After the Student Throws a Chair

As someone who consults with schools during moments of crisis, I’m often asked whether a student who posed a threat or has caused harm should return to the school. It’s a question that carries enormous weight—for the student in question, for their peers, and for the adults trying to do right by everyone.

While there’s a part of me that may want to say no—full stop—I’ve learned that circumstances differ, depending on the professionals in the building, the students in the classroom, and the school’s and family’s ability to coordinate together to restore safety.

There are five established principles that most directly shape the conversation that I may have with the educational team.

First: aggression is like a ball rolling downhill—the more it happens, the more likely it is to keep happening. Behavior is inherently reinforcing.

Second: the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Third: once behavior has been learned it’s not really unlearned, only suppressed. Some suspect you can create new experiences where old memories get linked to new or prosocial positive experiences; while others would say that you never unlearn what you learned nonetheless.

Fourth: we experience context- and state-dependent learning. This means that the sensory input we take in and our physiological state influences how we behave. Example: people at High School reunions often revert to old patterns of speech—they’re back in the space and state that shaped them long ago. If behavior is shaped in the walls, the stimuli, the input of a particular school, that behavior is more likely to be exhibited in that same space.

Fifth: Externalizing behavior is associated with shame phobia - that is a phobic response to shameful emotions. A student who is externalizing is more likely than other students to have a quick trigger "fight" response when experiencing any shame at all. The remedy, therefore would be to experience shame and not react to it (i.e., not try to escape from it through aggressive acts). They may need to become more introspective, perhaps, less reactive. And so this means adults must not shield them from consequences and feelings about their behavior.

Taken together, these truths remind us that behavioral change is hard. When we’re trying to shift behavior, we’re trying to swim upstream against the current. And that is exhausting and stressful. Severe stress, as we know, can be hard on the human system. It should be paced.

When it comes to aggression by a student in a classroom, the concern isn’t only for the student who aggressed—it’s also for the students who witnessed violence in their classroom. In school settings, we should protect the kids who have been subjected to aggression—recognizing that they won’t always say what’s going on internally. I look for ways to support them.

And even with the odds stacked against us and students being vulnerable to any further threats, there are times when every adult in the system wants to reintegrate the student who did harm back into the school—even if it’s unlikely they’ll return to the classroom. When that happens, I require a threshold that is not easy to meet.

I’d want to see the student who engaged volatile behavior in the classroom engaging in prosocial behavior. I’d want to see them wade in the waters of stress—without flailing, without capsizing. I need to see compliance with adult direction, and a growing emotional capacity outside of school. I want to see the student experiencing strong emotions and not reacting.

If I’m in a position to influence the process, I train parents and teachers to become warm demanders - those adults who can consciously reflect, acknowledge, and validate kids emotionally, while also having high expectations for conduct. And because there are often physical basis for behavior, I tend to advocate for medical evaluations—bloodwork to rule out physiological causes, medication reviews, sleep studies, ENT consults. I want to know that sleep quality is intact. And sometimes I match these students with therapeutic mentors, those who will climb mountains with these students, kayak long distances, and push them to their physical limits as a way to induce stress and reset their systems.

While advising or even supporting the process of reintegration of the student back into the school, I lean heavily on my colleagues to conduct neuropsych evaluations, and I advocate for observations across different settings—home, school, community. And if the student has been educationally neglected in the context of a learning disability, then I will advocate fiercely for those learning needs to be addressed.

And if I don’t see what I’m describing here—if I cannot get the adults involved to prioritize proper assessments and learning interventions, or if I do not observe shifts in the students' emotional capacities, and if there’s a high risk that the student will harm others, themselves, or their teacher—then I would likely be advising, alongside the rest of the team, that the student not return to that school. And that is because the first mandate is always: Do no harm. And, I know such a conclusion does not seem satisfying. But that is why I want so desperately for society to invest in prevention. Because the chair being thrown is not a foregone conclusion. It doesn't have to be this way. If we all invested in prevention efforts - we could have well run classrooms. We could have situatoins where we aren't all trying to swim upstream.