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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
This timely book moves the dial on the perception of challenging behaviour in schools. De-escalation is important but it is only part of the process: if we really want to change behaviour, we have to understand it. The causes of poor behaviour are many and varied: fear, stress, anxiety and the feeling of being overwhelmed can all take their toll.Changing Perceptionsexamines the motives behind challenging behaviour and the consequences that come with it, detailing ways in which these situations can be managed calmly and consistently. Better understanding and empathy can make children feel safer, build their trust, develop belonging and consequently create more effective learners in the classroom. Empathy is the master key to unlocking the most challenging pupils. When we consistently respond to children with empathy and compassion, we don't just put a sticking plaster over a problem, we change their experiences: how they feel and how they behave long term. Importantly, this approach also greatly improves staff wellbeing by increasing understanding of challenging behaviour and how it is perceived. In this book, Graham sets out why it is so important to teach behaviour and provides practical ways to deal with the most challenging situations in the classroom and stop the conflict spiral. He also covers the importance of validating feelings, building self-esteem, improving emotional resilience, raising expectations, fostering positive values and much more. Essential reading for teachers, school leaders and everyone working with challenging behaviour.
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Praise for Changing Perceptions
Personal experience and the harnessing of knowledge from highly regarded experts and professionals allows Chatterley to really get to grips with perceptions and misconceptions, throwing light on what drives behaviour challenges in schools and how we need to take a more sophisticated approach to how we deal with them. This is an honest and, at times, emotional read, where Chatterley allows us an insight into his own lived experiences that confirm why he is a person to listen to and learn from.
Dave Whitaker, Director of Learning, Wellspring Academy Trust, author of The Kindness Principle
In Changing Perceptions Graham Chatterley guides us through a number of steps to better understand children’s complex behaviour. Rooted in relational practice, neuroscience, restorative and trauma-informed approaches, Graham weaves in case studies to help educational practitioners develop a nuanced approach to behaviour.
Sarah Johnson, President of PRUsAP, author of Behaving Together in the Classroom: A Teacher’s Guide to Nurturing Behaviour, Head of Behaviour and Inclusion and Director of Phoenix Education Consultancy
Changing Perceptions is an enjoyable, thought-provoking read. Teachers and leaders at every level will get so much from reading his book. He manages to hit the target without missing the point, which is that behaviour is about meeting the underlying needs of all members of schools as communities. Graham explores behaviour with authenticity and warmth and keeps the well-being of children central. Read Graham’s book and behaviour will be better as a result.
Mark Finnis, author of Restorative Practice, Director of L30 Relational Systems
In Changing Perceptions Graham’s choice to share professional vulnerability with the reader lays the foundation for a reader–author relationship within a sense of trust which is, as he says, vital for learning. Graham set out to write the book he wishes he could have read at 22, and I think anyone working in education could learn from this book.
Dr Jess Mahdavi-Gladwell, SENCO and Head of Assessment Centre, Newhaven Pupil Referral Unit
Chatterley takes the reader on a journey, providing them with an opportunity to understand why behaviourist approaches to the communication of distress are not simply outdated but also pointless. Utilising the most contemporary research, supplying a coherent narrative and exploring the lived experiences of families, children and young people, this book is an essential read for everyone working in the education community.
Lisa Cherry, Director, Trauma Informed Consultancy Services and author of Conversations That Make a Difference to Children and Young PeopleB
Changing Perceptions is a must-read book for all who sit beside children and youth carrying pain-based behaviours. Graham explains how toxic stress – the ‘why’ – impacts behaviours and how holistic and restorative practices are critical for social and emotional well-being which leads to deepened learning. Most importantly, Graham shares his lived and often painful experiences as a father raising an autistic child. I am honoured to have this book in my hands as author Graham Chatterley shares his brilliance in working with children and youth who often dare us to love them and teach them.
Lori Desautels, Assistant Professor, College of Education, Butler University
Graham’s book is a bold and ambitious clarion call for teachers to ‘change their perceptions’ of several things; to change their perceptions of what lies behind the behaviour of the students they teach; to change their perceptions of the most effective language to use when describing the behaviour of the young people in their class; to change the perceptions of what approaches work to get better behaviour; and, above all, to change their perceptions of the young people they work with, especially those young people with the most ‘challenging’ behaviour. And there is a clear starting point for these changed perceptions and that is with all of us being a little more ‘fiercely curious’.
Mark Goodwin, Director of Behaviour and Wellbeing, The Mercian Trust
Changing Perceptions is a realistic and comprehensive discussion about how the education system can change its response to the need for emotional regulation in our schools and classrooms. Thank you, Graham, for sharing your personal story and for advocating for children throughout the country. Let’s hope this book can continue the progress we are making in changing perceptions about children and families and, therefore, being more effective practitioners.
