Psychologists: Addressing aggressive behavior in schools

What do cognitive psychologists suggest about decreasing aggressive behavior in schools?

Noted cognitive psychologists R. J. R. Blair and Daniel T. Willingham¹ posted a column entitled “Understanding Disruptive Behavior in the Classroom” in the spring 2025 issue of American Educator. Their column, which was likely read 10s of thousands of times, provided their answers for questions that are of interest to readers of Special Education Today.

We have reservations about what they wrote and we’ll report those to the readers of Special Education Today in this article. First, though, we need to explain what our colleagues wrote. Here’s how they start their article:

QUESTION: How can we better understand and support children who are highly aggressive?

ANSWER: Aggression has multiple causes and is part of the typical human’s behavioral repertoire. However, a small percentage of children engage in more severe and more frequent aggressive behavior than is typical, and these children may have differences in several mental processes (rooted in genetics and/or their environment) that require treatment. The good news is that most of these children can be helped—if they have access to therapeutic interventions. In this article, our aim is to increase understanding of these differences so that educators can become stronger advocates for connecting these children to mental health services.

That lede sounds good and, as a lede should, it encourages readers to read more. For us, however, the more we read, the less optimistic we became about the value of this column for educators, including special educators who often are called upon to work with students who behave aggressively. The analysis and recommendations do not seem to offer much guidance, actually.

AI-generated image of bullying.

However, rather than simply letting their article pass, we want to respond. So that we can’t be charged with creating a straw target, we provide a link to the article (it’s free). Read it and see what you, Dear Readers, think of the psychologists’ explanations and proposals. And, we hope readers will then consider the concerns about it that we explain in the following sections.

Purpose

Let us note that the good professors aim to “increase understanding” of “differences in mental processes.” Given that goal, some educators may dismiss their column immediately, because educators need to know what to do. “Understanding” a phenomenon, as in the sense of being aware of it and nuances about it, may be of secondary (or even tertiary) interest.

Of course, one can argue that doing things (e.g., teaching appropriate behavior) without understanding the inappropriate behavior can be short-sighted and ill-informed. We wonder, however, to what extent understanding in the way cognitive psychologists suggest actually alters what one does in practice.

To be sure, Professors Blair and Willingham offered suggested actions for educators to take in addressing aggressive behavior in schools—and we shall discuss them. An important indicator about their recommendations is in the last line of the foregoing quote: “connecting these children to mental health services.”

Photo by yang miao on Unsplash

From the start, then, let the foregoing paragraphs hint at our reservations about emphasizing understanding of aggressive behavior. Understanding may be of limited relevance to teaching and, what is more, faulty understanding might lead one to actions (teaching!) that are theoretically beautiful and practically useless; some may be a waste of time, and some (yikes!) might not in kids’ best interests.

What they said

Professors Blair and Willingham explained that aggressive actions are a feature of human behavior, but frequent or severe aggression is problematic. They suggest ways of understanding aggressive behavior that lean heavily on problems inherent to the child and children’s remote experiences (history). And what should be done to address aggressive behavior? Naturally, Professors Blair and Willingham suggested interventions that have a cognitive psychology tinge. Here’s a recap of their case (readers should, of course read the original).

Understanding aggressive behavior

Professors Blair and Willingham explained that only a few children exhibit severe or frequent aggression. They support efforts by educators and other readers of their article to discriminate between “typical” and “clinical” aggression. And they recommend that educators should not be concerned with relatively minor transgressions, and then they segued into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) from the American Psychiatric Association. They wisely noted, however, that a diagnosis—whether of “oppositional defiant disorder,“ “conduct disorder,” “attention deficit disorder” or other categories in psychiatric nosology—may help with securing services, but that such diagnoses do not help guide intervention.

