When a student is placed in a restraint or secluded, the incident report often begins at the moment the crisis becomes impossible for adults to ignore. The student “became aggressive.” The student “refused to comply.” The student “escalated.” The student “became a danger to self or others.” Then comes the intervention: staff responded, the student was restrained, the student was removed, the incident ended, and everyone documented what happened. But there is a major problem with this way of documenting crisis. We are often recording the final moments of an event without adequately examining the minutes that came before it.
What happened ten minutes earlier?
That question matters.
In many cases, the restraint did not begin when the student hit, kicked, screamed, ran, threw something, or otherwise engaged in behavior that adults considered unsafe. Those actions may have been the most visible part of the crisis, but they were not necessarily the beginning of the crisis. The beginning may have been a difficult transition, an unexpected schedule change, a denied request, an overwhelming sensory environment, a task that exceeded the student’s current capacity, a communication breakdown, a peer interaction, physical discomfort, fatigue, hunger, fear, or a series of increasingly demanding interactions with adults. By the time the behavior becomes visible enough to trigger a crisis response, the student’s nervous system may have already been responding to demands for several minutes.
Yet our documentation frequently treats the most visible behavior as the beginning of the story.
That is a problem.
If we only collect data from the moment the student becomes physically unsafe, we are collecting data about the crisis, not necessarily data about what contributed to the crisis. We know what happened at the end, but we may have very little information about what happened at the beginning. We know that a student was restrained, but do we know what the student was experiencing immediately beforehand? We know that they refused to enter a classroom, but do we know what happened when they were first asked to transition? We know they threw an object, but do we know what occurred immediately before the object was thrown? We know they hit a staff member, but do we know what communication, interaction, demand, or environmental change preceded that moment?
The ten minutes before a restraint may contain more useful information than the restraint itself.
Imagine a student entering the classroom already dysregulated. Perhaps the cafeteria was loud that morning. Perhaps the student slept poorly. Perhaps their normal routine changed. Maybe they were already showing signs that adults recognized as “off,” but those signs were interpreted as attitude, refusal, or noncompliance. The teacher then gives an academic demand. The student does not respond. The demand is repeated. The student pushes the paper away. The adult interprets this as refusal. The instruction becomes more direct. The student raises their voice. Another adult enters the situation. The student moves away. Someone tells them to come back. They move farther away. The adults increase their verbal prompts. The student begins yelling. Eventually, the student hits someone, and the crisis response begins.
The incident report may ultimately say, “Student became aggressive when presented with an academic task.”
But that sentence leaves out almost everything that matters.
It leaves out the sensory load. It leaves out the transition. It leaves out the student’s early communication. It leaves out the repeated prompts. It leaves out the increasing adult demands. It leaves out the student’s attempts to move away. It leaves out the possibility that the student was communicating distress long before anyone labeled the behavior as aggression.
This does not mean that every restraint is caused by adults or that every unsafe behavior can be prevented if a teacher simply identifies the right antecedent. Human behavior is complicated. Students can experience distress for reasons adults cannot immediately identify, and some situations genuinely become dangerous despite appropriate support. This is not about assigning blame to individual educators who are trying to keep students and others safe. It is about refusing to stop our analysis at the moment of crisis.
Because if we stop there, we learn very little.
We need to become much more curious about what happens before the behavior we are trying to understand.
What was the student’s body communicating? Did their speech change? Did they become quieter? Did they begin pacing, rocking, covering their ears, hiding, withdrawing, repeating a phrase, pushing materials away, or attempting to leave the environment? Did their behavior change when a particular adult approached? Did the student’s distress increase as demands increased? Did the environment become louder or more crowded? Was there an unexpected change in routine? Was the student given enough processing time? Were they able to communicate “no,” “stop,” “I need a break,” or “I don’t understand” in a way the adults around them recognized?
These questions matter because behavior does not happen in a vacuum.
The environment matters. The interaction matters. The demand matters. The student’s communication matters. The adult’s response matters. The timing matters. The student’s history matters. And sometimes, the student’s behavior is telling us something that our current systems have not taught us how to hear.
One of the biggest mistakes we can make in crisis response is assuming that the first behavior we notice is the first behavior that occurred. A student screaming may have been communicating distress for several minutes before they screamed. A student running from a classroom may have been communicating that the environment had become intolerable before they ran. A student pushing materials away may have been communicating that they could not access the task before they ever refused it verbally. A student attempting to leave may have been communicating a need for space before adults interpreted the movement as defiance.
