Unusual, problematic student behavior, step one: figuring out what's going on

8 Scenarios seen in classrooms, with possible explanations: 

1.  A student runs out of class crying and is crying in your office/classroom alone.
  à Is it depression, or a tough time, or bipolar, or stressed about school and wanting to be excused from doing some of the work?

2. A student is okay some days, sluggish and confused some days, and attendance is irregular.  

  à Is it poor time management, depression, or substance abuse?

3a. A student who spoke her name clearly on the first day of class, suddenly on the third day of class speaks in a string of sentences that doesn't seem to make sense. 

  à Am I (the teacher/professor) just not getting what they mean, or is the student's thinking disorganized?  

3b. What if the student's individual words often don't make sense?

  à Am I having hearing, listening, or processing issues, is it a language barrier, or does the student have a problem articulating words facially or even even trouble forming words in the brain?

4. A student doesn't look sleepy but stares off into space and it's hard to get their attention, sometimes zoning out even in a one on one conversation.  

  à Is it ADHD, or are they dissociating, or having a trauma flashback, or just sleep deprived and on caffeine?

5. A student seems to be in conflict with the teacher/professor at every opportunity, in class, in the office, by email; the student seems to be twisting words, inflaming misunderstandings.  

  à Is there something I'm doing wrong, is there some other agenda I'm missing, or is it a personality issue, or is there a learning or communication or mood issue?

6. A student sits up front, volunteers answers more often than most students, but gets caught up in details of class content, while missing some more general insights and core concepts, and is seemingly oblivious to other students chuckling about how "off" the comments are sometimes.  

  à Is the student compensating for below average ability by showing off some memorized information, or is there a possible Asperger's/autism spectrum disorder here?

7. A student is fully alert one moment then collapsed into apparent sleep the next.

  à Are they not managing sleep schedules, or is it narcolepsy?

8. A student gets out of the seat and starts striding around the room, waving his or her arms, and grunting.
  à Is the student angry, making some point, or having a psychotic episode or mood episode?

This is just a sample of the stories I've seen and heard in the past 10 years, almost all of them seen in college classrooms, though I could give similar examples from a previous seven years in elementary schools and earlier years in high school and middle/junior high schools.

So what am I supposed to do in that moment? 

Step one: How do I figure out what is happening? 

Don't just say "get help"; that's not always an immediate option. Besides, how do I know when it's serious enough to get help?

As a teacher or other member of a college or high school faculty, you may be confronted with these situations in which being able to get the basic sense of what is happening will help you know how to respond.  

So how do I figure out what is happening? There are three stages at which you could pick up helpful clues:  1) be informed ahead of time, 2) take guesses in the moment, and 3) get expert assessment help later.

1) Ahead of time, as I recommended in a previous post, ask everyone in the class to let you know of situations and conditions that may affect performance or behavior in the classroom.

2) Immediately after the unusual behavior (right after class or, if the behavior is so disruptive that the class stops, then out in the hall immediately after the behavior has settled down), talk to the student to help you understand what happened.  The I DON'T UNDERSTAND, but HERE ARE SOME GUESSES intervention: The best method for finding this information without invading privacy is, instead of asking, is to say you don't understand take guesses, following the model of the guesses I have listed above.  With practice, and some mental health education, and experience, you can get good at generating at least two guesses for every behavior.  Do not make one single guess!  Better to seem naive then to make incorrect assumptions "you must be doing drugs" or "you must have be lazy" or "you must be faking it to get a laugh."  Include such guesses as part of MULTIPLE possibilities, and let the student choose the one that fits. 

3) After the unusual behavior:  call in the experts. If the behavior has a consistent unusual pattern to it, a mental health and substance use expert (clinical social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, etc.) may be called in at the school or privately to help assess the situation.      As I recommended in a previous post, see if you can keep this information from being hidden behind a wall of confidentiality; ask for the student or parent (if the student is under 18) to sign a release of information form so you can find out the student's needs and how to be helpful to that student.  You can be clear that you are going to maintain confidentiality by not sharing this information with other students. 

   You may not want to know the private details of your students' lives and minds, but if it affects your classroom, then you may want to be prepared to understand the behavior and know what, if anything, you need to do to help that student, and the nearby students, to get around the problem and succeed in your classroom.

Overall lesson:  It's okay to guess.  I suggest going back to the 8 examples and seeing if you can come up with all of the guesses I listed.  If you can, you've learned the most crucial lesson from this post, and you at least will be less likely to feel completely lost when situations arise.

Next: what to do depending on what's going on

Upcoming posts could deal with specific conditions that can come up, most of which I've listed in the examples above, and follow up with what to do about them.
At the college level, I'm hearing that the most common problems are substance use and ADHD, but the most troubling, frustrating, and confusing problems are 1) possible hallucinations, 2) uncontrolled crying, and 3) the "odd, socially out of touch" behavior of possible Asperger's/autism spectrum disorder.  For more information on that last one, check posts I'll be adding to my Autism Spectra blog: http://autismspectra.blogspot.com/  In this blog, I may focus next on the rare but confusing symptom of hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms. 

Please list your comments or questions below, tell me what situation or condition you'd like to hear about first! Tell me/us your challenging story, leaving out identifying details, even gender, if you can.