Behavioral Issues in Special Ed: What Actually Helps, From a Teacher in the Classroom
Marcus shoved the pencil bucket off the corner of the table before I could even finish saying his name. The pencils scattered in every direction, hitting the floor like twigs snapping. In a third-grade special education room, noise like that travels. Three students dropped their work to look over, and Marcus sat with his hands under his thighs, staring at a crack in the wall as if none of it had happened.
“Pick the pencils up, please,” I said. My voice was steady the way I’d practiced in front of a mirror.
He didn’t move.
I knelt down and started gathering pencils myself. Later, when the room settled, I took him out into the hallway and asked him what went wrong. He shrugged. “Nothing.” And then he started humming, and my next words just disappeared.
My first year in special ed, everything felt like an exam I hadn’t studied for. I could write IEP goals about staying in a seat and raising a hand, but when behavior actually happened, the language flew out of my head. All I had was “stay calm” and “be consistent,” which sounded good in the moment but didn’t help either of us when the pencils were on the floor and the other kids were waiting.
That week, the assistant principal stopped me on my lunch break and said, “He seems to need tighter consequences. He isn’t responding to your routine.” She meant well, I know. There was a form to fill out—a discipline referral. Did I want one? Not really. Because the thing is, Marcus already knew the rule. Telling him again wouldn’t be new information. There was something else underneath the pencil bucket, and I hadn’t figured out what.
I started observing Marcus during the times things went wrong. Not with a marker or a data sheet—I kept a little spiral notebook in my jacket pocket and wrote down one line each time. Time, activity, what happened right before. It felt a little goofy, but I was desperate for patterns.
After about two weeks, the pattern appeared: the bucket went over during transitions from reading to writing tasks. Almost every single time. The writing block was coming, and Marcus’s body knew something his words couldn’t say. He couldn’t read at grade level, and when he was handed a blank paper and a topic, the anxiety rose up in him so fast he had to do something with his hands. So he threw the nearest object.
That night I called his mom. Not to complain, but to ask if she’d noticed anything similar at home. “He throws utensils when he’s upset,” she said, after a long pause. “At the dinner table. I try not to make it a big deal, I just take the spoon away.” She waited for me to give instructions. I said, “That sounds really hard, honestly.” And all at once, her voice softened.
We talked for half an hour. She told me about mornings when the bus was late, homework battles with the babysitter, the teeth-brushing fight that happened every single night. At one point she said, “Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a bad mom.” I was glad there was no one standing in the doorway to hear me say anything that sounded like a tip from a textbook. I just said, “No one ever hands you a manual for this.” And that was true.
I didn’t start by changing the schoolwork. I started by changing the moment right before the writing block. I moved that red pencil bucket to the bookshelf behind my desk, out of reach. In its place, I put a small bin labeled “Finished Work” on the corner of Marcus’s table. It was his job to put his own work in the bin when he finished. It sounds small, but it gave his hands a job and gave his brain somewhere to put the “done” feeling.
I also changed one phrase I’d been using. I learned to stop saying, “You need to start your writing now.” That sentence felt like a wall to Marcus. Instead, I offered two choices: “Do you want to start with the writing, or do you want to draw the picture first?” and “This pencil or the purple one?” It wasn’t shiny new pedagogy. But for a kid who felt trapped in a task that was too hard, a small choice he could control made the difference between a meltdown and a working minute.
There was a moment when it started working. Around mid-February, Marcus picked the purple pencil. I remember because he held it still for a moment and looked at me as if to check whether I was really going to let him choose. I said nothing. He picked up his paper and did three sentences before he ran out of steam. Three sentences wasn’t a victory banner. But when his hand drifted toward where the pencil bucket used to be, the bucket wasn’t there anymore. He looked around for it and seemed almost confused. Then he picked up his paper again.
The skills that ended up actually making a difference weren’t the ones they showed in the professional development slideshows. They were unflashy and slightly awkward. They looked like sitting with a parent and letting her talk about the nighttime teeth-brushing fight without turning it into a lesson plan. They looked like a pocket notebook and a stack of two choices. They looked like me closing my mouth during moments when Marcus needed to think—something I learned not by reading about “wait time” but by hearing myself say his name too fast and watching him flinch.
The truth is, behavioral issues in special education are rarely misbehavior in the old sense. The behavior is doing something. For Marcus, throwing was a way of saying “too much” before he had language for it. When I stopped asking, “How do I correct this?” and started asking, “What is his body trying to mean?” the intervention changed. I didn’t have to punish him. I had to be one step ahead—and one step closer.
There are still bad days. Last Thursday, Marcus pushed over the finished-work bin and emptied it onto the floor on purpose. He was tired; the writing prompt was too long. I gave him a card that had a picture of a body and three faces on it and let him put a marker on the face that just said “tired.” He picked the tired face, and I shortened the prompt. We got two sentences out of him before the lights went off for dismissal.
So I can’t say I’ve solved anything, not really. But I understand the pattern now. When behavior feels overwhelming, I try to get curious instead of getting louder. It doesn’t always work. The pencil bucket is still one of those things I look at every morning when I walk into the room, and I still have to decide whether to fill it up or leave it empty.
Every year, I’ve had to remind myself that these children aren’t doing something to me; they’re doing something for themselves. When a kid gets to the point where the only way he can say “I can’t” is to throw a bucket, you don’t need a bigger consequence. You need a smaller step, a steadier voice, and a parent who trusts that you’re not going to blame her.
The bucket is still there most mornings. But so am I.
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