When the School Day Goes Off the Rails: Responding to Student Crisis in the Classroom

This week, I've got Chris Zielinski with me, and he and I have worked together for many, many years, and I'm really excited to see where he chooses to take this topic, because he has supported all kinds of different crisis situations in the classroom, as a specialist, for a district, and even well beyond that. So, Chris, for you, when you are thinking of the school day that just simply goes off the rails, what are the first things that are coming to mind for you?

Well, we know that when things don't always go the way we're hoping or anticipating or viewing, it's always high anxiety, high stress. It's felt on the staff side, and believe it or not, it's felt on the student side. And I've recognized very quickly that there are some things that people tend to do when that happens. We don't always make the best choices, but the first thing I always tell people is: in those moments when things aren't going right, when things are taking that sideways turn, the first thing is to take a deep breath. Take a deep breath and try to center yourself. And I know that you've been in those situations, Heather, where you have walked in, even if you have the best-laid plan. You knew what your day was going to look like, and within 15 minutes, that went out the window.

It is gone.

Yeah. And it's very hard in those moments to try and trust those systems that you have spent the time putting in place and working through, but you also have to be present in the moment. And I think when we're just moving so quickly, we might miss those subtle things that can be that moment that can kind of turn the tide to make this a palatable situation as opposed to the day that you're counting seconds till it ends.

Well, I think that's fair because sometimes when people think of a day that goes off the rails, there was some big moment. So it was a fight or a certain outburst or something, just like a full-stop type of moment. But the reality is there can also just be the death by a thousand paper cuts type of a day, where I am just getting more and more in my head, and I'm missing more and more, which means more and more is building up. So, yeah, I think there's something to be said for both sides of that, where it could be just slowly built up throughout a day, or there's just this one big blowout moment that then completely derails everything that was going on, or at least for a good chunk of the time.

And those derailments, we've seen them. They can be isolated incidents, or they can be a very large-scale incident that happens within that classroom. And you always find yourself in that moment of, "Wow, I can't believe this is happening. Now I have to do something." And that's that duty to act, that thing that overwhelms us, that we have to do something. And I always tell people, at the core of it all, in those moments, take a deep breath, think about what you're going to do, and remember that, at the end of the day, no matter how hard, how challenging it gets, you always have to remember that part of our job is keeping ourselves and our students safe. And when it is one of those loud, huge instances that just seems to fall apart right in front of you, or you have a student that's having that dysregulated episode that's turning physical, you really do have to remember that safety. Part of our obligation is keeping ourselves and our other students and that student themselves safe.

Well, so let's start there then. Let's start with how, as adults, do we actually keep ourselves grounded enough to be able to make good decisions when that chaos is just ever-present? Because I think there are some aspects to training. I cannot figure out how to be grounded in the middle of my first crisis. I need to have done some thought work, some rehearsal of my own work, to know how I can show up that way. But in the moment, there are also internal battles of, I might want to instinctually react in a certain way, but I need to do other things to keep myself grounded, to keep myself at my own level of thinking. So for you, how do you help your teams make sure that they actually do stay grounded enough in that situation, and also that it's bigger than just that situation?

Yeah. It's a great question. In the moment, obviously, you're focused on safety, and it's all about preparation. I know that it's hard. It's easier said than done, but when you're sitting with your teams on your best possible days, you always want to be discussing those options, the things that you have in your classroom, the options that you have, your systems, what supports you have in your building. I think part of it makes it easier when we know that we are one of many. You get that overwhelming feeling that I, as me, have to do something. I have to act in this moment. It is my obligation as the teacher, as the administrator, as the fill-in-the-gap. That duty to act.

But we can't just act to act. Sometimes our action is looking at our resources and realizing maybe this is beyond my capacity, or maybe I do have to use another resource. I have to incorporate other people into this classroom. And it's very easy in the moment to pick a path and go. But if you don't have those previous conversations and you're not disengaging and making yourself extend beyond that moment of, "What are the true options I have in front of me?" 99% of the time, the first thing that comes to mind is student-centric. "I have to do something with or about or around this one student" might not always be the right thing to do in that situation, and it could make it even worse.

But you always talk through it. Debriefing after a situation at the end of the day: the day will start, the day will end. That is just the reality of the world. As silly as that sounds. But it's that conversation we can have with our staff: "Wow, this really did turn sideways." Everything is a learning moment. What did we learn from this? If I had that magic lamp and I could rub it and go back in time two hours, one hour, five hours, start of the day, what would I have done differently? And what, as a group, as a system, as an individual, as a professional, as a team, did we learn, and how can we use this to expand our repertoire if it ever happens again? Hindsight's always 20/20.

