De-Escalation Is Not the Goal When a Student Is Violent
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that when a student is violent, simply de-escalating the situation isn't enough — there must be meaningful consequences and safety measures.
Key Takeaways
- De-escalation is the floor, not the ceiling - Calming a violent situation is necessary but wholly insufficient as a response
- Violence requires consequences - Students who assault others need to face real consequences, not just a cool-down period
- Safety must come first - Protecting victims and potential victims is more important than avoiding disciplinary action
Transcript
When a student is violent toward other people, they don't need to be de-escalated or just have a chance to calm down.
They need to be sent home right away.
I got a comment from a teacher yesterday who was shoved by a student and the administrator's response was to come and sit with the student and redirect the student until the student was calm and could learn again.
And I get that we want students to learn as much as possible, but if a student is violent and gets to stay in the classroom, well, everybody's just learning that violence is okay, that violence is acceptable.
So calming down, getting deescalated cannot be the priority when there is violence.
When a student is violent toward classmates or toward a staff member whether it's a para or a teacher or administrator anybody we have to respond by sending that student home because that is what is going to create a boundary that says if you're going to come here you're going to be safe right the other people in this environment have a right to be safe and you have an obligation to be safe if you're the person who did this you got to go home at least for a while and depending on the severity maybe longer term And when we just focus on de-escalation, we teach the wrong message, right?
We create this situation where nobody can really guarantee anybody else's safety.
And we talk a lot about being trauma informed.
What about all the students who have already experienced trauma?
Maybe they've experienced violence in their personal lives.
and then they have to witness violence in the classroom.
That is not trauma-informed.
The most trauma-informed thing that we can do at schools with regard to violence is not tolerate it, but make sure that it is never tolerated so that when students show up to school, they know it is going to be a safe place.
It may be the safest place they ever go in their lives.
We've got to make sure that school is physically safe from violence.
So we can't prioritize learning at the expense of physical safety.
Like this is a Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing.
People have to be safe before they can learn.
And it is not just about the person who is being violent.
It's not just about their learning.
It is about everybody else's learning.
So let me know what you're hearing about this.
I feel like we just lost sight of the fact that there's everybody else in the room.
There's a teacher, there's maybe a pair, there are lots of other students.
It is not just about the learning of that one kid who is, yeah, probably going to miss some learning time if they are violent.
That is just kind of a natural consequence of of being violent and the consequence of being sent home is not intended as a punishment that's designed to change the behavior.
That's the thing that I think we really have to realize.
We don't know what's going to change the behavior.
The suspension may be a vacation for the kid.
Maybe so, that's fine.
We don't really know.
We can't play like reverse psychology games with individual kids.
We have to follow boundaries.
We have to have boundaries that give predictable consequences for things like violence so that kids don't do those things and that everybody else Has the predictability of feeling safe that if something like this happens, there's not going to be impunity That's that's the main thing that a boundary does is it breaks the impunity of the student who is not behaving safely?
So let me know what you think