When we only pay attention once the behavior reaches a certain intensity, we can accidentally teach ourselves that the student’s communication only matters when it becomes dangerous.
That is backwards.
The earlier signals may be the most important information we have.
This is where the concept of the “10 minutes before” becomes so important. Instead of asking only, “What did the student do?” we should also ask, “What was happening to the student?” Instead of documenting only the observable behavior that justified an emergency response, we should examine the sequence of events that preceded it. What changed? What was introduced? What was removed? What was requested? What did the student attempt to communicate? What did adults do in response? What happened next?
This kind of analysis does not excuse unsafe behavior. It does not mean students should never have boundaries. It does not mean teachers should allow a child to hurt someone. Safety matters. Boundaries matter. Other students’ safety matters. Staff safety matters. But understanding the conditions surrounding a crisis is part of creating safety, too.
If the same student is restrained five times in six weeks during transitions from one particular setting, that should not simply produce five incident reports. It should produce questions. What is happening during that transition? Is the timing consistent? Is the environment different? Is the student being asked to leave something preferred? Is there a sensory component? Is the transition too abrupt? Is there a communication issue? Are there predictable warning signs? Are adults responding to those signs early enough? Is the current support plan actually addressing the conditions associated with the crisis?
The restraint itself is not the intervention data we should be most interested in. The pattern leading up to it may be.
This also changes how we think about prevention. Prevention cannot simply mean teaching students to comply faster so that adults can avoid a crisis. Prevention should mean identifying what makes a situation difficult and changing what we reasonably can. It may mean adjusting the environment, changing how a demand is presented, increasing predictability, providing communication supports, allowing processing time, offering appropriate choices, recognizing early signs of dysregulation, or teaching students a safer and more effective way to communicate distress.
And sometimes prevention means changing something about ourselves as adults.
That can be uncomfortable to acknowledge, but good educators should be willing to examine their own practice. Did I give the student enough time to respond? Did I interpret communication as defiance? Did I continue increasing demands after the student was already showing signs of distress? Did I give the student a reasonable way to communicate that they needed help? Did I make the situation more public or socially threatening? Did I bring additional adults into an interaction when the student was already overwhelmed? Did I continue talking when the student needed less language? Did I mistake stillness for regulation or compliance for safety?
These are not questions designed to shame teachers. They are questions designed to improve systems.
We cannot ask students to learn from data while refusing to learn from ours.
If a student repeatedly reaches crisis after the same sequence of events, the responsible response is not simply to become better at restraining them. It is to become better at recognizing the sequence.
This is especially important for students with disabilities who may communicate distress differently from their peers. Not every student will say, “I am overwhelmed and need a break.” Some students may communicate through movement, changes in speech, repetitive behaviors, withdrawal, avoidance, changes in facial expression, increased sensory-seeking or sensory-avoidant behavior, or attempts to escape a situation. Those behaviors can be easy to dismiss when we are looking at them through a compliance lens.
The question should not always be, “How do we stop this behavior?”
Sometimes the better question is, “What is this behavior telling us that we haven’t figured out yet?”
That question creates room for curiosity.
It creates room for better data.
It creates room for prevention.
And it creates room for the possibility that the student is not simply trying to make the situation difficult. They may be trying to communicate something they do not yet have another way to communicate.
There is another piece of this conversation that deserves attention: what happens after the restraint. Too often, the incident ends when the physical intervention ends. Staff document what happened, everyone returns to their schedules, and the student is expected to move on. But the end of the restraint is not necessarily the end of the student’s distress. A student may need time, space, connection, communication support, and an opportunity to understand what happened. Staff may also need an opportunity to debrief and examine the circumstances without reducing the conversation to whether the restraint was technically justified.
A meaningful post-incident review should not only ask, “Was the intervention necessary?” It should also ask, “What can we learn from what happened?”
What were the early warning signs? What supports were attempted? What worked? What did not work? What changed the student’s level of distress? What could we reasonably do differently next time? What does the student tell us about the experience when they are regulated enough to communicate about it? What does the data show across multiple incidents?
That is how we move from documenting crises to learning from them.
The goal should never be to create a perfect classroom where challenging behavior never happens. That is unrealistic. Children are human beings, and human beings experience distress. Students with disabilities are going to have hard days. Teachers are going to have hard days. Sometimes situations will escalate despite everyone’s best efforts.