Rachel Tomlinson, Head Teacher, Barrowford Primary School
In Changing Perceptions Graham Chatterley set out to write the book he wished he’d had as an NQT when he struggled with pupil behaviour. What he has produced – the fruit of many years spent thinking, researching, observing, learning from experts and, above all, working with children in classrooms in mainstream and specialist settings – is a book I wish I’d had at any stage of my career.
John Cosgrove, retired Head Teacher
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Foreword by John Cosgrove
What if, instead of insisting that children are ‘school ready’ we asked schools to be ‘children ready’? What if, rather than trying to eradicate undesirable behaviour by punishment, we attempted to understand where it was coming from and treated the causes as well as the symptoms? What if we thought as much about the unconscious messages we give in our responses to children as about the ways they challenge us?
In medieval times, part of the examination for master of education at the University of Cambridge involved the candidate being presented with a birch rod, a small bat for smacking hands known as a ‘palmer’ and a boy. When the child had been soundly beaten, he was paid a few pence for his essential part in enabling a future teacher to demonstrate the skills needed to survive in a classroom. It sometimes seems that we have not moved on very far. The tools of control may have changed but perceptions have not.
Pupil behaviour management has been a concern for teachers from the dawn of time. If a child will not listen and follow instructions, it is very difficult for learning to take place. The trouble is that whilst we may no longer hit children with canes or paddles, we still too often approach behaviour from a purely punitive stance, with demerits, detentions, focus rooms, isolation booths, exclusions and expulsion. What if, instead of seeking to ‘manage’ behaviour, we taught children how to behave appropriately?
Graham Chatterley is an experienced teacher, school leader, trainer and consultant. In this important book, the fruit of many years working with children, teachers and schools, he challenges everyone involved with education to re-examine the most basic assumptions we make about our work. He explores some of those ‘what if’ questions and, using examples from his personal experience, shows how the latest research can inform our practice and how all our dealings with young people can be informed by empathy and respect.
Some years ago, a head teacher from a different continent came to visit the school I led at the time, a large multicultural primary in what I always iidescribe as ‘a challenging urban environment’. As I showed him round, he was particularly interested in the work of our specialist resource for children with autism. Later, over coffee in my office, he told me with a sad smile: ‘I am ashamed to say that in my country we don’t have special needs. We just beat children.’ He didn’t add – but we both knew – that the beatings achieved nothing. They were not a solution; they were because that head teacher and his staff, just like the masters of education hundreds of years ago and the proponents of isolation booths today, did not – and do not – know what to do instead.
What is important, of course, is not that we shame or blame teachers and schools, but that we show them the better ways of doing things. We challenge and change perceptions. Which is exactly what Graham does in this book.
Acknowledgements
It has certainly been a journey to get here, a finishing line I wondered whether I would ever reach. I would like to thank Mike and Kerry, without whose leadership, guidance and opportunity to develop my training this book would not exist.
A big thank you to Paul Dix and the Teacher Hug team for letting me be a part of this wonderful project, and for giving me the confidence to believe that people wanted to listen to what I had to say.
Special thanks to Dr Alec Clark, John Cosgrove, Maryse Dare, Mark Goodwin and Dr Jess Mahdavi-Gladwell for reading through drafts and offering advice and support throughout the writing of the book.
The most important thanks goes to all the children, including my own, who have taught me so much and continue to do so.
And, finally, thanks to Morgan for helping Dad with his terrible punctuation and grammar and support throughout the editing process. Unlimited high fives from here on out. iv
Contents
Introduction
I started my teaching career completely unprepared. The messages I had taken led me to try to be an authority figure, but I lacked that personality. I looked around at experienced teachers, attempting to emulate their classroom management. I bought into the idea that if my pupils sat still and conformed, that was a measure of my teaching capabilities.
Every day was a struggle. I left each day thinking that I couldn’t do it, my lessons weren’t interesting enough, I wasn’t firm enough and I wasn’t liked or respected by my pupils. I was very close to failing my newly qualified teacher (NQT) year and even closer to calling it a day. In fact, in my head, I had made that decision; I just hadn’t told anyone.
Then a strange thing happened. I relaxed, I stopped putting myself under so much pressure and, in order to make a little bit of extra money to save up for when I wouldn’t have a teaching salary, I signed up to do three extracurricular clubs. (Yes, there was once a time when teachers got paid for extracurricular activities.) A new laid-back me engaging in activities I enjoyed gave the children an opportunity to see the personality I had been working so hard to hide because I was under the illusion that it would damage my authority. The side effect was that behaviour in my lessons improved, which prompted some overdue reflection about what I had been prioritising.