Professors Blair and Willingham argue that aggression—which they characterized as “intentional behavior”—is based in brain-cognition difficulties which children may develop because of genetic or environmental factors. They emphasize that although social-environmental factors such as poverty, racial injustice, maltreatment, and the absence of appropriate supports may provide a fertile basis for aggression, in their view these factors are mediated by cognition—a perspective that makes sense, given that they are cognitive psychologists. In considering environmental factors, they rarely go farther than discussing broad features. The more immediate environment—setting, antecedents, and consequences—of aggressive behavior are not among those that they consider in depth. In our view, as we develop subsequently, that’s a short-coming in their analysis.

Mental processes

Professors Blair and Willingham described four mental processes that they said could lead to aggression. These four processes are

1. Acute threat response (“explosive rage in response to what for other children would feel like a mild threat”);

2. Response control or behavioral disinhibition (“if the child felt the urge to rage or grab another child’s belongings, difficulties in response control make it more likely that the child will actually do those things”);

3. Reward- and punishment-based decision-making (“If these systems are not working well, the individual will make poorer decisions—choosing, for example, a small reward now rather than a much larger reward in the future”);

4. Empathy (if “the brain regions important for empathy… are not working well, the individual will be more willing to harm others to achieve their goals.”)

It is important to note that, of course, all these processes are within the child. The interpretation of threats, the urges, the thought processes, and the brain regions are part of the actor, the child. So, it would make sense that the professors would lean toward intra-psychic interventions or treatment methods: those treatments would seek to modify the child’s nature, drives, and feelings that the professors see as promoting, if not causing, aggressive behavior.

The authors are sympathetic with the plight of people who are affected by a student’s aggression. They explain that aggressive behavior may bring not only perceived harm to others, but actual physical harm. Reading between the lines, it seems to us that they are also sympathetic with the individuals who behave aggressively. They seem to say that people should understand that those students who behave aggressively are at the mercy of their cognition, genes, and general environments. In our view, it would help if we could add that it is particularly important to consider environmental factors that are in close physical and temporal proximity to the aggressive actions themselves.

Support

So, what’s to be done about aggressive behavior? When Professors Blair and Willingham discussed ways of reducing aggression, they focused on what they called psychosocial and pharmacological interventions.

The “two main psychosocial interventions used for aggressions, as well as anger/irritability,” wrote Professors Blair and Willingham, “are cognitive-behavioral therapy and parent management training.” They cite studies that have demonstrated beneficial outcomes for these approaches. Indeed, these methods merit consideration on their own merits. We are concerned about these recommendations for other reasons, though.

First, there are classic examples of interventions for aggressive behavior that have extensive research bases that the authors omitted. To be sure, we shouldn’t fault them for cataloging only some examples, as listing the entire array of studies would be cumbersome. But some of the most well-documented examples of parent training (for example) they omitted are not aligned with cognitive psychology. Two examples: ²

• Gerald Patterson, John Reid, and their colleagues worked on social aggression in families. Beginning in the 1960s and 70s, they developed, tested, and refined behaviorally grounded procedures for teaching parents how to manage their children’s social aggression (see Forgatch & Patterson, 2010; Patterson et al., 1998; Reid et al., 1999).

• Alan Kazdin (2021) packaged many of the same components used by Patterson and colleagues, and called them the “Kazdin Method.” Drawing on his long history of testing behavioral interventions, Kazdin’s method employs practices and procedures (e.g., modeling, reinforcement, etc.) that will be familiar to special educators.

Second, limiting their recommendations of interventions to pharmacological and psychosocial methods resulted in omission of the entire literature on school-wide systems such as positive behavior supports, school-plus-home-based prevention programs, and function-based methods.

1. Special educators know that PBIS addresses aggressive behavior. George Sugai, Rob Horner, and their colleagues have made prevention of aggression a central part of their efforts to create positive behavior supports in the PBIS model. Studies of the applications of PBIS procedures in school have shown beneficial reductions in aggressive behavior (e.g., Bradshaw et al., 2012).