But we can create systems that are better at noticing what happens before the breaking point.
We can stop treating the final behavior as the entire story.
We can start paying attention to the ten minutes before the restraint.
Because those ten minutes may tell us more about how to prevent the next crisis than the restraint itself ever could.
And perhaps the most important question we can ask is not, “How do we get this student to stop?”
It is, “What happened before they reached the point where stopping became necessary?”
That is where the learning begins.
If we only document what happened at the moment a student became unsafe, we are missing an enormous amount of information about what led to that moment. But identifying what happened before the crisis is only the first step. The harder question is what we do with that information once we have it. If we notice the same patterns over and over again and our response is simply to document the next incident, then we aren’t really using data to prevent anything. We are just getting better at recording the crisis after it happens.
This is where I think schools need to rethink what they mean when they say they are “using data.” We often collect enormous amounts of information about students. We have behavior charts, incident reports, progress-monitoring data, discipline referrals, attendance records, IEP data, evaluations, and staff observations. But collecting data and learning from data are not the same thing. A school can have years of documentation on a student and still fail to understand why that student repeatedly reaches crisis.
Imagine that a student has been restrained eight times throughout the school year. The school has eight incident reports. Each report may contain the student’s behavior, the staff response, the duration of the restraint, and the outcome. On paper, it may look like there is plenty of data. But what if all eight incidents happened after unexpected transitions? What if seven happened immediately after the student was asked to stop a preferred activity? What if six occurred in noisy environments? What if the student showed the same early warning signs every single time? That information is far more actionable than simply knowing that the student has been restrained eight times.
The pattern is the data.
We have to stop treating each crisis as an isolated event when the same circumstances keep appearing. If the same student repeatedly becomes distressed under similar conditions, those conditions need to become part of the conversation. This does not mean we assume that one antecedent automatically “caused” the behavior. Human behavior is more complicated than that. It means we investigate patterns rather than ignoring them.
This is also where the distinction between an antecedent and a cause becomes important. If a student consistently becomes distressed when presented with a particular task, it would be easy to say, “The task caused the behavior.” But the task itself may not be the entire story. The student may not understand the directions. They may have experienced repeated failure with similar tasks. They may lack a communication method for requesting help. The task may be too difficult, too lengthy, too visually overwhelming, or presented in a way that does not align with how the student accesses information. The student may also be experiencing something completely unrelated that day. Good data collection should help us investigate those possibilities rather than immediately assigning a single cause.
We also have to be willing to look at what happened between the initial sign of distress and the crisis. This is one of the most overlooked parts of the story. A student may initially push away a worksheet. An adult repeats the direction. The student says no. The adult gives another prompt. The student moves away. Another adult is called. The student is told to return. The student raises their voice. More adults arrive. The student attempts to leave. Suddenly, we are looking at a major crisis.
If we only document the final behavior, we might write that the student “became aggressive when directed to complete work.” But if we document the entire sequence, we may discover that the student’s distress increased as adult demands and interactions increased. That does not mean the adults intended to escalate the situation. They may have been following the procedures they were taught. But if the same sequence repeatedly ends in crisis, it deserves examination.
Sometimes the intervention itself becomes part of the escalation cycle.
That is a difficult thing to talk about because teachers and staff are often trying to help. But intention and impact are not always the same. More verbal prompts may feel supportive to one student and overwhelming to another. Bringing additional adults into a situation may provide safety in one circumstance and increase fear or sensory overload in another. Repeating a direction may clarify expectations for one learner and communicate increasing pressure to another. Blocking a student’s path may prevent them from leaving a dangerous environment, but it can also increase panic if the student is already trying to escape.
This is why individualized support matters. There is no universal script that will regulate every student. A strategy that works beautifully for one child may make another child more distressed. The goal should not be to find the perfect crisis script. The goal should be to understand the individual student well enough to recognize what is likely to help and what may make things worse.
That requires knowing the student before the crisis happens.
Too often, the crisis plan becomes the most detailed part of a student’s support system. We document what adults should do once the student reaches a certain level of escalation, but we do not always spend the same amount of energy documenting what helps the student stay regulated in the first place. We need both. A safety response matters when a situation becomes dangerous, but a prevention plan matters long before we reach that point.
A strong prevention plan should answer practical questions. What does this student look like when they are comfortable and regulated? What are their early signs of distress? How do they communicate that something is wrong? What environmental factors tend to increase difficulty? What supports have actually worked in the past? What makes demands more accessible? How does the student communicate that they need help, space, or a break? Who does the student trust? What should adults avoid doing when the student is becoming overwhelmed?