That reflection led me to analyse my teacher training and focus on the experiences I had been ignoring. I had got it all wrong: authority isn’t the reason why children conform. Experienced staff don’t have well-behaved pupils because of what they are doing now, but because of what they have done before. The children are conforming to their high expectations 2because the groundwork of building relationships and earning respect has already been done.
I had believed that the successful teaching practice I’d had in my final year was down to what I had done in the classroom, but it wasn’t. It was down to the brilliant Jamie Hallett, my fellow trainee at the same school, who had dragged me onto the yard at break and lunch times to interact with the children, and also to the good luck that my teaching practice coincided with a school residential, further allowing the children to see my human side. I had been oblivious to it, but those little interactions had been my currency for better behaviour in the classroom. It was a currency I didn’t have during my NQT year because the children had never seen it, but I was now building it in those extracurricular activities when I was getting out and interacting outside the classroom. I started to play to my own strengths and to be authentic, and I actually began to enjoy teaching for the first time.
Now, some people reading this will probably think that I was a bit slow to catch on, and they are probably right, but I got there in the end. I have been reflecting and learning ever since. I have taught at primary and secondary level and pupils with social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs, and I look back with horror at some of the mistakes I made both as an inexperienced and as an experienced educator. It was a journey from shouty NQT to occasionally putting on a performance to not shouting for the last decade. My approach has probably gone from too unfriendly to too friendly and back to the middle, hopefully balancing Kim Golding’s (2017) two hands of discipline and parenting (i.e. emotional connection and nurture in one hand and discipline and boundaries in the other) to the best of my ability.
Meanwhile, I have tried to learn everything I can about the reasons behind children’s challenging behaviour. I have worked to support colleagues and share my experiences whilst doing outreach support for a decade, and I devised the training course that I wish I’d had when I was training. If I’d had a better understanding of child development, additional needs, self-esteem, emotional regulation and trauma, and if I had realised the importance of safety, trust, co-regulation, belonging and happiness, I would have started out as a better teacher. I am confident that the training course has helped more staff than I can count, so now I have written the book I wish I’d had when I was starting my teaching journey. 3
There are a lot of books on the market from teachers supporting teachers from a strategic perspective. Equally, there are lots of books from academics exploring trauma, neuroscience and additional needs. My hope is that this is a book that bridges the two. I was a teacher first (I guess you could even call me overly traditional in style), who has searched and researched to understand behaviour. I have read extensively about the science of behaviour, each time prompted by incidents when we weren’t successful with a child.
I will consistently repeat the message throughout this book that behavioural mistakes are learning opportunities – and that doesn’t just apply to the pupils. If something isn’t working, it is time for us all to reflect and improve. My hope is that this is the book the 22-year-old me would have picked up and read, and saved myself from feeling like a failure. It happens to too many new (and experienced) teachers, so we need to ensure that they start their careers armed with as much information as possible.
This book contains practical strategies, but on their own they will never be enough, especially if we want to be inclusive. We must have a solid understanding of the ‘why’ before we settle on the ‘what’. The first three-quarters of this book are designed to explain the ‘why’ and the last quarter the ‘what’ and ‘how’. I will share examples of individuals who have impacted on me and led my reflections, as well as real-world examples of the processes being used in practice. Everything in this book is tried and tested and has been proven successful. It also contains some insights from my own personal life, and how supporting my own children’s experiences with autism have further shaped my journey.
The aim of this book is to explore every avenue of children’s experiences to help us to react differently when faced with behavioural challenges. We will look at all the aspects of the conflict spiral and equip staff with the skills to de-escalate and repair situations that would otherwise deteriorate. 4
The purpose of school
A few years ago, I found myself in the role of parent sat across from my own child’s head teacher discussing the main purpose of school. The head teacher said: ‘The most important thing is the learning.’ I replied: ‘No, the most important thing is well-being.’ So, what is the main purpose of school? The question has been asked and debated for a long time, and is at the root of many discussions amongst educators. Of course, teaching, and therefore learning, is the fundamental job of a school. I have no desire to dispute that, but are we talking about academic learning or more holistic learning? Are we prioritising academic grades to achieve a higher league table position, or to produce successful adults with good jobs and happy families? Does a school see the child first, or the academic grade they can achieve?
It is very easy for academic grades to take precedence because that is what the system dictates. Children are too often viewed as their potential achievements rather than who they are. If something isn’t measurable in a standardised test, then it is easy to see it as less valuable. Many school leaders don’t buy into this narrative, despite the fact that it is how their school will be judged. If the priority is the individual, then we need a holistic approach for each child. One that equips them not just to contribute to society through whatever job they have, but also by providing them with the ability to be good parents, partners and friends, and to have a positive impact on their community beyond financial contribution.
