An Unintuitive Trick Experts Use To Avoid Power Struggles

Written By chris danilo

A conversation about pipe cleaners, pony beads, and why the cheapest move in any preschool classroom is also the one most teachers refuse to try.

By Chris Danilo — Principal, Human Skills Training.
Published May 12, 2026 · Updated May 12, 2026

📍 If You Only Read This Far

The lines worth underlining before you read the rest:

Should I really focus on praising more? Five-to-one feels excessive.

“Your five-to-one is your ratio of positive interactions to negative or neutral interactions with this child. I don’t think you’re aware of how many directives and how much demand you’re putting on this child day to day.” (Michelle, recalling her coach’s challenge)

The tough kid in my room doesn’t respond to anything. Now what?

“It’s so hard, because when you talk about behavior, it’s not ever really about the behavior. It’s about the why. It’s about the function.”

I can’t be the only adult who loses it sometimes.

“Most behaviors are not going to be life or death. If nobody is in immediate danger, take a second and take a breath. I know taking a breath sounds cliché. But when we do, the brain gets more oxygen and we’re able to think clearly.”

What’s the one thing you’d put in every educator’s brain?

“That neutralizing routine. Putting that pause between the behavior and your response.”

👋 A Note from Chris

I first met Michelle Farrell at the NAEYC conference in 2024. She was presenting on the Pyramid Model interventions for challenging behavior and I realized just how good she was at her work. I found out later that Michelle has spent close to three decades in early childhood education as a teacher, an interventionist, a coach, a director, and a Pyramid Model trainer. She now runs a family-based coaching practice, SuperStart Colorado. The mechanics and instructions in this post come straight from her teaching and I think every teacher should hear what Michelle has to say. Since meeting, we realized that we both live in Denver, CO and started collaborating on some training for the upcoming Rocky Mountain Early Childhood Conference. Hope we can both see you there one day.

— Chris

🗯️ Why does saying “no” louder make tough behavior worse?

Because the kid isn’t asking permission. They’re communicating something, and the volume isn’t the part you’re missing.

This is the move most untrained adults make, and Michelle is honest that she made it herself.

“I was the behavior kid. So I get it. I have a four-year-old strong-willed daughter now, and most of my career I didn’t have my own children. You don’t have to have kids to be a great teacher. But once I had my own, the way I empathized with children and families changed greatly.”

Michelle says the shift in her own teaching came when she stopped asking how do I get this kid to comply and started asking what is this kid trying to do.

This is the function-of-behavior frame the National Center for Pyramid Model Innovations (NCPMI), based at the University of South Florida, trains educators to use. Every behavior is either trying to obtain something or avoid something. Attention. Sensory input. Peer connection. Or escape from a task, a transition, an adult, a peer. The behavior is the surface. The function is the why.

“There’s no intervention for, ‘okay, you have a child who’s hitting in your classroom.’ The intervention is going to change based on what the function of the behavior is. It’s also going to change based on the skills that the child already has.”

This move is the Human Skills Be / Do / Feel framework in action. It walks you through who to be (orientation), what to do (specific moves), and how the action feels so you know it’s working. Most adults default to what to do when behavior escalates. They reach for a script, a directive, a consequence. Michelle’s move is upstream of that. She holds a different who to be first: curious instead of in charge. Then what to do gets smarter.

The default reflex of authority (I said this, I’m bigger, I’m the adult) is the move that scales the conflict instead of resolving it. It works the same way at a staff meeting and at the lunch table.

Most adults figure that out eventually. Most adults figure it out far too late.

📐 What is the 5-to-1 ratio, exactly?

It’s a target ratio of positive interactions to negative or neutral ones, for one specific child, in one specific window of time.

The number comes out of John Gottman’s Love Lab at the University of Washington, where he and Robert Levenson watched married couples eat breakfast and predicted with eerie accuracy which ones would still be together five years later. The couples who lasted ran about five positive bids of attention for every negative one. Gottman called it the “magic ratio.” The original 1992 paper (Gottman & Levenson, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) found a constant positive-to-negative ratio of about 5 across the stable marriage types.

Now: marriage research is not classroom research. The 5-to-1 in early childhood settings is a practical target adapted into the Pyramid Model and the broader Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports world, not a precise empirical constant. Classroom literature uses numbers ranging from 3:1 to 5:1 depending on the study. The point isn’t the exact decimal. The point is that most adults running classrooms are nowhere close.

Michelle learned about it from a coach at the lab school on the Auraria campus of the Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she did her undergrad and then her first teaching work. She was a brand-new lead teacher. She had a child in her classroom navigating deep trauma, an adoptive home, and disruptive eruptive behavior that took up most of the day.

The coach watched her teach for one morning and said:

“I think you need to work on your five-to-one.”

