Tag: behaviour problems

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Behaviour Management Teacher Mindset

How Coaching Applies To Behaviour

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Paudie Butler is a guy that I idolise when it comes to coaching children in any sport. He is one of these people that after you listen to him speak, you are inspired and enthused to coach children. He has a love of coaching and an obsession for instilling the love of sport in children.

He once quipped that;

“Supporters watch the ball, however, excellent coaches watch the player”.

Even though he said this years ago, I still think about it often.

What does he mean?

Paudie means that if you are spectating, you are watching the ball. You react to where the ball goes and decide if it is good or bad. For example, if someone takes a shot at the goal, your eyes follow the ball and if it goes into the goal, it’s good and if it goes wide, it’s bad. If a coach follows this approach of only watching the ball, he is getting very little feedback on what to work on at future training.

If you are an excellent coach, however, you are watching the player. You are watching how they execute the skills of the game. You are observing their movement. You are looking closely to see how they position themselves. If a player uses a poor technique and the ball coincidentally goes into the goal, the coach notes the poor technique and may focus on that in future coaching sessions. Equally, if a player takes a shot with perfect technique and the ball goes wide, the coach will be satisfied that the player is executing the skill the right way and will be confident that positive results aren’t far away.

I was thinking about this idea lately and I thought how this principle applies to children who are acting out also.

Onlookers watch the behaviour, excellent teachers watch the child.

What do I mean?

If an onlooker comes across a child who is acting out, they will simply see the behaviour. They observe the child screaming. They look at them running away. They see them being aggressive. If the behaviour is all they are watching, this is all they can react to. They might react by getting angry, by judging the child or by walking away.

Excellent teachers, however, watch the child closely when they come across them acting out. They are deciphering why they are behaving this way. What is the child trying to communicate? Is there an unmet need? What is going on in the child’s surrounding environment? They ask these questions to identify how to react to the full context and underlying cause of the behaviour. They know there are seven common triggers for meltdowns and each one will beget a different response.

The teacher who only watches the behaviour will respond to every child the same way. If a child is shouting out of turn in the class, the teacher may reprimand, ignore or punish every child.

A teacher who watches the child may react this way too. They may also react, however, by striving to give that child more positive attention for the rest of the day because they are aware that the child has a new baby brother and is seeking additional attention to compensate for the lack at home. Or perhaps, they might assign them a different task because they realise the one they have in front of them is too difficult.

Depending on the context and underlying cause, the adult who watches the child will react differently to each situation. This is the correct way to respond: with curiosity as opposed to instant judgement.

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Categories
anxiety

Banking on Anxiety: Free eBook

With children having missed a significant portion of the year in school and coronavirus dominating the media and household conversations, there is a chance that children may be feeling anxious about returning to the classroom.

Valuable content is abundant out there for teacher, parents and children to support them in their return and I’ve written my own contribution to this cause.

My eBook Banking on Anxiety includes a lens through which to view anxiety alongside strategies that may help teachers and parents prevent minor anxieties from becoming bigger ones with early intervention.

Click the link below to download and please share far and wide or let me know what you think!

banking-on-anxietyDownload

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Behaviour Management Inclusion parenting Special Education

What are SEBD, EBD, BESD & SEMH?

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What exactly are social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD)? Many definitions exist and even the overarching term is interchanged with others. You may hear the same difficulties referred to as emotional & behavioural difficulties (EBD). You could potentially hear the term behavioural emotional and social development (BESD). The most recent term that also pops up is social, emotional and mental health (SEMH).

All of the four terms above can be defined in similar ways. The definition that I prefer encapsulates how many children could fall under the umbrella of SEBD:

“difficulties which a young person is experiencing which act as a barrier to their personal, social, cognitive and emotional development. These difficulties may be communicated through internalising and/or externalising behaviours. Relationships with self, others and community may be affected and the difficulties may interfere with the pupil’s own personal and educational development or that of others. The contexts within which difficulties occur must always be considered and may include the classroom, school, family, community and cultural settings.”

