Why Do So Many Autistic Students Constantly Test Boundaries

 

An Educational Aside

I have been thinking a lot lately a lot about why students break the rules and push boundaries and what we, as teachers and parents, can do about it. What I have come to a rather simple conclusion that I think is borne out in the literature.

I believe there are three reasons that autistic kids in particular, and most disabled kids in general, push the boundaries of rules.

1. The rule was oddly worded or vague, and the autistic student is having a hard time understanding exactly what the rule means in the first place
2. The rule is not easily and intuitively generalizable, so the autistic student lacks understanding regarding how and when the rule applies.
3. The autistic student genuinely wants to know the edges of the rules so they can define their behaviors accordingly. And the only way to know this is to push against the boundaries to know where they are.

I will address each of these and corresponding solutions in the post below.

Rules, Rules, Rules

Please do not do this.

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First, some examples of rules available on the internet. All of these drive me absolutely bonkers. They are vague, cute, hard to read, and impossible to generalize. And we expect autistic kids to implicitly understand what these mean and how to do them.

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I focus a lot on rules and how students react to them. My personal bias is that most rules in classrooms are stupid and generally unhelpful. I say this because rules rarely teach students appropriate behavior. As I have mentioned in some previous posts (but I will refer you specifically to this one), rules are at best a distraction in class and at worst a challenge to the students that are to be rebelled against.

The post I linked above makes a point that I will return to later in this post: it is better to just teach easily generalizable classroom and schoolwide procedures than to impose a rule on a student. Procedures let teachers teach rather than punish, and a thorough knowledge of schoolwide and classroom procedures reduces anxiety in the students. See this post for an explanation as to why this is.

Below I will explain how I have been able to help autistic kids comply with rules and be comfortable in my classrooms. Without using ABA, compliance training, or any reliance on a tangible reward. This has been a combination of clear rules, explicit instruction, and supplementing rules with classroom procedures.

Poorly Worded Rules

Vague Rules Drive Kids to Noncompliance

The Role of Ineffective Directives in the Development of Early Childhood “Noncompliance” by Richman and Wacker in The Behavior Analyst Today.

I saw this research paper, and I got excited because it gave a mechanism to something I have always said: “Teachers are really good at giving kids behavior disorders.” They describe this as being the end result of unclear instructions and rules imposed on kids and resulting punishments for the student not understanding the instruction. They even focus on autism.

If the child is provided with an effective instructional prompt that has historically been associated with reinforcement, this type of instructional prompt will set the occasion for a chain of behavior that begins with the child discriminating the task requirements, completing the task accurately, and then receiving reinforcement through a variety of operant mechanisms such as parental praise and access to preferred activities. In this case, we can say that the child has complied.

However, if the child has a history of being provided with ineffective stimulus prompts that do not guide the child in discriminating the task requirements, these types of prompts may produce a different chain of behavior that is perceived by caregivers as noncompliance. If the child is not able to discriminate the task requirements, the parent may assume that the child is displaying noncompliant behavior, and the parent then provides various forms of redirection or punishment (e.g., reprimands, removal of preferred activities, physical punishment). Over time, the presentation of prompts is repeatedly paired with extinction or punishment, leading to avoidance or escape-maintained problem behavior. In this case, the child is repeatedly exposed to ineffective directives and then punished for perceived noncompliance.

Thus, care providers may inadvertently shape a chain of problematic behaviors that are maintained by negative reinforcement (e.g., the child may display disruptive behavior to escape completing the demand).

-Page 115 (emphasis mine)

I start with that quote from the research because I think they are clearly on to something. Kids are most often “noncompliant” because they have a history of being given vague and unclear expectations and they do not have the foggiest idea what they are supposed to do. So they misbehave. When a child is given an unclear rule, they challenge it so they can understand it. Sadly, as reflected in the quote above, instead of taking the time to teach and clarify the rules and expectations, teachers usually respond to this challenge by imposing a consequence or punishment on the student. This sets up a cycle that escalates out of control fairly rapidly.

