Imagine you are standing in front of a class and a child has just refused your instruction for the second time. Not only that, but they seem to be doing everything they can to get under your skin. They roll their eyes and mimic your tone of voice in a way that makes the class laugh.
You feel your shoulders tighten. Your voice changes as you repeat the instruction more firmly. You are a moment away from losing your temper.
I know this moment well, because I’ve often stood in it myself.
I started my career in schools before moving into residential children’s care, where I now lead a home supporting children who have experienced trauma.
We rightly ask teachers to be curious about behaviour (what is the child communicating? What triggered this? What is happening underneath what we can see?). But we spend far less time asking teachers to be equally curious about their own emotional responses.
What are your warning signs?
Understanding why a child behaves as they do doesn’t make behaviour any easier to receive. You can understand trauma, believe wholeheartedly in relational practice, and a child’s actions can still get under your skin. That doesn’t make you a bad teacher. It makes you human.
For me, a warning sign is noticing that I have stopped wondering “what’s going on here?” and started thinking “here we go again”. When I lose my curiosity, I know that I am just a few steps away from losing my self-regulation.
Recognising this in the heat of the moment is not easy. That’s particularly true in schools, because classrooms have audiences. When thirty children are watching, it’s easy to feel that you can’t possibly let something go.
“Hold the boundary” might be solid classroom management advice, but in practice, it skips over what is perhaps the hardest part of the process: noticing and regulating your own responses to stress.
In the home I lead, we spend a lot of time trying to understand children’s histories, triggers, warning signs and what helps them find their way back.
At some point, we realised we needed to know those things about ourselves, too.
Our adults now have one-page profiles covering what can trigger us, what colleagues might notice when we’re becoming stressed, and what helps us get back to ourselves.
Don’t panic, I’m not suggesting teachers need another form to fill in. But it is worth asking yourself what happens to you when you’re reaching your limit. Maybe you talk faster, you become more rigid, or you repeat the same instruction, only louder.
Being able to spot these signs in yourself gives you a better chance of being able to change what happens next. It gives you a chance to lower your voice, rather than raising it, to stop repeating an instruction that clearly isn’t working, or to decide that something doesn’t need resolving publicly just because it started publicly.
Space to reflect
We ask teachers to regulate themselves in front of thirty children, day after day, while rarely giving them anywhere to put what that work brings up.
In residential care, supervision is built into the job. There is somewhere to say “that child is really getting under my skin” and explore why without it being treated as evidence that you’re failing.
However, teachers mostly don’t have that. If we want relational practice in schools, we need a system conversation about workload, protected reflective space and what inspection and accountability actually value.
Until then, perhaps we need to become as interested in what happens inside the adult in the seconds before they respond as we already are in what happens inside the child. Sometimes the most important thing we can do in a difficult classroom is notice what is happening in us before it decides what happens next.
And sometimes we’ll get it wrong. I’ve shouted when I shouldn’t have and I’ve responded from frustration rather than curiosity - the important thing then is to go back and acknowledge you should have handled something differently.
I used to worry that going back would weaken my authority, but I now think the opposite is true. Children don’t need perfect adults, but adults who can make mistakes without making the child carry the weight of them.
Daniel Crowley is director of Sussex Children’s Care and the author of Being The Adult They Need.
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