2. They also missed well-documented prevention programs. For example, Hill Walker and colleagues have studied successful programs (e.g., First Step for Success) for preventing aggression in the primary grades. The studies, most of which were conducted in real schools (e.g., Walker et al., 2009) and home environments (e.g., Feil et al., 2014; Frey et al, 2021) have employed excellent methods and have been replicated repeatedly.

3. Professors Blair and Willingham mention determining the function of behavior in their description of parent training,³ but they skipped the literature on functional behavior assessments and functional analyses. There are excellent practical books (e.g., O’Neill et al., 2015) and reviews of research (e.g., Anderson et al., 2011; Melanson & Fahmie, 2023) that can provide explicit and clear direction for educators who need to manage students’ aggressive behavior.

Commentary

At the core of the differences between the cognitive view and our view is the question of whether aggression is something inherent to a child (e.g. behavioral disinhibition, faulty threat responses, reduced empathy) or a result of interactions between the child’s skill repertoire, learning history, and her or his environment. Explanations for aggression extend to environmental variables that serve to reward (reinforce) or punish aggressive behavior. Often adults inadvertently reinforce challenging behaviors, such as aggression. This is not a faulty decision-making process in the child (nor the adult), but rather faulty environmental contingencies.

Although we support home-based intervention (“therapy”) for children’s aggressive behavior such as those we cited previously, we also understand that aggressive behavior is often situation-specific. That is, only some children who manifest aggressive behavior in school also behave aggressively in the home setting (and vice versa). Furthermore, there is evidence that changing behavior in homes may not “generalize” to changed behavior in school (Forehand et al., 1977; McMahon et al., 2010). Recommending parent management training, may be something educators can recommend, but often requires ongoing support, coaching, and problem solving.

For decades, special education and behavioral researchers have operated from a perspective that understanding the role of the environment in occasioning and maintaining certain behaviors, like aggression, is essential to designing supports to reduce aggression. In this perspective, behavior, even aggressive behavior, is communication. By analyzing aggressive behavior using processes such as functional behavior assessment, educators can partner with families to develop supports to prevent and reduce aggressive behavior. Drawing from this perspective, in addition to implementing evidence-based child focused interventions, schools should focus on putting systems into place that prevent and reduce aggressive behaviors while promoting child replacement behaviors like social skills, communication skills, problem solving, and skill building.

Eminent psychologists and special educators have been working on the problem of aggression for as long as we have been involved with kids with disabilities. Professors Blair and Willingham mentioned some of the of the folks (Ken Dodge, John Lochman, John Coie, and colleagues) who have reported successful studies about reducing aggression. There are, as we noted, other research teams that have studied prevention and treatment of aggressive behavior but were not mentioned by Professor Blair and Willingham. The focus of many of these studies has been prevention or amelioration of aggressive behavior in actual classrooms.

Many of the recommendations that Professors Blair and Willingham discussed are essentially variations on shifting the responsibility for action to someone else. Recommendations about pharmacological management, parent management training, and cognitive-behavioral therapy⁴ all depend on securing action from others (medical doctors, psychologists). The recommendations do not explain what educators can do (namely modify learning environment). We understand that the audience for whom the authors were writing is composed mostly of general educators, so there’s some sense in having someone else take responsibility, but we suspect that if the problem behavior is occurring in a given environment, it is likely to be necessary to address it in that environment.

Special educators may sometimes need to seek assistance from outside of the schools, but they themselves often are sought as the assistance in addressing disruptive and aggressive behavior. It turns out that special educators have a strong assortment of methods for promoting appropriate behavior, for teaching students behavior to replace the function of aggressive behavior. We hope readers of Special Education Today will help others understand that effective methods are available and accessible.

It is unfortunate that Professors Blair and Willingham did not mention the prevention and treatment alternatives we noted here. Indeed, functional behavior assessment and functional analysis have special relevance in considering aggression in schools (Sullivan et al., 2020). Not only are they mandated by law for students with disabilities, but employing them has been found to result in substantial improvements in aggressive behavior (see reviews by Brosnan & Healy, 2010; Horner et al., 2002).