For an autistic student, any type of ambiguity and vaguery in directions is maddening. If students are trying to comply but do not know how to do so, all they can see is the unfairness at hand. They try their best to be good, but when that fails they will go into survival behavior that is most often driven by anxiety. And, in my experience, an autistic in survival mode is invariably tagged as noncompliant and disengaged. The actual conceptual model from the paper is presented below.

The left side of this figure is the behavioral cascade that occurs when an effective direction is given. Namely the student complies because they know what to do to contact reinforcement. The right side of the figure is what happens when ineffective or unclear directions are given. In essence, the child misbehaves and is noncompliant because they have no idea what they need to do to contact reinforcement. They get frustrated by this ambiguity, so they escalate misbehavior to avoid academic tasks.

The effect of this cycle of poor instruction is that prompts from the teacher to follow the rules become associated with a punishing stimulus. This means that the typical student actually increases their violation of the rules and they are driven to engage in an escape-maintained behavior. This feeds back and causes a behavioral chain in which the student receives a vague directive and is punished for noncompliance; followed by increased problem behaviors that serve the function of contacting negative reinforcement (a task or demand being removed). We have now TAUGHT the student that escape/avoidance behavior is the functional type of behavior to meet their needs! We also have taught the autistic student that the adults in the school are unreliable and not trustworthy.

How do we Address This?

The solution in it’s most general form is to use short, clear, explicit instructions. This can often be interpreted as barking orders or talking down to students, but it isn’t. Students, particularly autistic students, appreciate the clarity and will comply when they understand the expectations and instructions.

I am not a fan of rules in general, but if we want rules to be followed they need to have the following attributes (based on research):

• The rules need to be direct
  • Rules need to be intuitively understandable
  • Rules need to be worded as directly as possible
  • Do not try to be clever or cute. This muddies up any understanding of the rules
• The rules need to be short
  • Use as few words as necessary to convey meaning
  • Do not use so few words that the meaning is unclear
• There need to be five rules at most
  • Fewer rules are better
  • Stop at five. Number six is not that important
  • Remember you do not need a rule if you have a procedure to teach the skill
• The rules need to worded positively
  • Start with “we can” or “we do.”
  • Try to avoid “do not” and “we never.”
• Rules need to be absolute
  • We cannot let rules be flexible for some students and not others. If that is the case, we need to fix our rules.

If it is important enough to be a rule, then it has to be important enough to enforce absolutely.

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To give a concrete example, my classroom rules are as follows (download them here from Teacher’s Pay Teachers):

1. We use appropriate words and voices for the situation
   • I believe in this as a rule since, in the real world, we are not always expected to use quiet voices. For example, if someone hits you or touches you inappropriately, I expect a scream and perhaps an inappropriate word. That is okay.
   • I actually teach what appropriate words and voices means across situations as a classroom procedure
   • When there is a new situation, the students may accidentally make a mistake is made in reading that situation. I re-teach the procedure and fill in the missing information
2. We keep our hands, feet, and other objects to ourselves
   • This is the classic KYHFOOTY (Keep your hands, feet, other objects to yourself).
   • This also prevents me from throwing pencils, dry erase markers and erasers to students or across the room into a trash can.
   • I teach and enforce this rule using the concept of personal space bubbles, not just physical contact
3. We are good listeners, with voices off
   • This means we never talk over others, be it teachers, paraeducators, administrators, or peers.
   • This applies to me talking over kids and other adults as well.
4. We follow directions the first time
   • Self-explanatory. I am okay if they did not hear me, as I will happily give a courtesy reminder. I understand if a student is engrossed in their activity, they may be zoned out.
   • There is zero tolerance for hearing me and not responding. I am not going to count to 3 to give a series of warnings that are also ignored.
     • The one exception to this rule was a situation wherein it was necessary to implement the 1-2-3 Magic approach for a student to align with what he was doing at home.
   • I do accept polite requests for more time to clean up or finish a thought, page, etc. We give this time to adults and the kids deserve the same courtesy – so long as they ask.
5. We try new things, even if we don’t want to
   • This rule was adapted from my teacher mentor. She had taught in Asperger’s and autism classrooms for decades. She developed this rule to remind the students to try new things. As a rule, they had to do new stuff. No matter how much they did not want to.
   • This rule was helpful for me when I had a district trainer that was teaching me things like why I was required to have rules in the first place.

