness , all right , and it's really important .

As we talk about these kinds of things like losing temper , like being touchy , easily annoyed , resentful , arguing with authority , figures , right Defiance or refusing to comply , deliberately annoying other people , blaming other people for their mistakes or their misbehavior , all of these different kinds of things , we have to remember that some of this may be developmentally

appropriate . Right , to an extent it may be appropriate . So there are different criterions depending on the age of the student , depending on the frequency , the intensity of the behaviors , those kinds of things . And then we've also got to consider gender , we've got to consider culture . So there's a lot of pieces that go into this .

It's more complicated than you think and that's another reason I really don't like people throwing this term around .

These disturbances also have to be associated with distress in the student or others in their social context , and it has to have a negative impact on some of their major areas of functioning , like their social relationships , their educational attainment , their ability to hold a job , those kinds of things .

And then they have to be independent of some other sort of complicating factors , other disorders and things like that . So , given the criteria for this disorder , I think it is really dangerous and probably pretty unethical for us to be throwing this term around without a definitive diagnosis .

But also , you'll hear , you know there's a lot of play in these definitions . There's a lot of things that have to be determined and teased out . It's not so simple as filling out a screen or handing it in and going oh yeah , they've got oppositional defiant disorder . It doesn't work that way .

One key characteristic of oppositional defiant disorder would be that the student can't understand why or how reward or punishment should impact their behavior . It's not that they're choosing to behave in these ways . They honestly don't understand what the different alternatives should be .

If you offer them incentivized choices for behavior , they're not even going to understand why you would do that . And similarly , if they get punished for something they do , they genuinely cannot understand why they would be punished for doing what they think everybody would do . So it gets pretty complicated once you dig down deep in this .

And what's even more interesting is Bessel van der Kolk , who many of you know from the book the Body Keeps the Score , has actually proposed a whole different label for some of the kids that are falling under the ODD nomenclature , and he proposes a label of developmental trauma disorder .

Kids with a trauma history do tend to show more oppositional , defiant behavior , and so he's kind of leading a charge currently to tease out the differences between these two .

But all that aside , knowing kind of what oppositional defiant disorder looks like , what students who have been exposed to trauma looks like , we need to take a trauma-informed lens anytime we're confronted with a student who appears to be oppositional and or defiant . So what can we do to support these students at school ?

Number one you know I'm going to say this , you can hear it coming , I'm sure build relationship right , no matter what they may imply . Relationships are important for all students . You have to be able to invest in your difficult folks or you have to be able to find somebody else who can . Yeah , and you've got to remember this is a long game .

This is not going to be a matter of sitting down together two or three times and all of a sudden you're campus besties . It doesn't work that way . Depending on their age or their grade level , a student may have been ostracized , they may have been marginalized in school for quite some time , and so it's going to take a while to gain their trust .

They may have written everyone off around them , you know , or they may have had experiences where folks looked like they were attempting to get to know the student , but really were trying to build that relationship for the purpose of manipulation , and once the student didn't comply in as quickly a manner as the adult would have liked , they retreat , right .

They pull away from that relationship and just go . Oh well , I just don't know what to do with them . I tried , right . This is a long game , and when I say long game , sometimes that's weeks , sometimes it's months , sometimes it's years . And so are you prepared to invest in that ? You really need to take a good long think about it .

Second , to support students with these types of behaviors on campus , let's just take all these little behavior charts , rip them up in little tiny pieces and set them on fire . Please get rid of the behavior charts . For a student who doesn't understand why reward or punishment should influence their behavior , a chart ain't gonna do it .

Behaviorism with these oppositional behaviors , in my opinion , fail spectacularly , and so what I would propose instead is skill building with students , right , teaching them how to utilize some skill subsets in their classroom .

What I mean by that is , if you have an oppositional student and they're directed , you know , to get to work on that assignment , get that completed , of course they're going to say no right , or they're going to shut down , or they're going to refuse to complete the work . Lots of students with these types of behaviors really appreciate a choice .

You can do this or you can do that . If you can craft these choices correctly , you're going to be giving them two options . Either one would be what you would want to see , and so that's kind of the game on this is to give them two desired outcomes and let them choose the one they want to pursue .

You can also teach students how to pursue alternative activities when they're just not feeling what they're supposed to be doing Now . Does this give them the opportunity just to completely disengage and not do it ?

No , but if you set limits , if you set some parameters for this , give them the option to at some times choose some alternative activities , you may see some improvement overall . And again , this is a long game . It's not going to be one or two times and all of a sudden they're a new person .

But giving them choices , giving them some control in their environment , typically helps . And then we've got to practice these . It's not something that we can just direct them to do in the classroom .

If they're presented with a request they don't want to follow , their brain is immediately going to fly toward how can I get out of this as quickly as possible , right , and so they're not going to be able to think through their options , they're not going to be able to reason through what they want to do next .

So we must practice with them beforehand , at different times during their day , to really make sure that we're setting them up for success . And then , last , in that line of thought of getting rid of the behavior charts , of skill building and practicing exercising appropriate choices , we've also got to maintain consistent routines and schedules in the classroom .

Y'all , some of our classrooms are really struggling in this area . Our masterminders talk all the time about walking into classrooms that feel like free-for-alls . Students are getting up , they're wandering around , they're calling out , they're talking over the teacher .