See the child, not the grade. See the child, not the behaviour. Don’t get me wrong: these aren’t mutually exclusive (as some would have you believe). For example, my son’s school didn’t ignore well-being; the leadership and ethos was very inclusive. However, deciding on what is the most important thing, and making it central to everything you do, is what makes that a genuine ethos. If the most significant factor is academic learning, then there will always be a percentage of children who fall by the wayside because they don’t have the necessary foundations in place – safety, trust, belonging and resilience. If what is most important is well-being, however, then inevitably those foundations will be essential elements of the teaching.
The big question is, do we want a house that looks great but is rushed and built on weak foundations, or do we want a house that might need 5some furnishing and decorating but is built to last? I think every educator knows the answer to that question, but the system is designed for show homes. The strength and quality of the foundations are less important than how it looks. The current system puts pressure on schools to plaster over the cracks or hang a strategic picture. The problem comes when those fissures start to show and rebuilding the house is too big a task. Children can be taught for the test and to have great grades, but academic grades are a tiny part of what children need to be successful and happy adults. Without the foundations of safety, trust, belonging and resilience, children will find adult life challenging. I want schools to give the children an education that is built to last, not just good for show in the short term.
We can call it compassionate leadership, relational practice or progressive education; it doesn’t really matter. It is about putting the well-being of the child first, and knowing that if you do so then the grade will come. It is about the individual being more important than the whole. It is about every child mattering. Making the children’s well-being a bigger priority than their academic learning doesn’t make learning unimportant; it is about building the house properly with solid foundations before we decorate it.
Many educators will say that the foundations are the job of the parents. I can’t argue with that. However, for a multitude of reasons, it is a duty that some parents haven’t done. If our task is to meet the needs of our children, then it falls on educators to give that child a chance because, as Marie Gentles (Don’t Exclude Me, 2021) observes, ‘If we don’t do it, who will?’
I will give some examples throughout the book of where rebuilding those foundations has been done with great success, both in my SEMH setting and whilst supporting mainstream schools. Children’s names have been changed in these instances to protect their identity. 6
Chapter 1
Relationships
Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.
Bruce Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog (2008)
As great as it would be for every staff member to love every child, I don’t think it is possible to love all the children we teach. I often joke that in secondary schools we will settle for like! Love is a word that divides education. The educators I train often feel uncomfortable with the idea of loving their pupils, as it makes a comparison with their own children and they don’t feel it is the same. However, for me, it isn’t about the word, it is about the feeling. ‘Do you love your pupils?’ and ‘Do you want your pupils to feel loved?’ are viewed very differently. How a child is made to feel is what is important.
If, as parents, we go to our own child’s parents’ evening and get the feeling that the teacher doesn’t really know or doesn’t like our child, how does that make us feel? We may have spent five minutes with someone and our feelings towards them are negative; we don’t want to listen to what they have to say and we are probably quite defensive (or aggressive, depending on how we choose to defend our child). If pupils have the same perception, and as a result feel disliked or unwanted, this is not a good foundation for learning. Children who feel this way will be less likely to reach their potential because they will always hold back.
If we want our children to invest in us and in the lessons we teach, then we must invest in them first. I am not suggesting that we can love (or 8like) every child equally. Human nature means it is unlikely that we will love every pupil who enters our classroom. Indeed, many children behave in ways that make it very difficult to feel anything positive towards them – they know exactly what buttons to push. But, if we can find a way to convince the child that we are still going to like them, no matter what they do, then amazing things can happen.
Feelings stick
If you think back to your own time at school, you probably won’t remember subjects or lessons, but you will remember individuals. You won’t remember the content of classes, but you will remember how you felt in them. The teacher who showed so much enthusiasm for their subject that you couldn’t help but get swept away in what they were doing. The teaching assistant who was kind to you when you hurt yourself in the yard and comforted you until your mum arrived.
My outstanding memory of high school was the head teacher who came and sat next to me after I was given out in the school cricket final. I was desperately disappointed and giving myself a really hard time, so I had gone to sit on my own. I have no memory of what the conversation was about, and he didn’t attempt to make me feel better or fix what had happened. He just sat with me and talked. Nothing spectacular. No grand gesture or lesson that had taken three weeks to plan. It was a simple connection that helped at the time, and 20 years later I still remember vividly how it made me feel. It was Year 10 and this was the only one-to-one interaction I ever had with Mr Wright, who sadly died the following year, but it makes me wonder how many others he impacted on in the same modest way.