Now here is the key to my rules working. They were absolute. Itty bitty violations of the rules were not tolerated. Not from me. Not from the students. We all knew this. Everyone understood the rules and everyone was willing to help each other follow them. None of us wanted the chaos that comes with rules open to interpretation.

Now, an important proviso to the above. rule violations were not tolerated, but they were never punished. Instead, I retaught the rule whenever it was broken. Needless to say, there was a lot of re-teaching of procedures and rules in my classroom.

This applies to noncompliance because the rules were over taught and crystal clear. Every day there was a daily focus. I moved one of the rules to another column, and we talked about what following the rule looked like and what challenges we have had lately in following the rule. The classroom procedures were designed to supplement the rules, and I was explicit in telling the students this.

Finally — and I had to work to develop this skill — when I gave an instruction it was blunt, clear, and short. Some teachers joked I was a dictator in my classroom and I was so far as my rules were concerned. But I felt it was critical that the students were 100% sure what I was asking. That way they never had to worry about getting in trouble. I also avoided idiomatic sayings and jargon so much as possible because many autistic kids have trouble with nonliteral language if not previously taught (Link).

My point here is emphasized by Amelia Bedelia books. She is evidence that any instruction can be misunderstood if not explained thoroughly and persnickety enough. I recommend aspiring for clarity in instructions that is Bedelia-proof (link to Amelia Bedelia’s antics).

Finally, making requests and demands of students using questions or passive (aggressive) statements is never appropriate (e.g., “would you like to finish your conversation and join the class”). If you do this, then you have to accept, “No thank you” as an answer. You asked after all, and they responded.

Rules can be Difficult to Generalize

We have now set up our 5 classroom rules. They are pithy, measurable, crystal clear, immutable, and positively worded. In our classroom, the rules are — for the most part — effective and the students know what they mean. However, everything falls apart for a few of our autistic students when we go to library, art, computers, and recess. It is like these kids flat out forget our rules the instant they leave the classroom.

At this point, school teams are left with some questions: Does this mean the autistic students are naughty? Does it mean they only respond to our in-class authority? Are the specialty teachers weak on classroom management? Are the students actively choosing to be hellions when we are not around? Do they have ADHD? Do they have ODD or PDA? Do they need full-time special education or ABA therapy?

The short answer to all of the above is, “No. The students just do not know any better”, particularly if they are autistic and have a hard time extracting the essence of rules that must be generalized. We often forget to teach this skill because most people have a tendency to over-generalize anyway (how many parents have had their neurotypical kids raise their hand at dinner before speaking?). Autistics tend to be the opposite. They pour over the specifics and often have difficulty extrapolating across situations and settings.

If we forget to teach how and when to apply our classroom rules schoolwide, we are in trouble. A percentage of our autistic students will get in trouble every single time they leave our classroom for specialties. They will make easily avoidable mistakes at recess. They will somehow manage to fail at accomplishing lunch. So we make what we feel is a reasonable assumption, that they are choosing to misbehave when we are not around. As a consequence, we clamp down on them and remove freedoms…and then they become model students because they are in our classroom full time under our rules, which they understand and enjoy following. When we inevitably let them return to specialties the cycle continues. So we assume the worst – maybe this kid has a behavior disorder or they are too autistic to be in my class, and they need full-time special ed.

We as educators are wrong to think this way because we made our students that way. Fortunately, we have the power to fix these kids’ noncompliant behavior. In fact, it is quite easy and straightforward.

How do we Address This?

There are a number of ways to address this. My first impulse is to say get rid of your rules entirely and teach schoolwide procedures that apply across these different environments. That is not an option for most teachers because they are required to have posted rules by district policy.

My way of addressing this is to have clear procedures that you over-practice and rehearse the first few weeks of school, so the students know how to act in every corner and every room in the school, as well as at recess. They know acceptable voice levels, where and how to sit, where to put their hands, and precisely how to respond to teacher instructions. Also, there need to be specific transition procedures to and from specialties that the students know as second nature. This saves literally 3-5 minutes per transition, which really adds up during the day. I often made up 30 minutes during my day in transitions after I applied this strategy, which let me squeeze in an extra writing or reading unit that day.