(Source here)

I chose this definition because it encompasses the wide variety of difficulties that children may face. It avoids falling into the pitfall of just defining the most severe and shocking elements of SEBD that usually gain the most attention.

It highlights how a social, emotional or behavioural difficulty can impact relationships. Perhaps their relationship with themselves and their self-esteem is severely damaged? Maybe, they can’t build positive relationships with their peers or family because they have trouble regulating their own emotions. They could even be isolated in the community as they explicitly or implicitly can’t access local clubs and amenities because they are seen as different, challenging or strange.

Externalised behaviours get a lot of attention as they are very hard to ignore in a classroom. You may also hear these behaviours referred to as “acting out behaviours”. These include behaviour like defiance, aggression, vandalism, bullying, swearing, shouting and running away.

Internalised behaviours can get less attention. These behaviours are easier to ignore or miss altogether. They can also be called “acting in behaviours”. Internalised behaviour may present as withdrawal, depression, passivity, anxiety or even self-harm. 

I also like how this definition highlights the importance of context. It is worth observing where these difficulties occur. Are they just in school and not at home? Vice versa? Perhaps these difficulties manifest in certain places and not in others. 

So if someone says that a child is dealing with SEBD, EBD, BESD or SEMH, you will need to ask them to be more specific. Are their difficulties being communicated through externalised behaviour or internalised behaviour? In what contexts are these difficulties occurring? Which relationships are being impacted? Avoid the trap of thinking that a child who has an emotional or behavioural difficulty must automatically be presenting a certain way. Remain curious and dig deeper.

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Categories
Teacher Mindset

5 Quotes For Teachers & Free eBook

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A teacher’s best asset is their mind. Stress, anxiety, negativity and all the other things that inhibit our happiness naturally inhibit the quality of our teaching also. I’ve written before about two ways I deal with stress. I think it’s important to talk about this subject as the statistics are so damning.

To maintain a tidy classroom, we develop daily, weekly and yearly habits. One-off fixes are insufficient. I have found maintaining a stress-free and resilient mind is much the same. I have had to develop daily, weekly and yearly habits that help me maintain equilibrium. This isn’t to say my mind is squeaky clean. Much like the classroom, every so often someone bursts open one of those yoghurt tubes (don’t get me started) and makes a huge mess. Thanks to productive habits, however, the mess doesn’t last forever.

Reading and listening to philosophy has been one of my cornerstones. It keeps the principles and practices I value at the forefront of my mind and consuming them prevents me from slipping into old habits. Reading is great but it is my holy grail. I love a podcast, audiobook and youtube clips too as I can listen as I carry out mundane tasks. 

A short book I loved recently and which gave me perspective was Seneca: On the Shortness of Life. It includes three letters: one to Paulinus, one to his mother and one to Serenus. The whole book is 100 short pages and I was the full cliché highlighting quote after quote. I’m going to let the quotes speak for themselves. If you like the book but you’re still not sure, I’m going to include a link to get the first letter for free below.  

My 5 Favourite Quotes that Teachers May Find Thought-Provoking

“You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the thing in which it is right to be stingy.”

“It is generally agreed that no activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least desirable activity of the preoccupied man.”

“One person who has achieved the badge of office they coveted longs to lay it aside, and keeps repeating ‘Will this year never end?’

“But nobody works out the value of time: people use it lavishly as if it cost nothing. But if death threatens these same people, you will see them praying to their doctors; if they are in fear of capital punishment, you will see them prepared to spend their all to stay alive. So inconsistent are they in their feelings. But if each of us could have the tally of their future years set before him, as we can of our past years, how alarmed would be those who saw only a few years ahead, and how carefully would they use them.”

“It is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle; it escapes through the cracks and holes of the mind.”

Reading books like this one remind me that the day-to-day things that are inclined to stress me are generally meaningless in the wider scheme of things. They help me discard the frivolous thinking and time-wasting I can fall into when I’m not exposing myself to these habitual reminders.

I’d recommend downloading his first letter for free below. You can view this file as a PDF or put it on your kindle to see if it’s for you. You can also take the plunge and buy the full book here. If you want to receive a weekly email from me every Monday that includes a strategy for behaviour and inclusion alongside a thought that links in with topics like stress and mental health, you can subscribe below.

