Facilitating Solutions-Oriented Meetings About Student Behavior

Have you been in a meeting with other colleagues to discuss a student’s challenging behavior? The intent of the meeting was to update the student’s behavior plan or develop supportive solutions and strategies. However, the meeting quickly turned into a spiral of negativity. Instead of brainstorming new strategies, you spent 45 minutes redirecting back to potential solutions, managing staff emotions and watching conversations spiral out of control.

What you envisioned as a productive meeting has now turned into a venting session. Everyone continues to focus on the problem instead of identifying solutions or strategies, and you ultimately leave with a plan less productive than the one you came in with.

Garner staff Buy-in and Facilitate COLLABORATION

When developing plans for students with challenging behavior, it’s crucial to collaborate with staff. Their buy-in is essential to support the plan, improve the fidelity of implementing the behavior plan, and improve student behavioral outcomes long-term.

However, those collaborative meetings can become counterproductive if they aren’t structured in a way that reinforces and guides staff to focus on the solutions to support the student. These meetings can quickly spiral and feel like they’re beyond recovery. So, how do you avoid the pitfalls and the meeting spiral all while talking, make staff feel heard during a challenging time, and develop solutions and strategies for the student’s behavior?

4 Tips for Solution-Focused Student Behavior Meetings 

Structuring meetings strategically allows staff to engage in intentional dialogue and supportive conversations, all while achieving the goals of creating solutions for students’ challenging behavior. Structure maintains a meeting’s focus and purpose, and allows a flow of topics that are intentionally placed to prevent reactive emotional responses as we discuss solutions to challenging student behavior. So, what does that meeting structure look like?

1. Celebrations. It’s important to set the tone of a meeting at the beginning. As the facilitator of the meeting, you create the climate and conversation by the way you lead into the situation. Starting every meeting off with student celebrations allows you to set the tone for the meeting in a way that is collaborative and engages everyone in participating.

I like to start by having everyone go one by one to share something related to an area that the student has improved in or is doing well with, or anything positive about the student. This strategy allows staff to humanize students beyond their behavior and not see their negative behavior as the sole focus of the conversation.

2. Student strengths. The meeting often spirals because we shift too much of our focus on circumventing the student’s deficits as opposed to thinking about what strengths the student brings to the classroom. When we focus on student strengths, we can shift our focus from a deficit-based intervention model to thinking about how to use what a student excels at within their behavioral interventions. For example, if a student responds well to predictability and structure, including a visual schedule in their day and doing a morning check-in when the schedule may be different is a way to think about their strength and turn it into an intervention.

3. Behaviors and barriers. Once we’ve acknowledged a student’s accomplishments and strengths, it’s time to identify their particular challenges in order to bridge the gap between deficit-based thinking and solution-focused action steps.

In this part of the meeting, it’s important to meet your staff’s emotional need to be heard—all while categorizing behaviors in a way that allows alignment with interventions. This can begin with staff taking the time to name all the student’s behaviors and barriers and then categorizing them into groups based on similar qualities.

Creating time limits around this part of the meeting can help to avoid spiraling and encourage the staff to focus on developing a supportive student plan. For example, set a three-minute timer and prompt staff to “name all the barriers you see with this student” and write them down for everyone to see. When the timer goes off, it will be easy to identify the student’s particular skill deficit.

4. Targeted intervention. Now that we’ve categorized the behaviors and identified the skills that the student needs to learn, we can align interventions that provide the necessary support.

To do this, lead staff in the appropriate direction by using intentional questions and guiding them back to a solution-focused mindset. Utilize sentence starters (“I notice/wonder...,”“I see this skill deficit... Can we teach?...,” “The student has this strength… How can we?…”) that facilitate inquisitive conversation and positive movement.

In staff meetings, I’ve found that the following statements work well:

• “I wonder what would happen if we tried that strategy when they’re engaging in that behavior.”
• “I notice that the student responds well to new staff members. I wonder how we can embed some new staff into their week.”
• “One of the student’s strengths was responding well to staff predictability. I wonder how we could use that to support their transitions around the building.”
• “I noticed that the student struggles the most during math. I wonder how we could target some more math intervention for them.”
• “One of the student’s strengths was reading. I wonder if we could increase regulation by embedding quiet reading breaks throughout their day.”

Structure Yields Positive Results

Creating a structure and guiding framework around how to talk about challenging student behavior allows staff to have solution-based conversations instead of ones that continue to glorify the problem and contribute to the negative narrative around a student’s behavior. Harnessing and uplifting student accomplishments and strengths are pivotal in the process of creating supportive communities around students. This moves meetings and conversations around challenging behavior from furious ones to curious ones, where we see the whole student beyond the behavior they present to us.