What Special Education Taught Me About Handling Behavior Issues in the Classroom
The first time Marcus threw a chair, it didn’t clatter the way you’d expect. It hit the corner of my desk first, bounced once, and then slid across the linoleum with a screech that made every kid in the room go completely still. Marcus was nine, small for his age, and already standing with his fists balled up like he was waiting for me to yell. I didn’t. Not because I was calm, but because I was too surprised to say anything at all.
In the years before I got my special education training, I probably would have sent him to the office. That was the old playbook—remove the disruptive kid, restore order, move on. But by the time I had Marcus in my class, I’d learned enough to know that sending him out would have just been a timeout for me, not a solution for him.
The thing that changed my thinking wasn’t a theory or a textbook. It was a question one of the behavior specialists on our team asked me during a meeting about Marcus: “What happened right before the chair?” I didn’t have an answer. I had been watching the whole scene, and I still couldn’t string together the ten minutes that led up to it. That was the moment I realized I’d been seeing Marcus as a behavior problem instead of a person with a pattern.
We started tracking him. Not with fancy tools—just a notebook by my desk where I’d jot down the time, the task, and what was happening when he started to escalate. It took about two weeks for the pattern to show up. Marcus could handle almost anything if he saw it coming. The trouble started during transitions, especially when we moved from something he liked to something he found hard. And it got worse when I gave directions out loud to the whole group, the kind where you say “Okay everyone, clear your desks and take out your math folders.” For most kids, that’s a routine request. For Marcus, it was like asking him to solve a puzzle without giving him the pieces.
That’s the first skill working with behavior in special education teaches you: look for the function. Behavior is communication. A kid who throws a chair isn’t giving you a hard time. He’s having a hard time, and he doesn’t have the words or the skills to tell you what’s wrong. Marcus couldn’t say, “I feel anxious when I don’t know what’s next.” He could only show it.
Once we knew his triggers, the changes were simple, and honestly, they made life better for everyone. I made a visual schedule and put it on his desk—not the whole day, just the next step. I stopped giving him multi-step verbal directions and started writing them down or showing him a picture. And before transitions, I started giving him a warning: “Marcus, in five minutes, we’re going to clean up and switch to reading.” Just that. It sounds so small in the retelling, but for him, it was the difference between a predictable world and a chaotic one.
There was another day, maybe a month later, when I saw the warning work in real time. The timer went off. I told the class we had five minutes left. Marcus did that little shoulder roll he always did, the one that meant he was starting to spiral. He pushed his paper away and crossed his arms. I watched him make the choice—not to be defiant, but to try to control something, anything, in his day. So I walked over to his desk quietly, knelt down so I was at his eye level, and said, “I see you’re working on your writing. Do you want to finish that sentence and switch to reading, or switch now and come back to it after?”
He looked at me for a long second. “After,” he said, and went back to his pencil. Nothing about that moment was dramatic. No big breakthrough. But it was the first time in weeks that he’d had a tiny bit of power in a day that was mostly decided for him, and that small choice was enough.
The deeper lesson here is about our own reactions. Before my training, I would have met resistance with more pressure. I would have said, “Marcus, I need you to do your work.” And he would have pushed back, and we would have had a power struggle, and thirty other kids would have watched the whole thing. What I learned instead is that de-escalation starts with me. It’s about slowing down, dropping my own volume, lowering my body, and remembering that his behavior is telling me something I haven’t figured out yet.
There’s a skill to that, and it’s not natural. You have to practice looking at a kid who’s refusing every request and saying, “What’s he getting from this?” Sometimes the answer is attention, sure. But more often, it’s escape from something painful or overwhelming. It’s sensory overload. It’s exhaustion. It’s the feeling of being bad at something in front of thirty people and wanting to disappear. The chair-throwing is the only exit a nine-year-old can find.
I’ve had colleagues watch me work with a student like Marcus and assume I’m being permissive. I understand why it looks that way from the outside. What they don’t see is the boundary-setting that happens before things get bad. They don’t see the morning check-ins, the clear classroom structure, the follow-through on consequences that don’t involve shame. And they don’t see the calm teaching at the margins—the quiet conversations during lunch when I’m pre-teaching a concept, the extra ten seconds of wait time I give him before expecting an answer.
For parents, the application is similar. When your kid melts down at home, the first question is the same: What was happening right before? Often it’s not the thing you think. It was a long day with too much noise. It was a transition they didn’t get to choose. It was feeling rushed or misunderstood. The skill isn’t fixing the behavior in the moment. It’s noticing what the behavior is responding to.
We use a language in special education classrooms that helps with this. Instead of “he’s misbehaving,” we say “he’s dysregulated.” It sounds clinical, but the shift matters. One word says the kid is bad. The other says his nervous system is overwhelmed, and that’s something we can address. We can’t address “bad.” We can’t do much with “stubborn” or “defiant.” But we can address overwhelm—by lowering demands, providing breaks, offering comfort, or changing the setting for a little while.
Last spring, I had a day where Marcus relapsed. He had a substitute teacher for a Friday afternoon, which is basically a hostage situation for a kid who needs routine. He lasted about twenty minutes before he shut down completely. The sub called the office, and I got paged. When I walked in, he was under his desk with his hood up, and the whole class was buzzing. I sat down on the floor next to him, not saying anything. After a minute, he said, muffled through the hood, “I didn’t like her.” I didn’t fix it. I just said, “I know.” We sat there for another minute, and I told him we could take a walk together when the next period started. He got up. The day moved on.
I don’t want to pretend I have Marcus figured out. He still has bad days. There are still moments where I miss the signal, or where my own exhaustion makes me respond more sharply than I should. But the deeper I get into this work, the more I see that behavioral intervention is less about controlling kids than about being curious about them. It’s a slower way of teaching—you’re not just delivering content, you’re constantly reading the room, reading the faces, reading the shoulders. And every time I get it wrong, I start over. We both do.
The work is still in progress. That’s how it goes with kids like Marcus. You don’t finish them. You just keep showing up with a little more patience, a little more understanding of what’s underneath the surface, and a notebook still open to the next pattern you haven’t seen yet.
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