One of the fundamental principles of beneficial management of misbehavior is that it is important to build appropriate behavior, not simply eliminate inappropriate behavior. The importance of promoting prosocial behavior when addressing disruptive-aggressive behavior is an emphasis in common behavior management textbooks (e.g., Cooper et al., 2020; Martin & Pear, 2024). We hope that readers of SET will not only remember this principle, but employ it routinely in dealing with behavior problems. After all, it is wired into special education’s DNA: We teach kids how to behave.

References

Anderson, C. M., Rodriguez, B. J., & Campbell, A. (2015). Functional behavior assessment in schools: Current status and future directions. Journal of Behavioral Education, 24(4), 338-371.

Aman, M. G. (1991). Review and evaluation of instruments for assessing emotional and behavioural disorders. Australia and New Zealand Journal of Developmental Disabilities, 17(2), 127-145.

Blair, R. J. R., & Willingham, D. T. (2025). Ask the cognitive scientist: Understanding disruptive behavior in the classroom. American Educator, https://www.aft.org/ae/spring2025/blair_willingham

Bradshaw, C. P., Waasdorp, T. E., & Leaf, P. J. (2012). Effects of school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports on child behavior problems. Pediatrics, 130(5), e1136-e1145. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2012-0243

Brosnan, J., & Healy, O. (2010). A review of behavioral interventions for the treatment of aggression in individuals with developmental disabilities. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 32(2), 437-466. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2010.12.023

Carr, E. G., & Durand, V. M. (1985). Reducing behavior problems through functional communication training. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 18(2), 111-126. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1307999/pdf/jaba00028-0013.pdf

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Forgatch, M. S., & Patterson, G. R. (2010). Parent Management Training—Oregon Model: An intervention for antisocial behavior in children and adolescents. In J. R. Weisz & A. E. Kazdin (Eds.), Evidence-based psychotherapies for children and adolescents (2nd ed., pp. 159–177). Guilford.

Frey, A. J., Small, J. W., Seeley, J. R., Walker, H. M., Feil, E. G., Lee, J., Lissman, D. C., Crosby, S., & Forness, S. R. (2022). First Step Next and homeBase: A comparative efficacy study of children with disruptive behavior. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 205-222. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029211062588

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Sullivan, K., Crosland, K., Iovannone, R., Blair, K.‑S., & Singer, L. (2021). Evaluating the effectiveness of Prevent–Teach–Reinforce for high school students with emotional and behavior disorders. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 23(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/10983007209111https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1276472.pdf

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Footnotes

1. Regular readers may well remember that Dan is a friend of SET. Not only has his work been featured frequently here (e.g., 29 June 2021; 21 April 2023; and 1 June 2023; search the archives for more), but he’s also posed for one of those Friday Photos with one of us.

2. There is the proverbial ship load of demonstrations by other groups, including Rex Forehand (Forehand & Atkeson, 1977; Forehand et al., 1980), Scott Henggeler (e.g., Henggeler & Schaeffer, 2016; Saldana & Henggeler, 20006), and Bob Wahler (Wahler & Fox, 1980).

3. Here is the topic sentence of Blair’s and Willingham’s paragraph in which they describe parent management training: “During parent management training, parents (or the primary caregivers) are taught to identify the function of maladaptive behavior, to give praise for appropriate behavior, to communicate directions effectively, to ignore maladaptive attention-seeking behavior, and to use consistent consequences for disruptive behaviors.”

4. We think the cog-mod our colleagues discussed has often been tested in clinical situations where a psychologist trains patients in an office. There is, of course, a substantial literature that many readers of Special Education Today know about implementation of self-management methods in classrooms. See, for examples, reports and reviews from the Campbell Collaboration (e.g., Smith et al., 2023).