A “positive” interaction is anything that isn’t a directive or a correction. A specific noticing. A shared joke. Three seconds of eye contact and a smile. Sitting next to the kid during snack and not saying anything at all. A “you remembered your jacket today” delivered without trailing into “but next time also bring your...”

A “negative or neutral” interaction is everything else. A correction. A redirect. A “no.” A “wait.” A “stop.” Even a flat, businesslike instruction without warmth.

It is much, much easier to rack up negatives than most teachers realize.

📿 How do you track praise without losing your mind?

You don’t. You track one child, in one short window, with a piece of craft store hardware.

This is Michelle’s story, verbatim from the transcript.

Young Michelle was not buying any of this. She dug her heels in. She decided she’d implement her coach’s strategy specifically so she could prove it didn’t work.

“I dug my heels in a little bit and was like, all right, fine. I’m going to implement, and I’m going to implement so that I can really show you that your strategy is not going to work.”

The coach handed her a pipe cleaner threaded with five small pony beads. The rule: every positive interaction with the target child, slide one bead over. Every directive or correction, slide them all back. Reset to zero. Build the five again.

Michelle picked a 20-minute window. Not the whole day. Twenty minutes that lined up with the predictable trouble, right before the transition, or in the middle of one. She set a timer. She counted.

What she found is what every teacher who tries this finds. The ratio at baseline was nowhere near five-to-one. Sometimes the ratio at baseline wasn’t even one-to-one. The behavior wasn’t the problem. The signal-to-noise was.

The five-bead window does two specific things any classroom can use:

  • It makes the invisible visible. You cannot manage what you cannot see. Most teachers think they’re praising more than they are. The beads catch them out, kindly, on a Tuesday.
  • It narrows the work. Tracking five-to-one across 20 children and eight hours is impossible. Tracking it for one child for 20 minutes is doable. You build the awareness in the small window, and the new pattern leaks into the rest of the day on its own.

The other thing the beads do, and Michelle says this is the actual mechanism, is that bringing your awareness to it is the first step. Once you’re aware of the ratio, you start adjusting in real time. You don’t even mean to. The beads aren’t really the intervention. The beads are the noticing.

Michelle went in to disprove the strategy. Within a couple of weeks, the kid was different. She doesn’t say the kid was magically transformed. She says she stopped winding him up.

Most “behavior problems” are partly due to how often the adult is in the kid’s face. The beads reveal that without making anyone the villain.

🔍 What if praising the rule-followers isn’t enough?

Then you swap “telling” for “noticing,” and you do it out loud.

This is the second move Michelle pulled from her coach, and it’s the one that does the heavy lifting once the ratio is in the right zone.

The setup: you give a direction. Clean-up time. Five kids hear it. Three start cleaning up. Two don’t. The default reflex is to repeat the direction. Louder, sharper, addressed by name. Maybe a count to three. Maybe a consequence.

Michelle’s move is different. She stops giving directions and starts narrating, by name, the kids who are already doing it.

“I’m going to start positively narrating instead of telling little Johnny to clean up five times. I’m going to say: I see the way Susanna is putting the toys in the bucket. I see the way Jackson is putting the bucket on the shelf. I see the way Sarah is walking over to get her coat.”

Most of the time, the kid who wasn’t doing what they were supposed to be doing cues in. Oh. That’s what I need to be doing. Most of the time. Not always. Michelle is the first to flag the exception.

The reason this works is the reason most adult conflict de-escalation works. The kid who’s not doing the thing already knows the rule. They don’t need the rule again, louder. They need a low-stakes off-ramp back into the activity. Positive narration is the off-ramp. It doesn’t draw a public line in front of them. It doesn’t require them to capitulate. It gives them a route, and most of them take it.

It also, quietly, racks up positives for everyone in earshot. Susanna and Jackson and Sarah got noticed by name. That’s a deposit in the five-to-one bank for three other kids who weren’t even the target child. The class as a system gets calmer because three kids got seen.

This is the curiosity stance from the first section, made into a specific repeatable move with real mechanics. The signal that it worked is soft and easy to miss: the kid who was off-task has rejoined the group. You can see it in the shoulders. You can feel it in the room.

When the function of the behavior is something positive narration doesn’t address, say, the kid is trying to escape a task they can’t do, the move has to change. Michelle calls this out plainly. There’s no single playbook. There’s a function-first habit of mind, and then there’s a deepening toolkit. The five-to-one and the narration are the floor, not the ceiling.

🌬️ What do you do when you’re the one losing it?

You build a neutralizing routine. A pause, deliberately practiced, that sits between the behavior and your response.

Michelle says this is the single move she’d download into every educator’s brain if she could.