Seneca: On The Shortness of LifeDownload

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Categories
Behaviour Management

8 Ways to Motivate Children Without Rewards

Different strokes for different folks is becoming my new behaviour policy. What works for me as a teacher, might not work for you. Ditto if your parent. Definitely, if you’re a child. The more I have studied behaviour, the more I have come to wonder why would you marry a single philosophy when there are so many options out there? Handcuffing yourself to a single set of beliefs just limits your options. Develop preferences for sure. But if your strategies aren’t serving you, the adult you’re trying to advise or the child, it’s time to change it up and try something new. As long as the approach abides by obvious ethical parameters, its an option.

Reward systems usually evoke strong opinions. Adults can love or hate them. They can rely heavily on them or avoid them like the plague. The truth, as always, lies in the middle. I wrote a piece about developing top-quality reward systems but I acknowledge they are not for everyone and different strategies are needed. But how do we motivate children to behave and learn without rewards? Here are eight different options:

  1. Providing Choice is a strong motivator. It gives ownership to students over their learning and behaviour. Depending on the situation, you can offer them a choice over what they learn, how they learn and where they learn. (More on choice here)
  2. Providing Competition motivates students. The teacher can set a challenge for the child to overcome. They can challenge a child to beat their own personal best. In the appropriate contexts, they can even pit children against their peers. Healthy competition is part of life and should be harnessed positively.
  3. Technology always is appealing to students. They will jump at the chance to achieve learning objectives using technology instead of using pen and paper. Creating their work digitally, photographically or through video will inspire them to apply themselves.
  4. Art should never be underestimated. Whether it is creating work using new and colourful stationery or reacting to a stimulus through clay or painting, children are often motivated by presenting their work artistically.
  5. Drama stirs children’s imagination. A topic such as the Vikings can be very uninspiring in a textbook, but if it is brought to life through role-play, freeze frames and conscience alleys, it suddenly becomes a world of fun and motivation to get involved.
  6. Mysteries that need solving stoke a child’s curiosity. Give them clues and the resources and support to solve them and they will work like detectives to scratch the itch and find out what the answer is. 
  7. Surprises aren’t for everyone. Some children who are anxious need predictability. Depending on your class, however, inserting novelty and surprise activities can shake off the funk children fall into if they find routine monotonous. Variety is the spice of life and it adds motivation to the mixture too.
  8. Deadlines are simple and effective. Whether you introduce a short term deadline with a radial timer or a longer-term deadline, these can motivate children to achieve task completion before the deadline runs out.

Each of these eight options provides effective motivation on their own or paired with a reward system. Incorporating them into your daily routine will prevent misbehaviour before it has a chance to arise and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

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Behaviour Management parenting

Top Quality Reward Systems

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Top quality reward systems can be a great way to start the year and establish the standard of behaviour you want in your classroom. They can be fantastic for intervening if a class is particularly challenging to work with. They can be a wonderful way to motivate children or an individual child to apply themselves to a task. 

By committing to a reward system, you are taking a primarily positive approach that will objectively show you if the desired behaviour is increasing and if you are rewarding it regularly. 

This article explains what the key elements are, what the steps involve and common reasons that they may not work.

Four Keys to an Effective Reward System

Lock in these four keys before creating your system. All successful reward system have these four elements in common.