We get so caught up in systems and policies that we forget the most important tool we have. Human connection – how we make the children feel – is what ultimately makes the difference in a school, not what we do. There are no magic strategies to manage behaviour. I was a well-behaved child, but I wasn’t a spectacular learner generally. However, I tried harder for some teachers than others, and if Mr Wright had taught me, I would have gone through a wall for him after that day. 9
Validate, don’t fix
If we can validate feelings of anger, frustration, fear or any other emotion and not dismiss them or try to fix them, if we can show children that it is okay to feel that way but it will pass, and if we share our own experiences, then we can also show them ways to overcome negative feelings. If we expect behavioural mistakes to happen, but teach children how and why to respond to these occurrences, then we empower them.
Nobody wants children to become distressed. Nobody wants children to react with fear or to be fuelled by chemicals like adrenaline or cortisol (stress hormones that prepare the body for fight or flight), but they are part of life, not just school. These hormones regulate a wide range of processes throughout the body, but too much of them over time can cause significant harm.
Teaching children how to deal with fear and stress should be part of what we do in the classroom. If we can use our relationships to support and our connections to replace that cortisol with oxytocin (a bonding hormone that plays a huge role in connection and trust) and increase levels of dopamine (the pleasure hormone), then we reduce fear, drive connections and make young people feel loved. If we have pupils who feel good, and know the power of making others feel good, then behavioural mistakes will decrease naturally without the need for a specific behaviour focus. They will also be in a state that is more conducive to engagement and more effective learning.
Currently, many behaviour systems run the risk of creating an environment where behavioural mistakes are unacceptable and only perfect will do; anything less than this results in punishment, often in a way that has no link to the original behaviour. I will discuss later the dangers of perfectionism and how we can easily compound a child’s narrative and shame cycle, especially when there is a reason for the behaviour. If we don’t know why they are getting it wrong, how can we teach them to get it right? For example, a child who perceives a psychological or mental threat (and whose body is flooded with stress hormones) is likely to get into trouble because this type of active survival response isn’t appropriate. The fight-or-flight response is millions of years old and evolved to keep us alive in dangerous situations. Thankfully, these kinds of threats are much rarer in today’s world. 10
Don’t ignore the mistake. Instead, see it as an opportunity to learn, connect, raise self-esteem and teach better responses. If someone has been wronged, a consequence will be necessary, but it must be linked to the behaviour and must give the child an opportunity to repair and redeem themselves. Without this, we feed into the child’s narrative that they are bad and should be punished – a narrative that will become harder and harder to change if we don’t challenge it.
Without supportive staff guiding the redemption, there is no connection and there is no oxytocin. Without the connection this brings, we are left with mistrust and disconnect. Just being given an unrelated sanction might be a deterrent, but it doesn’t teach the child anything. It might give them a message that a behaviour or action is unacceptable, but it doesn’t lead to potential repair. It doesn’t show the child that something good can come from something bad, and it doesn’t offer a satisfactory conclusion to the incident. I will discuss this further in Chapter 7.
Issuing a punishment for a mistake puts a full stop on things and informs the child that it is time to move on. We often say to children, ‘Fresh start’, and we do it with the best intentions, but this won’t work if they don’t feel that the situation has been resolved. Resolution gives the child a shot of dopamine that makes them feel good. Throughout the book, I will refer to the bell curve model, which starts at calm and ends at calm, followed by repair. In-between is the escalation to crisis and then recovery. Even in very nurturing schools, the repair often gets missed because having got a child to calm there is a temptation to avoid bringing the incident back up again, as it might trigger the child and take them back into negative feelings. It is a valid concern. Without repair, however, a destructive cycle is created: I am challenged and become dysregulated – I lose control – I am supported and calmed – I go back to class – I am punished – I am challenged and dysregulated – repeat. The adults have the power to interrupt this loop.
The process isn’t this simple, and it takes time because we are often trying to change a child’s narrative about themselves. When we are attempting to modify beliefs, we are taking the child on a journey through the unfamiliar, and unfamiliarity brings with it fear. Any challenge to the child’s learned belief system will be rejected by them and likely sabotaged. However, if we can have faith in the process and stay with it, then we can teach children that although they may feel bad and do bad things, 11they aren’t bad and mistakes can be fixed. We separate guilt and shame. We get them to turn failure into success. In my school, there were many children who were impulsive, who would perceive a threat, storm out of the classroom and rip down the first display they encountered. They were dysregulated and had no interest in the display because they weren’t thinking rationally. The priority was to get them calm, and then the behaviour could be discussed.
When the initial response is punishment, the result is a child who believes that they behaved in the way they did because they are bad and therefore they deserve to be punished. They will take the punishment. And then they will make a similar behavioural mistake the next day because they are bad and that is all that can be expected of them. This is a shame loop. Children often find themselves in this position and little has been done by adults to break it. In fact, sometimes inadvertently, they have embedded the children’s beliefs even further.