“I think that neutralizing routine. Putting that pause between the behavior and your response.”

The mechanic is small. You identify your hot-button behaviors, the ones that hijack you before you’ve even chosen a response. For Michelle, whining ranks high. (She has a four-year-old in her “whining era.” Her words.) For someone else it’s noise. For someone else it’s a specific kid’s name written on the substitute sheet. You write down which behaviors do this to you and you build a pause specifically for those.

The pause can be a breath, a sip of water, or the first two lines of a song you sing in your head. Conscious Discipline, Becky Bailey’s program, gives educators a mantra: I am safe. Keep breathing. I can handle this. What goes in the pause matters less than the fact that there is a pause.

Michelle is funny about the breath. She knows it sounds soft.

“It sounds fluffy. You’re right. It does sound fluffy.”

Here’s why it isn’t. When you take that breath, your brain gets more oxygen, and you think more clearly. That’s the physiology. The kid in front of you, mid-escalation, has mirror neurons firing. A system in the primate brain, first identified by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma, that activates both when we observe an action and when we perform it. When you breathe, the kid’s mirror neurons get a breath to copy. So does your co-teacher’s. The pause spreads.

The same loop runs across three brains at once. Your breath shifts your body. Your body shifts the kid’s orientation. Their orientation shifts the co-teacher’s response. One breath is a four-person intervention.

The other piece of the routine is honest self-knowledge. Michelle says it plain: maybe Tuesdays you’re tired because you take a class Monday nights. Plan for that. On Tuesdays, drink the extra water. On Tuesdays, the kid who hits the hot button needs you to take the breath even more deliberately than usual.

This is not self-care as a brand. This is calibrating the instrument that’s about to deliver the intervention.

☀️ What does this mean for your practice on Monday morning?

Michelle has been doing this work for nearly thirty years. She’s still teaching. She’s still coaching. Last month she led a Pyramid Model session in Denver for over a hundred educators who showed up after their workday ended. She says the thing that gives her hope is that teachers are still in the room. Still trying. Still willing to learn one more thing.

Here’s the one more thing.

Try one of these this week:

  • Pick one window and one kid. Twenty minutes. The window before or during the predictable trouble. One child. Bring a pipe cleaner and five beads, or your phone counter, or a tick-list on a sticky note. Count positives. Reset on directives. Notice what you find.
  • Narrate, don’t repeat. The next time you give a direction and someone doesn’t follow it, stop repeating yourself. Start naming three kids by name who are doing it. Watch what happens to the kid who wasn’t.
  • Name your hot button. Pick the behavior that hijacks you before you’ve decided. Write it on a card. Build one specific pause for that one specific trigger: a breath, a sip, or a line from a song you sing in your head. Practice it on a low-stakes day so it’s available on a high-stakes one.
  • Plan the bad Tuesday. Whatever day of the week you predictably arrive depleted, plan that day differently. Extra water. Two-deep-breath rule. Co-teacher knows you’re running low. The intervention is the same intervention, applied to yourself.
  • Curiosity first. Before the next behavior plan, before the next consequence, before the next conversation with the parent, ask the function question. What is this kid trying to obtain or avoid? Then build from there.

Five-to-one. Narrate, don’t repeat. Build the pause. Plan the bad day. Function first.

The methodology Michelle teaches is simpler than it looks. Not authority. Not pressure. Curiosity, with the will to help. The kid having a meltdown on your carpet is, in the deepest sense, asking what’s going on for me? The teacher who can ask it back, what’s going on for you?, instead of doubling down on the directive, is the teacher whose classroom keeps getting easier instead of harder.

The hard part isn’t the technique. The hard part is the breath, taken in the half-second before the response, on the day when you’re already tired.

Take it anyway.

Listen to the full conversation with Michelle Farrell above, including her work with Discovery Source on the new Pyramid Model neurodiversity series (Atlas, Haven, Maria and Sol), Dr. Rosemarie Allen’s line about not preparing children for developmentally inappropriate kindergartens with developmentally inappropriate practices, and the difference between a behavior that’s annoying and a behavior that’s a crisis.

Want one mechanic like this every other week?

If you run a classroom or a caseload where one tough kid is consuming the day, my newsletter sends one short, useful piece every other week. Usually with a single move you can run on Monday.

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✍️ About the Author

Written by Chris Danilo. Edited and refined with Claude (Anthropic, Opus 4.7).

I’m Chris. I help early childhood education leaders build the human skills that hold up under pressure: emotion regulation, facilitation, adaptive thinking, and the kind of communication that changes how a team works together.

Unlike other trainers and speakers, I use high-engagement, experiential learning workshops and keynotes, in-person and virtually, to make it all happen.

What could be possible with Human Skills Training?

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📚 Sources & Further Reading

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