This extensive procedure practice mitigates the knowledge gap between what to do in class and what to do everywhere else. The kids just know. They appreciate knowing, especially your autistic kiddos.

This can be a difficult proposition as it is time-consuming and there are pressures to be focusing on curriculum starting in the first week of school. I recommend having a long chat with the building supervisor to unpack this plan and get permission to focus on behavior (this guide from Robert Marzano is a good resource to share). Any curriculum missed early on in the first week or so can be made up in the time saved by having quick and effective transitions to and from specialties.

Barring this option, the specific students that are having problems can be specifically pulled out and explicitly taught the classroom rules for the different specialty classrooms. This can be time-consuming, but it will help the autistic students understand precisely what the rules are in the different classrooms and what the expectations for behavior are. They will then not have to worry about generalizing rules across the school, they just have to remember what room they are in. As such, any disobedience cannot be attributed to not knowing the rules.

The final way to deal with this is to align your classroom rules with those used by the teachers in the specialty classrooms. This is annoying but also prevents the problem.

Vulcans Embrace Technicalities

An autistic girl I worked with told me that she was a Vulcan. I asked what she meant, and she said that her autism made her Vulcan. When we unpacked her statement, she meant that she identified with Spock because he had huge emotions, but did not know how to let them out. And when he finally did let them out, they were explosive and got him in trouble. 

When it comes to rules in the classroom, the above quote from the rebooted Star Trek movies strikes me. We can all agree that sassy Spock likes, or better stated is driven, to follow the rules. That does not keep him from looking for little loopholes and edges of the rules.

My point here is this: In my classrooms involving autistic students and students with behavioral/emotional disturbances, almost all of the students were constantly looking for the edge of my rules and what technicalities they could exploit. I will admit, this was rather annoying at times, but I had to get over myself and try to understand why they were doing it. It did not appear to me that they were being naughty. They were being curious and inquisitive – something I was trying to instill in them anyway.

When I visit classrooms one of the complaints I hear a lot is about the autistic students almost breaking the rules. Constantly. They are not breaking the rules, but they are as close as a person can get without actually being naughty. The teacher is at their wit’s end, but there is nothing they can do because the student is not being naughty. They are just constantly needling the teacher’s nerves by testing rules relentlessly.

Then one day, the autistic student takes their boundary testing too far, and the teacher comes down on them like a ton of bricks.

At this point, the teacher not only addresses the immediate case of rule-breaking (which is important that they do), but the boundary testing from the past is now brought up again and treated as a significant pattern of misbehavior and noncompliance. The student is punished for these past “transgressions” as well.

This never ends well. The autistic student is confused, and the teacher is mad and often ends up accusing the autistic student of intentionally breaking rules, being lazy, or seeking attention. In numerous cases I have witnessed, this resulted in the autistic student being moved classrooms, suspended, or being referred for special education.

How do we Address This

The way we address this is by having firm lines drawn for what constitutes rule breaking and what does not. In practice, this means when training the students on the rules at the beginning of the year, we make it abundantly clear what is and what is not allowed by the classroom rules.

As an example, let us use a rule that states, “we sit in chairs correctly” or “We use Whole-Body Listening.” These are annoyingly vague rules, but I have seen it in a lot of classrooms. Part of this infers the student will sit like this (I am forcing myself to ignore the “Heart caring about what is said” part of this diagram):

And yet, we will often see our students sitting cross-legged on the chair, leaning back on two legs, leaning forward on two legs,  slouching dramatically, sitting sideways, changing positions every 3 seconds, standing next to their chair working at the desk, etc. We have to ask ourselves a question, “At what point is this no longer appropriate?”

Here is a collection of different ways to sit. I have this chair, and I use all of them. In fact, I love my chair because I can sit wrong.

We have to ask ourselves, precisely where is the line? When we decide what is and is not tolerable, we stick to it 100% of the time. We never let any kids sit wrong — and we never sit incorrectly ourselves. For example, I have a habit of sitting on top of tables and desks. So when a student does it…I don’t care. So long as they are safe. I do it, why can’t they?

Where we draw these lines is a personal question.

