ABSTRACT
Adolescents dealing with significant emotional and mental health concerns often exhibit disruptive patterns of behavior that impede academic and social functioning at school. Many school responses to this type of “acting out” are punitive and ineffective due to being reactive instead of proactive. To effectively tackle these challenging behaviors, we need to understand the motivations prompting the adolescents’ problematic coping patterns and design our interventions to result in actual change. Discussion of case examples consider ways we can utilize informed understanding of motivating factors to develop better ways to tackle challenging behavior and improve student ability to succeed at school.