Those questions move us away from simply reacting to behavior and toward understanding the learner.
They also require us to stop confusing compliance with regulation. A student sitting quietly does not necessarily mean the student is comfortable.
A student who stops moving does not necessarily mean the student is calm. A student who stops communicating does not necessarily mean the problem has been solved. Sometimes what looks like successful de-escalation from an adult perspective is actually withdrawal, shutdown, or an attempt to survive an overwhelming situation.
We need to be careful about what we define as success.
Success should not simply mean, “The student complied.”
If a student was able to communicate their need for space before reaching crisis, that is progress. If a student was able to leave an overwhelming situation safely instead of becoming physically unsafe, that is progress. If a student recognized their own early warning signs and requested help, that is progress. If an adult recognized those warning signs and adjusted the environment before the situation escalated, that is progress too.
Prevention is not just about changing the student.
Sometimes prevention means changing the environment, or it means changing the demand. Sometimes it means changing the way we communicate or changing the timing.
Sometimes it means giving the student a legitimate way to say no, ask for help, request a break, or communicate that something is too much.
And sometimes it means changing the way adults interpret what they see.
A student who refuses a task may not be communicating, “I will not obey you.” They may be communicating, “I don’t understand this.” A student who runs may not be communicating, “I want to cause chaos.” They may be communicating, “I need to get away from this.” A student who covers their ears may not be trying to avoid instruction. They may be telling us that the environment has become physically difficult to tolerate.
We do not have to assume that every behavior is intentional communication in order to become more curious about what it might be communicating.
That curiosity matters.
It also changes the way we think about staff training. If the primary training staff receive focuses on what to do once a student becomes dangerous, we should not be surprised when our systems become heavily reactive. Staff need to know what to do in a crisis, but they also need to know how to recognize the earliest signs that a student is moving toward one. They need to understand the student’s communication, sensory needs, accommodations, support plan, and individual patterns. They need opportunities to practice responding early rather than waiting until the situation becomes impossible to manage.
The earlier we respond appropriately, the more options we generally have.
Once a student is at the highest level of distress, everyone’s options become narrower. Language may be less effective. Problem-solving may be less accessible. Reasoning may not work the way it normally does. The environment may need to become simpler and safer. Adults may have fewer opportunities to redirect the situation without using emergency interventions.
That is why the first signs matter so much.
The goal is not to become better at predicting exactly when a student will lose control. We cannot predict human behavior with that kind of certainty. The goal is to become better at recognizing patterns and responding to information before the situation reaches a point where everyone’s choices become limited.
And this brings us back to data.
If the data tells us that a student repeatedly reaches crisis after the same sequence of events, then the team should do something with that information. We should not simply write another report. We should ask whether the student’s supports need to change. We should ask whether the environment needs to change. We should ask whether the student’s goals are appropriate. We should ask whether staff need additional training. We should ask whether the student’s communication system is actually functional in moments of distress. We should ask whether accommodations are being implemented consistently. We should ask whether the student has meaningful opportunities for autonomy.
Most importantly, we should ask whether our current plan is actually working.
If a student continues to experience the same crisis under the same conditions, repeating the same response and expecting a different outcome is not a behavior plan. It is a cycle.
Breaking that cycle requires us to look upstream.
The incident report tells us what happened at the end. The ten minutes before may tell us how we got there. The patterns across multiple incidents may tell us what needs to change. And the student’s own perspective can tell us things that no behavior chart ever will.
This is why I believe restraint data should never exist in isolation. We need to know how often restraint occurs, but frequency alone does not tell us enough. We need to understand the circumstances surrounding it, the supports attempted beforehand, the student’s communication, the environmental conditions, the adult responses, and what happened afterward. We need to look for patterns over time rather than treating each incident as an independent event.
And we need to remember that the ultimate purpose of collecting this information should not be to build a better case for why a student needed to be restrained.
It should be to build a better understanding of how to keep that student from reaching that point again.
The most successful crisis response is not necessarily the one in which adults become more efficient at managing a crisis. Sometimes the most successful response is the one that allows us to recognize the pattern early enough that the crisis never happens.
That is what we should be working toward.
Not better documentation of the restraint.
Better understanding before the restraint.
Because when the data tells us what happens before the crisis, we have an opportunity to change what happens next.