We heard a story here recently about a teacher who was teaching over students who were talking over the teacher , and it just kept getting louder and louder and louder on both sides . We really have got to support our teachers in good classroom management .

We've really got to support them in asserting their authority in the classroom and so that they can provide these consistent routines and schedules .

It's a lot of work on the front end to get these systems in place , but , boy oh boy , does it make everybody's lives easier when students know what to expect , they know what's coming next and they know what they can do in the moment . It's just phenomenal , the change that good routine and structure can make .

Third , when we're working with students who are showing oppositional or defiant tendencies , we need to build relationships . Oh wait , I already said that , right ? Yes , I did say that and I'm going to say it again . Why ? Because it is so important Find who the student gravitates toward .

Who do they seem like they might want to spend a little bit more time with on campus ? Are there some students that tend to be more positive peer influences , who may be able to , you know , sit closer to your student in question , who may be able to mentor them a little bit or , you know , just be a positive role model ?

I think there's a lot to be said for those kinds of relationships . So , if we can encourage those , help teachers find potential candidates , offer some lunchtimes for them to sit and talk and get to know each other .

Whatever it is we need to do , we need to try to help students build relationships on campus , and then we also need to be able to find or offer resources . There are usually very high ACE scores for these kids . Do you remember the ACE scores , which are a measure of the adverse childhood experiences that a student has had in their lifetime ?

What's going on at home ? What do these students need at home ? What do they need at school ? What do their parents need ? Do the parents need some sort of support ? If you have a social worker available , deploy them . Get them involved with this family . If there's no social worker , determine what the family needs through some person-centered means .

Build those relationships , have some real conversation without the urge to jump to a worksheet or jump to reframing or jump to identifying emotions . Just talk to them like a person , like a human being , and build those bridges . Determine what they need , what their family may need , and then find those resources and offer them .

Also , don't forget that if you think a child has experienced a significant level of trauma in their life , they may need a level of support you can't provide in school . That would be when you would need to refer them out to a therapist in your area .

Investigate some programs available within your schools on-site therapists , telehealth therapists , community therapists , whatever you can find . Get them involved in some services to help them with their oppositional or defiant behaviors . And my last tool when you're dealing with suspected ODD is build relationships . For the third time , y'all .

I cannot stress this enough Relationship is going to be your golden ticket , y'all . I think it's so important that we recognize the potential for students that we do not box them in with these crazy labels .

And if I had my way , I don't think I would hear anybody say oppositional , defiant disorder on a school campus , except maybe once every I don't know few years , because that should be so far from our frame of reference .

We need to be in the business of supporting students , identifying what their needs are , helping them learn how to make healthy choices in the classroom and helping their teachers learn how to work with them as well , so that everyone can move towards success . I hope this has been helpful for you .

I hope it's helped you kind of re-examine how you think about students with difficult behaviors , how you approach those situations and how you talk to your staff about them .

In the moment , I think it's really important that we be able to be confident enough when these conversations come up to say you know , I know that term gets tossed around a lot , but I'd feel much more comfortable if we just talked about difficult behaviors .

I think we're going to get a lot further that way , because we know difficult behaviors can be changed right , and that's what we're here for . We're here to guide and inspire students toward their best , most fulfilling outcomes . Hey , listen , I know I've told you before , but I want to tell you again how important the work is that you're doing .

As we release this episode about mid-April . This is the tough time of year , right . Things start feeling really hard . So I just want to remind you that , even on the hard days , even when it feels like there's so much to do , right , how are we ever going to get this done before the end of the school year ?

Your students are so lucky to have you on campus supporting them , believing in them and learning so that you can be the best school counselor for them you can be , and you've been here learning with me

today . I can't thank you enough for that and I can't wait to talk to you next time . I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast . Until then , I hope you have the best week ever . Take care , my friend . You know it's funny when I pulled that episode and thought , hey , you know , I better re-listen to that .

I bet it's probably pretty entertaining . Being that it was almost two years ago in my podcasting journey , I was still pretty new to this whole thing , wasn't really sure what I was doing and it was taking me hours and hours to get one episode ready . But I gotta admit I think it wasn't bad and I hope you felt the same way .

Hey , if this got you thinking about oppositional behaviors and reframing maybe the way you see some of your most challenging students on campus , I want to remind you we have this oppositional behavior playbook , as well as our entire playbook collection , available to our School for School Counselors Mastermind members .

This is what we do month in and month out in the Mastermind Membership . It's an amazing collaborative community of school counselors unlike anywhere else you could ever join , and I would love for you to have a seat at that table with us as well . You can check out all of the details at schoolforschoolcounselorscom .

Slash mastermind to up level your school counseling game , build your professional fluency and finally be seen as a go-to authority on your campus . Hey , also , if you enjoyed this episode , would you do me a favor and go ahead , subscribe to the podcast . That way you know you're never going to miss a future episode .

And then , if you're feeling super charitable , go give us a rating or a review in your podcast platform . That's worth more to me than anything else , because it lets me know if I'm on the right track and if I'm serving you well , and it also helps other school counselors find this podcast .

So if you could find a few minutes in your heart to go give a rating and review , I would be forever in your debt . All right , I'm going to bid you goodbye , but I do promise I'll be back again soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast .

Happy holidays to you , no matter what you celebrate , and I can't wait to visit with you again . Be well , my friend .