Bookshelf: Kappan authors on their favorite reads

During my first year working in a public elementary school, the top drawer of my desk was filled with stickers, Velcro, stamps, and a jumble of markers. I often used these tools to make colorful incentive charts, which were part of the predominant method of managing behavior at the time and the emphasis of my recent training as a special educator. Ross Greene’s The Explosive Child helped me understand why this approach was inadequate and needed to change.

The Explosive Child not only outlines why traditional incentive plans do not work but also offers an alternative, empathetic, skill-building approach. Greene’s book challenges the conventional belief that students who struggle to manage their behavior choose not to behave in order to gain or avoid something. He illustrates that students would behave if they could and that when a student is misbehaving, it is due to a lagging social or emotional skill. The most common underdeveloped skills in students exhibiting challenging behavior include social skills, attention, working memory, self-regulation, flexible thinking, and executive functioning processes. Greene goes on to say that teaching students these skills will help them change their behavior in a more long-term way. While the book is geared toward parents, this paradigm shift is applicable and crucial for all educators and school personnel.

Greene’s book not only helped me create more space in my desk drawer but also led to a permanent shift in how I support struggling students and has been infused within my work ever since.