If, instead, the response is to look at the impact of the action rather than the action itself, and if the child understands that their favourite staff member spent hours putting up that display and will be upset about the damage, then the behaviour means something and the child feels guilty. An expectation that the action is repaired becomes not only a logical consequence but of importance to the child. Often, I couldn’t give that child a staple gun fast enough to fix the damage. When guilt is used to drive repair, not to feed shame, the child’s narrative changes. ‘I’ve done a bad thing, but I’m not a bad child’ is a driving force for accountability, and making amends brings with it change. If bad things can be fixed, then so can faulty beliefs.
If the child has experienced how satisfying it feels to do good things, then we can keep reminding them of this feeling. Over time, the positive things win out because the child believes they can do them. Starting with adrenaline and cortisol and finishing with oxytocin and dopamine is a powerful process and journey. Take that path enough times, with enough connection and safety, and the adrenaline and cortisol aren’t required and negative behaviour will reduce.
For many of us, there comes a point in our lives when giving the gift becomes more satisfying than receiving it. Getting something nice is great – we get a short-term buzz – but the feeling we get from creating 12and seeing that in others lasts longer and gives us more. This is what we must teach our children.
Punishment, consequence or sanction without resolution doesn’t achieve this. It is why behaviours become cycles and change doesn’t happen. Currently, the same children getting the same consequences is a feature in too many of our schools.
The purpose of this book
When I wrote Building Positive Behaviour: Returning to Learning Using a Sequential Approach (2020), it was in response to what I felt was very damaging guidance coming from the Department for Education. The book was about giving schools a scaffold to respond to children who were struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic and what had been an incredibly challenging time. The impact of the pandemic on mental health and well-being was being downplayed in favour of a more authoritarian approach. For example, ‘Rebooting Behaviour After Lockdown’ by Tom Bennett, the lead behaviour adviser to the Department for Education, published in May 2020, focused on more rules and more adult controls rather than trying to understand and respond to children’s losses and experiences. At a time when mental health, well-being and recovery curriculums were being talked about by many, the government’s focus was simply managing behaviour.
The sequential approach, which I will share in Chapter 19, will never be more relevant than now. It can be used to guide children back to normality and respond to the fallout of the pandemic, the consequences of which I am seeing up and down the country when I work with schools. As schools come out of survival mode and take a breath, the true impact of the past few years is becoming apparent. I have serious concerns about the rigid behaviour systems on which some schools rely. I hope they will begin to prioritise ethos and whole-school approaches to behaviour rather than more punitive responses, which will result in more children out of education. The numbers of pupils missing from schools is already a big worry. Much of the focus has been on academic catch-up and how resilient children have been – and many have been. However, children are survivors; when they experience a crisis, they are more malleable than 13resilient. Although children may recover, they may never be the same as they were before.
In What Happened to You?, Dr Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey (2021) discuss the common misconception that children’s brains are like a sponge ball – that when they face adversity, they bounce back to the perfect round shape of the ball because they are resilient. The truth is that they are more like a coat hanger bent out of shape. You can bend it back but it will never be the same, and the point at which it was bent will always be weaker. Resilience is much more complex than it has been portrayed by politicians and the media; it is more than simply bouncing back. (We will explore emotional resilience in Chapter 16.) If and when the crisis finally goes away, the experiences of the pandemic will stick around.
This book is about making sense of future challenging behaviour by digging into the potential causes and responding in the best possible way. I will never suggest, nor expect, teachers to diagnose the causes of challenging behaviour, but equally I don’t expect staff to assume that there isn’t one. In my experience, the main opposition towards trauma-informed practice is that not all children are traumatised and so we shouldn’t treat them as such. I agree, but that isn’t what trauma-informed practice is about. It isn’t that all children are traumatised; it is that some might be and we wouldn’t necessarily know.
Having an understanding and empathetic approach will never cause emotional harm to a pupil, whilst having a zero-tolerance approach to all will definitely harm some pupils. Section 1 of the Children Act 1989 contains the paramountcy principle – that ‘the child’s welfare shall be … paramount’.1 This should be front and centre of every school policy and include every child.