  1. The students must find the reward desirable. If they don’t, the system will be doomed to fail. Provide choice and pick suitable rewards that you both can agree on. Beware of “reinforcer satiation”. This is where a once desirable reward has lost its novelty. Keep it fresh and change it up.
  2. Ensure the behaviour is defined, explained and practised. Choosing between one and four behaviours for a whole class will keep it extremely clear what is expected. Instead of rewarding “being good”, reward “listening when another is speaking”. Reward the specific behaviour you want to increase. Spend time practising what it looks like as you introduce the system. Ensure the behaviour is within their ability.
  3. Decide how often the children will need to be rewarded. When you set up the system first, reward frequently and overtly. This makes it crystal clear what you are rewarding. Pair your rewards with very specific positive language. “Excellent Caleb, I noticed you were looking at Ellen when she was talking, I have to reward that”. Watch as that behaviour spreads through the room. As the days pass, gradually reduce the frequency at which you reward the behaviours but still intermittently reward and praise them. Wait until break time to reward them. Delay it until the end of the day when they are ready. Finally, the end of the week. If the standard of behaviour drops, increase the frequency you reward again. Find the sweet spot and gradually reduce.
  4. If the behaviour is not forthcoming, do not give them the rewards but equally, do not complain. The attention and rewards are solely for the students who are performing the behaviour. This provides consistency in your approach and will harness children who love any attention to your advantage. If they want your attention, they must play by the rules the teacher and students have agreed.

Five Steps to Implementing a Reward System

Whatever you do, spend time working through steps one to three. Think of it like building a house. Build solid foundations and your house will stand the test of time and stormy weather. If you skip the foundations and start by creating a lovely display, you are building on sand and it is sure to decrease the chances of success.

  1. Write and explain clear definitions of the behaviour you want to increase. Actions that can be seen and heard and cannot be argued.
  2. Establish how often the defined behaviour occurs before implementing the system. This helps you decide how often you need to reward it. Raise the standard and increase the time between behaviour and reward as they improve.
  3. List a menu of rewards that they can choose from. Let them have a say in this step to increase compliance.
  4. Create an attractive display. This will maximise buy-in from the kids.
  5. Explain the system clearly.  Taking the time to do this reduces ambiguity and creates excitement as the children can see clearly what they have to do to be rewarded.

Four Reasons It’s Not Working

There is no magic strategy that will solve all problems. Maybe a reward system is not suited to your context. However, there are four common reasons why reward systems fail. Consider these issues and how you might fix them if this ever applies to you.

  1. The students may not clearly understand the expectations or the behaviour may not be within their ability. Put more time into explaining and practising the behaviour you want to increase.
  2. You moved too fast from continuously rewarding the behaviour to infrequently rewarding it. Return to immediately rewarding the specific behaviour you want to increase.
  3. Reinforcer satiation has occurred. The once amazing reward that was on offer has lost its shine. Change the system and rewards to freshen things up.
  4. There are inconsistencies. The child knows that the reward will be given to them anyway. Maybe, they are getting negative attention which they find rewarding. Once the system is set, finetuned and explained, it needs to be executed consistently by all adults in the room to maximise its impact.

Giving children rewards for positive actions and behaviour creates a rapport between teacher and student. If the four keys are secure and the five steps have been taken in the correct order, you will slowly be able to reduce the reliance on your reward systems as the children habitually perform the behaviour. Reward systems are a valuable part of a teacher’s toolkit. Ensure that you use them correctly.

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Behaviour Management

Coronavirus Kids

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We are living in a strange time right now. In Ireland and many other countries, we have been thrust into school closures with the advice of keeping children apart to ensure that coronavirus does not spread. This places sudden and sizeable stress on parents and children alike. Although we could see school closures coming, it came quite fast and children may be at home now with no real school guidance on what the best course of action is. Here are a few thoughts below that may be of help to parents or teachers:

Anxious Children

The media sells fear. This is a known principle of how media drives traffic to their websites and purchases of their newspapers. Anxious children do not need to be exposed to a 24-hour newsfeed about a virus they do not fully understand. Adults do not either. Limit the amount of coronavirus related media that children (and yourself) are exposed to. Limit the amount of talk about the coronavirus around children also. There is no need for children to listen to speculation, repeated reporting and scare-mongering which can be sure to contribute to their anxiety. 

Energetic Children

Children are advised not to mix with other children as they can help spread the disease to the more vulnerable. If you have a child with ADHD, ADD or any abundance of energy, this does not mean that you have to lock them inside. The advice seems to suggest being outside is a safe environment. Go to big parks, fields, forests or anywhere in nature where you believe contact with others will be minimal. Teach your child the concept of social distancing like a bubble around other families and explore places that, otherwise, you might not have the chance to explore.