Yes, always, every time. I guess what I'm hearing from you is, in order for me in that moment to stay grounded, there's an aspect of my team that I need to know that I am actually grounded within my social network of colleagues as I am responding to whatever this may be. If it's in my classroom, if it's in a hallway, if I'm showing up to support someone else in something that they are dealing with. I guess what I'm hearing from you is that, in order for adults to stay grounded, it really is within the psychological safety of the team who are then responding in these situations, which is so much bigger than me personally just keeping my head on straight and doing what I need to do internally to kind of keep my reactions, my responses in check. That is so much more difficult.

And I know you're talking about debriefing. This is best practice. It is legally mandated in many places and almost never implemented. And so, it can be a gold mine of opportunity for learning from ourselves, and if done well, in my opinion, with the students that were part of whatever that incident was. But it's rarely ever done, and sometimes when it is done, it results in a lot of blame shifting. And it's not productive in the ways that it could be.

So, I want to challenge you on some of these things that you're saying. I agree with you procedurally. I don't challenge you whatsoever there. But gosh, this is real hard. There's a lot of personal stuff that is showing up here to actually do this well and have this shake out in such a way that, as a human, I can show up in a grounded way and feel protected and cared for while I am engaging in crisis situations.

Yeah. And the other piece we haven't even talked about, yes, 100%, you also have to recognize that, as individuals, we all have limitations. And that on a team, my limitations of where I need to "tap out" might come as a threshold much sooner than yours. And respecting those boundaries. But to your point of what you were saying before, it is. It's a structural-level conversation. And that debriefing, as you said, is mandated in many states after a crisis. And in some, it's part of that documentation process if you've had to use physical restraint, isolated timeout, timeout, if your state is a state that allows for that.

And it all comes down to: how do we best support that student? And I've always thought of it, and I've always tried to challenge people to think this way: when a student is having a meltdown, when a student is distraught, when a student is really starting to escalate- by and large, not always. Always and never are things that you should have caution around. But by and large, it's the individual telling you that there's something that they feel they can't control or a problem they can't solve in that moment. And it's hard at times to articulate that aspect, but if you keep that in your mind's eye, it goes to: how do we support the student in this moment and moving forward, as opposed to just how do I react to what is happening in front of me?

And I think that those, from a mind's eye, they're going in the same direction, but they can look and play out significantly differently. Responding to crisis and responding to a student who is a student in need of support can sound the same and look grossly different.

Well, and I think when you're in a teaming dynamic, then you're not trying to figure out who failed in the scenario. You're simply collectively trying to figure out the kid. And that's, I mean, when we talk about running instruction with resistant learners, we always talk about ally with the student and positioning the teacher and the student against the problem. The problem is the curriculum. The problem is the learning. The problem is the activity. It's us against this thing that needs to get done. And I appreciate how you're kind of reframing it: even in crisis situations, when we're trying to figure it out, it's all of us, the student included, trying to make sense of the experience so that it's the student and everybody responding, trying to figure out what's actually going on here.

And I love that, almost like that third, I don't remember the fancy words for it, but it's that effect where it's us together against that other thing. And I think it's so much easier to team well because then you're not looking for blame within it because we're not looking at ourselves. We collectively are standing, looking at the actual problem, regardless of how we showed up in that situation.

Yeah. And in those really tough days, you tend to hear a word that's thrown out often: ‘Safety.’ Oh, safe. The student is unsafe. It was a safety... And then you've got this safety assessment. Some places will do a safety assessment. And even that word, ‘safety’ and ‘student support,’ they're not competing priorities.

No.I'm so frustrated when people think they are.

Yeah. So now I've created this safety plan, and you've labeled the student unsafe, but I would ask that question: what if the best safety strategy isn't all of these security and heavy, intense things, but really better student support, different student support, aligned student support to the student's needs. It's not just responding to that safety situation or that crisis situation; what we do in those moments matters. We do respond to that crisis. But then what do we take away to help prevent students from reaching that point in the future? We can't reliably predict. I mean, we can use precursors and antecedents, and we can see this escalation window, but before we recognize that buildup, we can't just predict, "Hey, in 17 days, Chris is going to have an escalation. He might be physically aggressive, or he might maybe be violent." We can't predict that.

