The 'Dysregulation' Fad and How New Terminology Messes with Our Thinking

Let's talk about fads in education and specifically the neuroscience terminology fad like calling a student being upset, dysregulated.

I'm seeing this more and more and if you've been in the profession as long as I have, I think this is my 23rd year in education, you start to see these fads come and go and you start to see some patterns in what happens.

And I think with terminology in particular, it can blind us to bad ideas that are accompanying familiar ideas, right?

So if we have a new term for something familiar, like if instead of saying this student is upset or this student is throwing a fit or this student is really heated or they're just agitated or they're mad right now, Now we call them dysregulated, and we can argue about whether that's actually a valuable change or not.

But what I think does happen when we introduce new terminology is we temporarily close our eyes to mistakes in thinking or lapses in logic that allow us to make some mistakes in how we approach school discipline and how we think about these situations with our students, for example.

If we say a student is dysregulated and then we say, well, they're dysregulated because they're hungry, then it might start to make sense to us to send that student to the office and have them get a snack and then let them come back in just a minute, kind of no matter what they did.

And, you know, a few years ago, we would have said, well, wait a minute.

We have to be careful not to reward bad behavior or incentivize kids to get sent to the office just to get a snack and get a break from class.

And then like this is going to spread.

And a lot of you have said in the comments that, yes, that's exactly what's happening.

People are, you know, reinforcing kids for their worst behaviors.

And then those behaviors are spreading to other kids.

And now kids that didn't have struggles with behavior before are acting up more and more.

And of course, we can predict some of that if we use the old terminology.

But if we use the new terminology and we say, now this student is not just upset, but they're dysregulated, we can kind of lose our usual reasoning and our usual rationality about how these things work.

And we can end up with policies that don't make any sense.

So I think the best corrective to this, if we're being kind of deceived or at least blinded by new terminology, is to paraphrase it with the old terminology.

And if somebody says to you, hey, this kid is dysregulated, that's why I gave him a candy bar, you could say, well, I mean, obviously all students need to eat.

Nutrition is important, food is important, but we just had our class snack and lunch is coming up, so you didn't really need to give him a candy bar.

And if you give a kid a candy bar every time they act inappropriately, they're going to catch on very quickly and start acting inappropriately to get the candy bar.

Like if you paraphrase and don't use that magic new word that's been invented, you know, like sometimes people use the new word and act like they've invented a fifth state of matter.

And that's not the case, right?

These are familiar concepts.

They're nothing new.

We just need to talk about them in the way that we always have in order to avoid some of these mistakes in our thinking about our policy and our approach to students.

Let me know what you think.