One of the best ways to maintain a calm, positive environment is to make sure a lively child gets an opportunity to burn off some of their energy. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and preventing misbehaviour before it has a chance to arise is always a good tip.

Remember: there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing choices!

Educational Activities

As this is an unprecedented event, teachers and parents have been left scrambling at what to do. There has been a noble effort by schools and teachers to direct learning remotely but I believe this is not the way to move forward. 

The teacher may be able to provide some beneficial guidance on applications and websites to utilise or pages in books to complete but this is a wonderful opportunity for your child to experience one-to-one learning that they otherwise would not get.

I would suggest the following list of activities that would be a more beneficial way to spend the bulk of “educational time” while at home:

  • Play board games to teach strategic thinking and problem-solving.
  • Bake or cook dinners together to teach healthy living and weight in maths.
  • Writing out shopping lists for practicing spelling and handwriting.
  • Gardening to teach about science or geography.
  • Paint a fence or a wall to teach about fo
  • Get out into nature for geography and P.E.
  • Play with Lego, mechano or any other construction for science.
  • Get children to dress up in adult clothes for a fashion show for drama.
  • Clean bedrooms and re-organise the house to teach executive functioning skills.
  • Read to your child or have them read to you for English.
  • Listen to podcasts and talk about them for oral language.
  • Bring home a few empty cardboard boxes from the supermarket and let them loose with colours, sellotape and scissors for art.

There is a list of exciting opportunities to entertain, education and enjoy time with your children over the next few weeks. Creativity and energy are needed but the chance to teach your own child should be grasped with both hands. It’s also important to note that the whole world will be spending more time watching television and on screens at the moment and we should reflect this with our children. There is nothing wrong with binge-watching television right now to entertain ourselves in the evening when everyone is tired out.

Control the Controllables

There is very little in our control at the moment regarding the wider world but we can control our actions. The important things we need to impress on our children is that there is no need to panic or worry but there is a need to be careful. We should educate our children to:

  1. Wash their hands with correct technique frequently.
  2. Cough into their elbow.
  3. Practice social distancing.
  4. Avoid mixing with their friends in person (encourage calling their friends on phones).

After these four points, there is very little else we can do right now other than take the positives where we can and enjoy the extra quality time with our loved ones. 

Categories
Behaviour Management

How to End the Tale of Telling Tales

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Teachers can have an aversion to children telling tales after lunch and break time. Children can feel the need to report every misdemeanour they have ever witnessed on the yard to the class teacher upon their return. Some students can be compelled to do this even after reporting it to the supervising teacher and watching as the teacher dealt with the situation. There are students out there that just love to retell the drama of it all. This is fine to a point and we always encourage children to tell a teacher if something bad has happened. The issue arises where you get every minute detail after every break and the issues are nothing more than minor indiscretions that could be handled by the supervising teacher or even better, sorted out amongst themselves. At times the motivation behind this type of behaviour can be to eat up teaching time as the lesson is side-tracked by sorting the incident or simply just students who love to stir up a bit of trouble.

When you try to prevent the telling of tales by silencing them or by ignoring the undesired behaviour, perhaps it gets worse or the children are too frustrated to concentrate on the next lesson. When you try to sort it out quickly, it can unravel and take ten or fifteen minutes to reach a satisfactory conclusion. What is an alternative strategy that you can incorporate to deal with this issue?

Listen: But on your terms and their time

I had a chronic issue with this type of behaviour with a class I taught before. It stemmed from their hyper-competitive nature (that I loved) but their games on yard often ended in petty disputes that they loved to report back after the bell which ate up precious teaching time. I used a simple solution to decrease this behaviour.

Having tried for weeks with various strategies to prevent their minor disputes with reflective discussions, preventive discussion and positive reinforcements with no success, I simply started to listen.

Whenever the students would come in from the yard and begin to sort out their disputes and tell tales on each other, I would feign the utmost genuine concern. I would ask who was involved and take careful note of the names. I would say that it sounds very important and we should try to get a solution to this issue. I would ensure to attribute no blame or showcase zero frustration. Then, I would tell them their appointment to sort this issue is at the start of the next break.

