Summary
Are you supporting children who frequently lose self-control when faced with big emotions like anger and anxiety?
In this Essentials episode of School Behaviour Secrets, we introduce the concept of pro regulation - a proactive approach to emotional management. Learn how to help your students recognise and act on their feelings before they escalate, ensuring a calmer and more controlled classroom environment.
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Show notes / transcription
[00:00:00 - 00:02:30] Simon Currigan
Are you supporting children who frequently lose self-control when faced with big emotions like anger or anxiety? Well, in this essentials episode of School Behaviour Secrets, we reveal one simple strategy that you can implement immediately to help your pupils understand and manage their emotions more effectively. Join us to discover this practical approach so that you can make a positive impact on your students' emotional well-being. Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan. My co-host is Emma Shackleton, and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents, and of course students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success. We're gonna share the tried and tested secrets to classroom management, behavioural special needs, whole school strategy, and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential.
Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world, so you'll get to hear the latest evidence-based strategies before anyone else. This is the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. Hi there. Simon Currigan here back with another mini essentials episode of the School Behaviour Secrets podcast, where we head back to earlier episodes to share key insights that we believe can really make a difference for the students that you work with in your school or your classroom. And these little reminders are more important than ever when we're all so busy with our day-to-day challenges and managing the competing demands of the classroom.
Just before we start, I'd like to ask a quick favour. If you're finding the information in our podcasts helpful, please do hit that subscribe button in your podcast app so you never miss out on our latest tips and tricks. Today, we're heading back to 2023. My co-host, Emma Shackleton, and I met to discuss strong emotions in children and in adults. What it might look like, what it might feel like, and most importantly, what we can do to try to take control of those feelings in order to make that change to improve emotional well-being for everyone involved. We join the original episode about 17 minutes in. Just picking up on something you said there.
As a society, when we talk about emotions in books and in films, people talk about the heart. Yeah. But it is all about the stomach, isn't it, largely?
[00:02:30 - 00:02:34] Emma Shackleton
Often it is. It is, isn't it? Yeah. But it's different for different people, isn't it?
[00:02:34 - 00:04:42] Simon Currigan
Yeah. Absolutely. So, if a child can begin to put labels and recognise those physical sensations, that's the first step. The next step is that they have to then recognise and notice those changes on a moment by moment basis. And kids who have difficulty managing their emotions often, simply aren't as in tune with those feelings. They don't notice them coming and going. They might be able to link physical sensations to a changing emotional state, but they just don't have that moment by moment awareness of them, and that can make it difficult for them to act.
However, those key problems aside, if we can get those things right, if they can label those emotions and recognise them when they happen, then regulation is all about noticing that you're becoming angry, you've reached a heightened state, and then using a strategy to manage those emotions. So that might be some deep breathing. It might be taking a time out. It might be starfish breathing. It might be some physical exercise. The thing is we're all different and you have to use whatever works for the child. Now the problem is the part of the brain we need to think all this through logically is the prefrontal cortex, and the more stressed or the more anxious or the more angry we become, our brain starts to take that prefrontal cortex offline.
It stops listening to it. So, the very part of our brain that we need to access this information about recognising emotions and taking actions on strategies, it stopped working. The part of the brain that logically looks and monitors the changes and thinks to itself, I know what I need to do in this situation to be successful isn't available to us. And that means kids, when they're calm, can talk through what the feeling of anger feels like, and they can tell you what they should do when they start to feel that emotion. But when they're actually in it, when they're in that situation, it's too late. They're already drowned by their emotions, and the parts of their brain they need to take action simply isn't online to them.
[00:04:42 - 00:06:32] Emma Shackleton
And we know that this is true because frequently, I've worked with children who have had an explosive outburst, for example. And then afterwards, they've been very clearly able to articulate what they've been taught to do when they get angry. They can say I should have walked away. I should have told the teacher. I should have had a drink of water. I should have taken some deep breaths, but they just weren't able to do it because they didn't realise quickly enough that the anger was coming. So, because they didn't recognise the emotion quickly enough, they weren't able to deploy the strategy in time.
It's a bit like driving a car towards the roadworks, noticing the hole in the road 5 feet ahead, and swerving at the very last minute, but it's just too late. You're still going to end up crashing the car. So, let's talk now then about pro regulation. We're going to introduce you to this. And again, it is a completely made-up word, but it does the job. It does what it says on the tin. This is what we want you to think about and teach your students when helping them to manage strong emotions.
So, what we do here is we keep all of the good stuff we know from regulation, recognising feelings and bodily sensations, linking them to labels like anxiety or anger, improving their moment by moment awareness of emotions, and finding a productive way of dealing with that emotion. That's all good, but here's the change. Usually, when we teach pupils to manage strong emotions, we say something like this. When you get angry, use this strategy. But as we've already said, at that point, it's already too late. Your behaviour is driven by pure emotion and not by logic.
[00:06:32 - 00:10:10] Simon Currigan
So, here's the pivot. Here's the change. In pro regulation, we tell the child to act much, much earlier. We don't wait until the child's in an anger state. We get them to notice when they're becoming annoyed or irritated or frustrated when that sensation is building but hasn't reached anger. Or if you're thinking about anxiety, we get them to take action when they're concerned or worried rather than overwhelmed. Why? Because in this state when there are far fewer stress chemicals in their body, they still have access to their smart logical prefrontal cortex.
It hasn't been taken offline yet, and that part of their brain can notice these changings are happening and take action much earlier. It can take evasive action. It can tell the child to start using their strategies now before things go too far or get them to ask for help or tell them to get away from the thing that's making their ancient brain feel threatened now before it's too late, before those emotions rise any further. This is all about taking early action when emotions are much, much lower. The analogy for pro regulation would be this.
We're driving our car down the road again. We're paying attention not just to the tarmac in front of us, but we're looking much further down the road. We're looking way ahead. And when we can see the roadworks and the big hole in the road from 500 yards away, we don't just keep driving. What we do is we turn off and take a side road now so we never have to deal with the danger. Or for our child in class who's, finding his work difficult and he's worried about getting things wrong, for him, it means recognising earlier on that he's getting frustrated or worried and not waiting to complete the entire page of sums and getting them all wrong before seeing the teacher and getting help or trying to take a time out, he never reaches that anger state. So he doesn't have to try to regulate that big emotion or use diminishing levels of self control to deal with it.
And that's the difference between pro regulation, regulation, and self control. Pro regulation means avoiding the hole in the road way, way earlier when you see it coming up in the distance. It's a much more powerful strategy. And if you want some help with this pro regulation approach, we've got a free download that can help. It's called How To Help Children Manage Anger And Other Strong Emotions and it will take you through our approach to teaching those techniques to the kids in your school. You even get resources to print out and use with the students themselves. I'll drop a direct link to that resource in the show notes, and I'll also pop a link to the original episode.
If you'd like to hear more about supporting children who are experiencing difficulties with their strong emotions, all you'll need to do is click directly through to hear the full discussion. Thanks for joining us today. That's all we've got time for on this essentials episode. If you've enjoyed listening, please take a moment to rate and review us. It takes just 30 seconds about the time it takes to realise that you've been using a marker instead of a whiteboard pen. We've all been there - to the same horror. And when you do, it helps the algorithm recommend School Behaviour Secrets to other listeners.
This helps us grow the podcast and reach more teachers, school leaders, and parents. Thanks for listening, and we look forward to seeing you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