Five core beliefs are absolutely central to my perspective on behaviour:
Behaviour should not be a reason to fail school. I believe that exclusion rates and children out of education and marginalised are far too high in England, with many pupils being sent to alternative provision, waiting for placements or offered nothing at all. It doesn’t have to be like this. 14Teachers’ well-being should be prioritised. The provision of quality training to help them better understand children’s behaviour is central to this.What happens after an event is just as important as what happens before. If we are teaching behaviour rather than managing it, then we must use mistakes as learning opportunities.A sound awareness of the reasons for poor behaviour is not about asking staff to diagnose. It is about recognising that there is a reason for the behaviour. We may never fully understand it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Curiosity, empathy and understanding will never harm a child, but assuming they are simply being naughty potentially will.It takes time to change behaviour. The adult holds much of the power in this process, but only when they have worked on the relationship with the child.Everything in this book will draw us back to these beliefs. It isn’t about quick fixes; it is about long-term change and lasting improvements in behaviour. A characteristic of schools that are failing on behaviour is staff leaving at the end of the day exhausted, frustrated and even angered by the conduct of the children in their classes. They ask: ‘Is it me?’ ‘Are my lessons not good enough?’ ‘Why don’t they like me?’ ‘Why are they good for … but horrific for me?’ ‘I can’t teach this child!’ No teacher should be going home with these misconceptions, and schools shouldn’t be allowing it to happen.
Equipping staff to better comprehend the reasons for behaviours and, most importantly, that they aren’t personal is the most powerful thing we can do to improve staff well-being. In doing so, we have positive staff, armed with empathy and understanding, who are focused on the solution rather than beaten down by the problem. This sets up a relationship between staff and pupils that will over time transform behaviour. It is too easy for school leaders to claim that if teaching was better, then behaviour would be better, but this removes the context and tries to simplify what can be a very complex issue. The truth is that we don’t always know the reasons for a child’s behaviour, unless we take the time to find out. This book will show that the same behaviours can have more than a 15dozen causes. Although they don’t need a dozen different responses, they do need to be understood.
My experience, both as a teacher experiencing training sessions and a trainer delivering them, is that educators expect the person who is imparting information about an approach to have employed it in the classroom. However, this is not always possible, and educators are therefore guilty of dismissing ideas or writing them off without giving them a real chance or genuinely trying them out. Asserting that something won’t work and evidencing its failure are very different things. Just because something is difficult or different to what we have always been told, doesn’t make it wrong.
I am willing to state that many elements of traditional discipline are flawed in that they use consequences as deterrents – that is, the fear of the consequence will get the children to conform. I know the limitations because I used them early on in my career. I don’t dispute that traditional discipline works for most children, but the minority who can’t control their responses or emotions or who have developed maladaptive long-term survival responses need more than this. Consequence systems tolerate the fact that some children will fail, and they often discriminate against the neurodiverse and those with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). I don’t believe that such a system is justifiable. Too many children are collateral damage and they don’t need to be.
If you are like me and want all children to succeed, then we need a different approach. Exploring the use of neuroscience, trauma-informed and restorative practice means that schools can work for all. Developing these approaches in school is certainly challenging; it took my school time and was a difficult mindset shift for some. Yes, it was a change. Yes, it was more work. Yes, it was very difficult at times. But the results are powerful, and so is how it feels as a teacher. Going home believing that we aren’t doing everything we can for a child is not a good feeling, and it isn’t good for well-being either. However, accepting that things can’t always go according to plan, but knowing that we have done everything possible in a situation, makes sleeping at night much easier.
The truth is that it is easy to dismiss an academic non-teacher. It shouldn’t be because the work needed to gain a doctorate is more than I will ever achieve, but it is an unfortunate undercurrent in education. It only takes 16a small amount of time to see this bias in action on social media. The ‘It will never work with my class of 30’ argument often gets used to shout down and dismiss, but it is only a valid viewpoint if you actually have evidence or experience of using a trauma-informed or restorative approach that has been implemented properly and proved unsuccessful. Without this, it is just an opinion. It is just more of what we have always done.
I have found a way to marry the two elements to a degree. I will always be a teacher first; it runs through my writing, my training and every piece of work I do. This book is therefore filled with practical examples of theory being put into practice. However, I can’t possibly claim to know as much as the experts in the field of neuroscience, and I would certainly never claim to do so. I attended a training session on trauma and attachment led by Lisa Wisher in 20172 which changed everything for me. It added the missing piece and sent me down a path of professional development that I aim to keep on exploring. It has also led to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of my own research and learning about every available reason for challenging behaviour. Lisa Wisher is a psychotherapist, not a teacher, and to my knowledge she hadn’t taught a class of 30 pupils, but she had worked with exceptionally complex and challenging behaviour day in, day out with adopted children. She had helped them start to overcome the worst of trauma. Her message was a simple one: it always comes back to relationships. Not on their own, not without or as a replacement for boundaries, structure or expectations, but alongside them.
Unconditional positive regard isn’t about accepting or ignoring everything a young person does; it is about keeping on coming back and keeping on caring: ‘I don’t like your behaviour, but it doesn’t stop me liking you.’ Every child is equally worthy, regardless of their prospective grades or challenging behaviour. Seeking an explanation for a child’s actions is not the same as excusing them.