The children were initially very satisfied with this as I was demonstrating concern and was showing how I was willing to listen so the lesson could instantly begin that I had planned. The next break would come, and I would funnel the rest of the class out to the yard and suddenly, it would dawn on the remaining children that this issue could be resolved surprisingly quickly.

I would move comically slowly to my desk and take out my notepad and pen and begin to ask each child, “How can we solve this problem?”. I would take the spotlight away from the blame and focus it solely on what we could do to ensure it didn’t happen again. The students became antsy at missing their break time and could think of several ways to sort out their problems. It was miraculous how little they wanted to tell tales when it was on their time. When a satisfactory discussion was had (usually 4-5 minutes was enough), I would let them out without an angry word and tell them to enjoy their break.

Sure enough, I had to do this more frequently at the beginning, but very quickly the children realised that talking about many of their issues wasn’t worth five minutes of their own break time. They began to sort the minor issues out amongst themselves or tell the teacher on the yard and the constant telling of tales in my room reduced to zero.

It was a simple strategy that saved a lot of time. Of course, I missed time out of my break while using this intervention at the start, but I saved countless time over the year. If you’re struggling with a group that love to tell tales, I recommend it as a go-to strategy. Let me know if it works!

Disclaimer: Of course, bullying is always dealt with very seriously and students are always taught how bullying behaviour is deliberate, hurtful and repetitive. I trust a teacher will not use this strategy to reduce the reporting of bullying and knows the profile of their students appropriately to judge if this strategy is useful.

Categories
Behaviour Management

ADHD, ODD, ADD: Is labelling our children counter-productive?

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One of my favourite thought-provoking articles I have read is a research paper by Nardone and Portelli titled When the diagnosis “invents” the illness. It is a fascinating take on the world we live in and how we classify mental disorders. It proposes a move away from the rigid categorisation of disorders and toward viewing problems as dysfunctional systems of perception and interaction.

Its implication for teaching children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties would be a shift away from trying to fit children into a specific box such as ADHD, ADD, ODD, EBD etc which lead to predetermined strategies and instead focusing on a strategic approach where the problem is viewed on its own very specific merits and interventions are designed to help the student function better in their environment.

The paper makes a great case for this alternative way of thinking. It argues that a diagnosis has the potential to end up causing self-fulfilling prophecy and gives examples where this has been proven.

It gives one extreme example where a patient was admitted to the hospital as a manic depressive and was sedated with tranquillizers. The following day, she was to be moved to an alternative location but refused. The hospital insisted and the patient resisted. As they tried to forcibly move her, she became violent. She screamed. The doctor was called and a further series of injections were used to calm her as every time she woke, she became more violent.

This story may appear unpleasant but perhaps you may think “it was for her own good as she was manically depressed and they wanted to help her.” Your opinion may shift when you discover the police pulled over the ambulance when it was in transit to inform them that they had taken the wrong person. They had been injecting and sedating a “normal” person.

This story blew my mind. The nurses thought she was manically depressed so when she violently protested, they injected her as the diagnosis was there and the behaviour was interpreted as typical of the condition. How is this relevant to the classroom and students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties? The story above is an extreme example but there are takeaways for us as teachers.

Let’s take for example a student with a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A teacher who has a student with ADHD in their class may expect certain behaviours. They may expect the child to be disruptive, energetic, and inattentive and may treat them accordingly. The child – if they are aware of the diagnosis – may expect to perform these behaviours too. There is an element of diagnostic prophecy to the condition. 

With this diagnosis, common interventions include behaviour therapy and medication. To pose the question, what if the child has been wrongfully diagnosed and their behaviour was the result of something else and now they are being medicated?

Consider a child who is considered “normal” in your classroom. If a teacher is teaching a lesson and this child is inattentive and disruptive, the teacher might come to different conclusions. The teacher might consider their teaching. Was the child inattentive because the subject matter of the lesson was too difficult? Was the child disruptive because the methodology used was too boring and sedentary? The teacher may change the way they deliver future lessons to try to increase their engagement.