I got rid of chairs altogether. So I might not be the person to ask. I also am known for saying, “natural consequences” when a kid falls backward from leaning too far on a chair. If I were forced to set a rule, it would be that all four chair legs have to be on the floor and you have to be able to write. Beyond those criteria, I do not care.

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Another example is the KYHFOOTY rule. Kids love to test what this means, and I swear have seen them all: Can they give their friends each a 15-second hug in class? Can they give a friend a solid high five? Can they bop a friend on the back of the head as they walk by? Can they trip a peer in good fun? Can they hold their hands at their sides tightly and pinball among friends to their desk from the drinking fountain? Can they touch a friend with mittens on? Can they poke friends with an eraser? Can they braid their friend’s hair in class? Can they put their stuff on a friend’s desk? Can they “play hit” if they pull their punches or kicks? Can they throw playground balls at others? … and so on.

Again, choose the exact location of the line between acceptable and not acceptable and teach it. For me I settled on the following:

• Hugs and high fives are okay at recess, but in class personal space is an absolute. Personal space bubbles also extend to desks, chairs, and property.  The classroom is neither the time nor the place for touch-related social activities.
• Hitting is always a no-go, even if play fighting and pulled punches. Do that at home. I do not have time nor energy during the school day to make a snap judgment call between play and fighting. So I decided it was all verboten before the school year began.
• Don’t throw things at anyone at school, ever. I even extended this to lending pencils and erasers. You can set things down on desks. You cannot toss, hurl, throw, or drop. I cut out the ambiguity between okay and not okay items to throw. Nothing gets thrown. If we do throw things we practice how to hand things correctly for an annoyingly long amount of time. Conveniently, dodgeball has been removed from schools, so I do not have to create any exceptions.

If we do this for all of our rules, then the students will not push boundaries. The lines are not in the sand. They are a well-signed wall with a moat and sharks with laser beams on their heads. The students know what is and are not allowed. When they get rebuked for trying to get away with something, they will relent with only a minimum of whining. Testing boundaries of rules are never worth the consequence. Your autistic students will thank you for the clarity.

A quick proviso. Everything not explicitly forbidden in the rules and procedures is fair game for the student. Doing something you have let them do before should NEVER be held against the student later. Even if they broke the rules, you let them get away with it and then be mad at yourself, not them. Also, it is always appropriate to redefine what is and is not appropriate based on experience. I changed the location of my acceptable and unacceptable behaviors many times, but I always dedicated 20 minutes to explaining how and why the change happened. My autistic kiddos were able to roll with it, even when othre teachers said they would not be able to handle the change.

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As stated above regarding my rules and their efficacy:

Now here is the key to my rules working. They were absolute. Itty bitty violations of the rules were not tolerated. Not from me. Not from the students. We all knew this. Everyone understood the rules and everyone was willing to help each other follow them. None of us wanted the chaos that comes with rules open to interpretation.

Now, an important proviso to the above. rule violations were not tolerated, but they were never punished. Instead, I retaught the rule whenever it was broken. Needless to say, there was a lot of re-teaching of procedures and rules in my classroom.

This applies to noncompliance because the rules were over taught and crystal clear. Every day there was a daily focus. I moved one of the rules to another column, and we talked about what following the rule looked like and what challenges we have had lately in following the rule. The classroom procedures were designed to supplement the rules, and I was explicit in telling the students this.

Conclusions

Clarity. Clarity. Clarity.

If we are crystal clear with our students and we teach them how to follow our rules, they will. They may test boundaries, but if we hold firm and demonstrate we are serious enough about our rules to enforce them, the kids will stop pushing. My experience says this is true for students with emotional and behavioral disturbances, mental health problems, and/or intellectual disabilities. They will revel in the structure.

Autistic students will absolutely love your approach as a teacher when you grant them the clarity and structure they seek desperately from the world. Anxiety levels drop, social skills increase, and learning becomes fun.

As a final thought, also remember that when kids break the rules, they are just kids. It happens. It is not personal. They will appreciate your compassion and try their best to be good. Sometimes it is just hard. They do need to have consequences for their behavior, but please make it proportional to the crime — and 99.9% of the time re-teaching and practice are sufficient.