Making the switcheroo : the experiences of veteran teachers of aggressive and challenging students

“Making the Switcheroo'' was a qualitative study of long-term teachers of aggressive and challenging students. The intent of the study was to understand the phenomenon of teaching aggressive students and to gain insights into how teachers do this work long-term.

Thirteen teachers from elementary and secondary school Behavioral Disabilities (BD) programs who had done this work for five years or more were the participants in this study. They were from public school resource and self-contained settings for BD students, as well as from self-contained facilities. Participants were asked to describe their experiences with their students in an in-depth, open-ended interview format.

Interviews were interpreted with the assistance of a cross-disciplinary collaborative research group skilled in phenomenological approaches to qualitative research. Analysis of the interviews yielded five inter-related themes common to the experience of working with aggressive students: safety/danger; fast/slow; predictability/unpredictability; control/out-of-control; and vigilance. Three themes described the transitions long-term teachers made with experience: learning to balance student needs against their own, personalizing formal theory and techniques in their work and translating student characteristics in different ways. For long-term teachers, it was usually not student characteristics that cause them work dissatisfaction. Rather, issues identified were systemic difficulties, including the lack of resources, limited support, and excessive demands on their time by work other than teaching.