Is it possible that medically categorising our students at a young age might not be the correct way to go? Potentially. If a child with a diagnosis behaves a certain way, it can be accepted as part of their diagnosis. If a child without a diagnosis behaves a certain way, it may be more likely considered as communication.

I would not suggest throwing out all forms of diagnoses in schools, but I would be slower to label children in primary school and treat them a certain way because of their diagnosis. Thinking strategically (as discussed in previous articles) is a way to steer away from pigeon-holing our children and helping them to function more effectively in the classroom. The teacher can observe the problem behaviour specific to its characteristics and context and attempt to intervene to help the child function better in the classroom or wherever the problem may be. Having a diverse range of strategies, interventions and supports available is key to this way of thinking. 

I think this ideology is incredibly thought-provoking, how about you?

Categories
Anger Management Behaviour Management

Stop….Have a Debate and Listen!

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Have you ever had two kids who are constantly fighting? They just seem to rub each other up the wrong way. They can’t walk past each other without a sly comment, a slight nudge or out on the yard at lunchtime is a free-for-all with fighting, cheating and lots of other undesirable behaviours? These types of situations can be quite common in schools as children can find it difficult to cope when they believe they don’t like someone who is constantly in the same area as them. Learning to be civil around someone you loathe is a life skill.

There are common strategies to try to cope with these scenarios. Perhaps a reward chart might be incorporated and kind words, kind hands and kind feet are positively reinforced. The teacher might use a punishment strategy to try to decrease the undesired behaviour where the children lose privileges if they engage in negative behaviour. The teacher might read social stories, use the zones of regulation or try discussing their issues with them separately to try to calm them down. They might even use the I-ASSIST model or Letters of Anger. These are all good strategies which might bear fruit, but what if they don’t?

As I have constantly parroted on this blog, anger is an emotion like any other and it is okay to feel. It is how the anger is communicated that needs to change in these situations. An unorthodox strategy that may be worth keeping in your toolkit for these instances is organizing face-to-face debates.

Face-to-face Debating

Often, children who are furious will only settle when they feel the situation is resolved to their satisfaction or their point is heard. Organising a face-to-face debate facilitates this as they get uninterrupted time to voice their grievances without fear of interruption of reprimand. There are several ways that this could be successfully implemented.

If the two children are fighting daily, religiously schedule a debate for after lunchtime where each gets five-ten minutes (depending on the context) to air their opinions and not a minute longer than the teacher prescribed. The other child must sit and listen for the full five minutes before he can speak for five minutes also. On the following day, the child who went second in the debate gets to start it. Once this is made a routine fixture, the pair should reduce their number of arguments outside of the designated debate time as they realise they will get their chance to argue later. It is, therefore, a great tool for de-escalating out on yard as the teacher can remind them to wait for the debate time.

There are other benefits to this method such as the building of a positive relationship with the teacher who is clearly impartial and no longer must seek who is to blame or reprimand negative behaviour. As the children have a full five-ten minutes to speak, apparent misunderstandings will appear, and the children will listen to how the other perceived what was happening which can help prevent future incidents. Finally, on the days that there are no issues, having to sit opposite each other as if to start a debate can provide a spark of humour and demonstrate the progress made. Perhaps make them just talk that day and see how a rapport may flourish that could even become a friendship.

Concerns

I am sure that there will be teachers reading this horrified. How can you organize the very situation that we want to avoid? Where will I get this time for a debate? What if it escalates the situation further?

To these teachers I would say, this strategy is great when other strategies are not bearing success and alternative logic is needed. It is apparently time-consuming, but the chances are if you are using this strategy, you were losing teaching time anyway having to deal with these negative situations. This is a method that gives the teacher control over a tricky situation. I would encourage the teacher to set firm minimal rules for the debate such as no swearing and having to remain in your seat. Otherwise, the teacher must sit in stony silence and allow the venting to occur.

What do you think? Could it work? Let me know your thoughts!

Thanks to Papantuono, Portelli, and Gibson’s book “Winning without Fighting” for the idea.