But what we can do is look at behaviors; we can look at communication, we can look at our systems and our supports, and we can know what resources, tools, and approaches we have within our own purview and available to us, because it allows us to align that support clearly when it's most in need. And how do we ensure that support is there preemptively?

Yeah, but I mean, you're talking about safety from a very dignity-centered stance. How many people look at it and think, if that person- I won't even say kid- like if that person is unsafe, they have then given up the right to have any dignity in that because they're a safety risk. And so, there is no dignity part of this conversation because this is purely safety. And everything you just said really melds the two of them together. Like, it's not one or the other. It is both/and.

Yeah, 100%. It should be in the mind's eye. And compartmentalizing people as a safety risk or a threat risk, even when you look at things like threat assessment. So you have a situation: a kid in the moment is escalated and upset and says that devastating statement of, "I'm going to harm you," or "I'm going to get you," and they take it to that level in the heat of the moment. No matter what, you're still going to follow a problem-solving model. Whether you're going to go through and do, let's say, a threat assessment, you're going to follow that process. You're not doing that to determine, "Is this student dangerous?”

You're looking at it from, in that moment, is this threat, is there substance to it, or is it transient? And if it is, you're always going to want to try and incorporate student support from a problem-solving model into it. And I see that in MTSS and our safety and security things; they should absolutely fall into alignment. But when you let it, or if you find yourself in a system where it's siloed, I would ask you to try and marry it, because that is the mindset you'd want to get away from, what you were saying. "This kid is a safety risk," or, "This person loses all that dignity," or, "This person loses that because in this moment, it doesn't matter what we do. It's all about safety." Well, really, there's safety and support. You're supporting the students, the staff, and that individual in a crisis situation.

Well, but in order to create safety, I think we've been using the word safety as a risk, as a problem. But in order to create safety, that is the student support responses that you are talking about. You cannot create safety without supportive systems.

You're 100% right, and I think it's often overlooked. I do. Melding that together. I ask when we look at MTSS, even. You sit down, and you look at all these isolated interventions you have, whether they're academic, whether they're social-emotional, whether they're behavioral. But how does that tie into a bigger perspective of safety, if we want to use that term, how do we utilize them as preventative tools, as proactive tools? And even in those safety situations, a crisis situation, I'm going to say that we can walk away from a situation with more information about that student, knowing that, hey, maybe this level of support, this intervention at this tier, if you follow a tier-based model, would be the most appropriate for the student. We don't have to follow that rigmarole of everything going through, try your tier two, try go through this one, and do add the individualized features. We can tailor-make it to that.

But in order to get to that point, you also have to know what resources and tools you have at your disposal. And I think teams don't spend enough time, in my opinion. They focus on the student, yes, student-centric always, but often they focus on the deficit mindset. What are they not doing well? What are their scores low in? What are they not able to do? And not as much of not also, and what tools do we have that can support the student? We have a myriad of these options. How can we leverage some of these very great interventions, these strong tools, these easy, sometimes low-hanging fruit to match with this need? Because in doing that moving forward, it might reduce the future probability that we're going to see an escalation to that level.

Will it fix everything? There's probably no magic potion that's going to fix everything for eternity, but it's those gradients of success that we can find. We can use those resources. We can baby-step that forward by looking at what tools we have, where our holes are, and how we can incorporate those to help support these students. Yes, you will have a crisis. It's going to be in your face. I guarantee it.

It's going to have an impact on your staff. It's going to have an impact on your students. But let that impact come out in a way that you come out stronger. As a team, you debrief; you come out stronger, and you learn. What did we learn from this? What can we do differently? What tools do we have at our disposal, and how can we help in this system? A myriad of these supports- can we help support the students? So tomorrow, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, whenever we're in a situation that could lead to that escalatory pattern, do we have some proactive things in place for that student so they can feel supported? They're not out of control, and there isn't a problem that they can't solve, because maybe that problem has shifted. Maybe it's a little bit smaller, maybe it's different, but supports- we lose that when all we focus on is isolated safety. We lose it because it's an and/or, and it should be an and-period.

So then I guess let's talk about when we have a situation, and I don't care how we conceptualize that, if it's a student, if it's a classroom, if it's a whole local level event. When there is a situation after that, what does repair look like? Because I think a lot of times there's harm done in a variety of different social directions, and that's a lot of times what people are trying to protect against or using as justification for why the individual that maybe caused that harm doesn't need to have any dignity in this because they lost that because they harmed other people. So let's walk through how we repair some of that harm that may have been done, if that's with the individual themself, if it's maybe with their peers, with other adults. Let's walk that out because I think it's not just let's debrief and learn from it.