I understand people’s reservations. It has taken me years to get my head around the complexities of neuroscience, and much of it will always be beyond me, but it doesn’t matter. I am not diagnosing. Any knowledge I do have helps me to signpost. If therapies are needed, then the right professionals will deliver them. Dr Bruce Perry talks about love and how 17powerful it is in both The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog (2008) and What Happened to You? (2021). Whether it is possible or not, my job isn’t necessarily to love or like the children; my job is to make them feel loved when they are in my care (which, incidentally, is much easier if it is genuine).
How do you love a child who behaves horribly?
For me, learning to love a child who misbehaves comes from understanding the reason for it, and if I don’t understand it yet, then by accepting that there is a reason. I didn’t always know what it was at the time, but in 20 years I am yet to see a behaviour that didn’t have a cause.
The more awareness we can give our staff, the more they can put themselves in the shoes of the child and see things from their perspective. In order to practise empathy effectively, adults need a good understanding of the child’s feelings and experiences. Unconditional is a very powerful word that is sometimes lacking in schools. Statements like, ‘We’re hard on our pupils because we love them’ are commonplace. If the love children receive is dependent on certain behaviours (‘We only love you when you behave in the way we say’), then it is coercive and conditional. We wouldn’t accept that kind of love in any other relationship – if a partner behaved that way it would be described as a toxic or abusive – so why is it okay for our children?
Accepting that they can be well behaved and that adults care unconditionally goes against the beliefs of many children. Experience tells them that care is dependent on what they do, not on who they are, so it stands to reason that they will reject that care as a safety measure. Being on the receiving end of a child’s self-sabotage is not a pleasant experience, and the natural human response is to take it personally. School leaders who ask staff to keep coming back from repeated rejection without added understanding are failing them because they are likely to believe it is their fault: the lesson wasn’t interesting enough, they aren’t liked, they aren’t a good enough teacher. 18
But, ask yourself this question: when I am upset, angry, frustrated or scared, who do I tell? To whom do I show my feelings? Who sees me at my worst? The answer for many of us is a parent or partner – the person in our life who cares for us unconditionally and makes us feel safe enough to express our emotions. For some unlucky children that person doesn’t exist at home; for some lucky children that person does exist at school. Seeing the worst of a child’s behaviour because we make them feel safer than any other adult in their lives is a pretty backhanded compliment, but it is a very powerful reframing of the behaviour we will explore in Chapter 5. It may change how we feel about it.
I have always tried to combine the most important elements of the experiences I have had and the reading I have done in order to take educators to a place of improved understanding, which empowers them to provide unconditional love and care to their pupils. Empathy is about feeling with; although many of us will never be able to put ourselves in the shoes of our children, because our experiences are completely different, the more we can feel, the more we can understand. This book will examine what feelings are driving our pupils’ behaviours with the aim of helping us to understand what experiences got them there.
1 See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/41/contents/enacted.
2 See http://www.lisawisher.com.
Chapter 2
How we respond
When the adults change, everything changes.
Paul Dix, When the Adults Change, Everything Changes (2017)
Paul Dix’s quotation about change conveys a powerful message. In the current education climate, a great deal of emphasis is placed on systems and policies, but ultimately it is how we respond to situations that matters. We have the power to make things worse or offer a short-term fix, or we can bring about positive, sustainable change.
Children will get it wrong, and we should expect them to do so. We all make mistakes, so where does the idea of zero tolerance come from? Why do we hold children to a higher standard of expectations than we hold for ourselves, and at a stage of development when they should be figuring things out? The simple answer comes back to the adult, and especially the adult’s need to control.
It is entirely possible to display the same behaviour for entirely different reasons. I return frequently to the origins of challenging behaviour in this book (see especially Chapter 3). However, if we only see the behaviour, all the complexity and nuance behind the behaviour is ignored. For example:
Child A might fly out of a classroom in a moment of impulse and smash the first window they see in a fit of rage.Child B might rip down displays and tear things to pieces because their stress bucket is overflowing. 20Child C might smash the teacher’s laptop to get sent home and avoid the subject they don’t want people to know they can’t do.These three children have all damaged property, but by treating them in exactly the same way we miss that child A clearly has difficulties with impulse control, that child B needs support to re-regulate themselves and that child C has adopted a reject-first survival style because they are scared of rejection. It stands to reason that without knowing what needs fixing, things will remain broken. Although the most important factor is still our unconditional care, identifying and targeting interventions early (based on our understanding of what drives the behaviour) is the most proactive response we can have. For example, punishing child A for an impulsive survival response over which they have no control or don’t remember ignores the origin and tries to deter them, but how can you discourage a behaviour until the child has control over it?