I think there's some repair that needs to happen, and if we're good at repairing these relational harms, then we tend to see teams come back to the place where they're actually willing to intervene and engage in a lot of these systems pieces that we're talking about. And we kind of like, all of these weird sideswipe type of outcomes don't become as much of a reality. But if teams don't know how to repair that harm and they don't walk that, then it just becomes this social standoff where they're justifying kind of a lack of intervention, a lack of systems response, and just kind of hanging that individual out. So let's walk through that. What does repair actually look like?

Yeah, and I'll start with an unexpected place. In those moments where it is a significant event, I almost emphatically say that the student will be removed for some short period of time; call it a suspension. Sometimes they look to expulsion, but most often schools are going to file those disciplinary guidelines, and they're going to have some kind of suspension. And this is where all of it even starts. I try to tell teams, if I'm working with them, or get them to think of the mindset of oftentimes educators will follow a disciplinary code of conduct and guidelines, and they'll suspend the student, and they'll say, "Okay, this space gives us time to breathe." Well, the reality of it is there is never a better time than to lean in right now.

Because if that student is in a situation where you've had to use local supports or increase that family involvement or supervision or whatever it is, in that moment, you are at a critical time. That student is going to come back to your door, period. They're going to come back, whether it's coming back to appeal an expulsion process or an expulsion; they're still entitled to a FAPE (Free Appropriate Public Education). And you're going to have to address that. But in that moment, you have time. You have time to plan. You have time to work as a team. It's a time to sit in and hope that tomorrow is business as usual, just to have an "easy day," is time and resources lost.

And so, if you find yourself in that situation, the first thing I tell you is: if you're walking through the cycle where you're going to have to have some form of repair and restoration, restorative practices that are there, you use that time very wisely to lean in. You start your planning that day before you leave that school building. You continue it on. If you have a two-day or a three-day, whatever that is, you're doing it because the last thing you want to be caught with is a student where your staff has had two or three days. Where they've been able to breathe easy in their easy days, and that student comes right back into your building, into that same class, in that same environment.

Because I would argue that you're no better than you were before; if not, maybe you're worse off to address any of that situation. You got a break. That's all you got. And that isn't a student-centric break. So, it starts there, going back.

Well, I mean, I'll echo that because I've been walking a kid who's coming back in from a suspension or expulsion, and we are walking back into that classroom, and you get the, "Oh, you're back." "Well, crap." And any potential attempt at, “Can we pick this up? Do we have an opportunity to repair what happened?” should have been done before I was even walking that kid back into that room, first of all. But even when the first interaction back in is, "Oh, you again?" Like, "Oh, I still got to put up with you." No repair has been done here.

No. And the reality of it is, when that happens, it's not looking at it as, "Oh, we're just going to move on, business as usual." It's really looking at: What can we do in these moments? What approaches can we take? How can we present ourselves? How can we repair some of those relationships? How can we rebuild the trust? How can we restore that sense of safety and dignity in that classroom and still support that student? Accountability is a prerequisite of that restoration. It is 100%. And so you have the time to even ask, how are we going to reintroduce the... What is that reintroduction plan?

Right. Reentry is a thing.

How are we going to do this? How can we do it with a support-centric mindset for this student? What is that telling us? Who was harmed? Who was affected? What can be redone to repair some of that harm? How do we set that situation up so that the entire system we have for that student is more supportive than it was previously? Because it wasn't supportive enough to address some of the needs that were there for the child. They were waving a flag. They were telling us, "Hey, there is a problem that I can't solve." "And I don't know how to communicate it, but I'm going to do it behaviorally." You don't just reopen that classroom door. You have to have that structured reentry plan. You've got to have expectations of people, of the staff, of the team.

How many times have the team members been the ones who are choosing not to re-engage, even when students are trying, or some of the adults are part of perpetuating some of the harm that is being done, and the students are only reacting to it? And nobody wants to think of the adults being "the problem" in the situation. But these are the realities, which is why, when I'm looking at how we repair the harm, that can go so many different directions. And it really is the foundation of whether it just perpetuates ongoing crisis, or if we can actually find a stopgap to slow this down and potentially end that cycle of reactions to begin with.

Yeah. And in those situations, you're right. You have to build that time in. You have to plan out how, as a class, how as a program, how we're going to process what happened and how we move forward. And I see a lot of these great things happening with restorative circles and circle-based practices, talking through that. That might not always be the most appropriate, especially when you're working with littles.

It just looks different.

It does, exactly. It's not going to be as forthcoming in the expectation that dialogue is going to generate from all of the students. It might need to be prompted, probed, and pulled out. But you facilitate those discussions. You help rebuild that sense of togetherness you had in your classroom. And if you're just starting to build that sense of togetherness, what a good way to start. We all have bad days, myself included. We're allowed. We are allowed to have bad days.

That's just the human experience. That has no age range on it whatsoever.

And then what can we do in the future moving forward? We can process what we went through, and we can build off of it. And I would love to say, "Hey, if you do X, Y, and Z, it's always going to work." The reality of it is, every kid, every situation, every system's going to be different. But I would encourage teams, as part of that debrief, as that time where you lean in, if you find yourself in a situation where a student has been suspended, to lean in on those systems and say, "Hey, what do we have? What do we need?" You might find, at a structural level, there are significant gaps. And I would tell you, that's probably not going to be the only student that might benefit from something that you have a gap in. How do you partner with outside agencies, collaborate with family? How are you opening those doors? How are you incorporating them into an entire system of support for that student?

And I'll add in, for those adults, because then no one adult is trying to champion a situation, a student, a scenario by themselves, because it is the system that is collectively resourcing the system to meet all of those needs. That, for me, has always been one of the strongest parts of having a truly functional student support system: every human can plug into that system, and then they can pick up what they can pick up. They have their capacity, they have how they fit into it, and then on the receiving end, students can access what they need- no more, no less- that it's all theirs, all available. And it sounds really pretty. It's a bear to build. To actually get that up and truly functional.

But all of the teams that I am working with who are like, "Oh my gosh, these kids are too much, and our systems can't handle it," and all of this, it's like, you're right, because everybody's reinventing every single wheel in every single scenario. But if you had a system, then your cognitive load is less. You can just pick up what you need to do and move on with that. Your own personal experience is so much more stable. Systems truly can help remove the individual lift that it takes to respond well in crisis, because the system is taking it all.

Yes. And when you're going through that, too, I remember sitting and looking over behavioral data. You're doing a review, and we're trying to figure out what's going on. What are we seeing as patterns? And so, of course, you see all these incidents. And they're categorized, and they're put up, and then you say, "Oh, 16% were this, 3% were that, 9% were this." And when you go through that rue, and you find out, hey, some of those might have been more significant than others, let's look at the actual write-up of what was actually happening in there. And I would be willing to wager you're probably going to find a pattern eventually.You're probably going to find that pattern.

And, well, you might not find a canned intervention, right, that you're going to be able to just plug on the shelf and look, but you might find a structural-level problem. But it's hidden, because the data, when you're only looking at it from a quantitative perspective, sometimes you miss the weight of that qualitative insight. Those broad brush strokes that leave all the color and everything else out of it by just a very rigid numerical table- you can find that our system, yeah, we might have all these options, but what options do we have in that moment? Because we're finding an increase in elopement, or an increase in physical aggression, or an increase in self-injurious behavior, whatever it is.

I'm using very extreme situations, but I'm doing that for a reason, because those are the ones that raise the hackles, that bring up that S word, the safety word. And a safety plan, and a crisis plan, and a threat, and all this other stuff. And we're doing these things, but we can also recognize that that might be telling us that there are supports that need to be infused in our system, because we're seeing it not in isolated situations, but as a continuation. It tells us about our network, it tells us about our students, it tells us about our systems. You just have to be in a position to learn, listen, and try and respond in a supportive way.

Well, thank you for taking this conversation on with me, because I know no one ever really wants to talk about the crisis situations, but gosh, after they happen, everybody wants to talk about them. So thank you for showing up and engaging in such a way that says, "Hey, it's bigger than just that situation." It's all of the individuals that are part of that. It's what's happened long before that. There are so many pieces of information and data that we can take from the actual event after the fact that we can then process and team together better. Thank you for taking just that crisis situation and making it so much bigger in terms of the context in which it's situated. That's really where the opportunity and the effort is. So thank you so much for having this conversation with me.

Yeah, thanks for allowing me to have that dialogue with you. It's really good, especially from our past histories, knowing that we've been in those situations shoulder to shoulder in the past. And a lot of learning. A lot of learning in that.

Thank you.