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Have you ever used your calmest voice with an upset pupil only to find that it winds them up even more?
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My name's Simon Corrigan and I've got over 19 years experience supporting schools with behaviour in SMH, and I've observed literally hundreds of teachers work with thousands of children, and in this episode I'm going to show you why calming strategies can backfire, why showing more intense emotion on your part isn't necessarily a bad thing, and how to use that information to support and co-regulate your pupils successfully.
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Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets Podcast.
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I'm your host, Simon Currigan.
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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.
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We're going to 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.
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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.
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This is the School Behaviour Secrets Podcast.
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Hi there, my name's Simon Currigan.
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I'm gonna warn you, I've had a lot of lem sips in the last few days.
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So if I were you, I'd keep my distance.
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Because you should only be in the same room with me if you're sitting next to an open window, and that just gave me a scary COVID flashback.
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Anyway, welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast.
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And today we're not talking about colds, we're talking about co-regulation and why doing your best impression of the world's most calm, most zen person doesn't always help to regulate an upset child and how sometimes using a calm voice and a calm posture can actually make things worse.
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But before we get into that, if you listen regularly to the show but you haven't subscribed yet, please take a moment to do that now.
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It just makes you feel better inside.
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And look, if you've been feeling a bit down, a bit, I don't know, not yourself, or you sense on some level that you've let yourself down and you haven't achieved your life goals.
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The truth is, it probably is because you haven't smashed that subscribe button yet.
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You know I'm talking sense.
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So subscribe today and rid yourself of all negative feelings.
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That's a guarantee.
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And while you're doing that, don't forget to share this episode with a colleague who'd find it useful.
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I'll wait while you do that.
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Yeah, I'm not kidding.
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I will literally wait while you do that.
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Seriously.
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Don't make me use my disappointed voice on you.
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Because this week, as you can hear, my range of voices is limited, and you've got the Lemsip one or the disappointed one.
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Right, we've done the admin.
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Let's think about regulation and what can go wrong when we're trying to regulate a pupil or co-regulate a pupil.
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So you imagine we've got a UFI pupil, we'll call him Amir, then he's coming from football, and as far as he's concerned, right, the other kids have just cheated.
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He scored a goal, then someone announced a rule that apparently meant that his goal did not stand.
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He's talking quickly, his fists are clenched, he's loud, he's refusing to sit down.
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So his teacher comes over to him and says in a very soft, very measured voice, Amir, you need to calm down.
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I want you to take three calming breaths and then tell me what happened.
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You know, modeling calm, modeling regulation full zen.
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And then Amir just shouts, you're not listening to me.
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Now, from the teacher's perspective, and obviously I've overegged that there, but trying to encourage Amea to use a regulation strategy, and Amir's pushing it back in his face, that's frustrating and confusing because you are listening, even though I overacted it.
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The teacher has come over to help.
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The teacher is giving him time.
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Well, there's probably 29 other kids who are waiting for you to get the lesson started.
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So that's not easy.
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And you're taking your time, trying to be patient, trying to listen and help him with his emotions.
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But if we flip it around from Amir's perspective, something important just happened outside that hasn't been sorted out or resolved yet.
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And now the adult seems much more interested in regulation strategies and making him quieter and calmer than they are actually understanding the issue.
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And that is probably not your intention at all, but it might be, it might be how Amir is interpreting your attempt to get him to use regulation strategies and the way you're using your voice.
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And this is
Load full transcript
where we need to think about what co-regulation actually involves.
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It's the support we give to a student through our relationship with them, through our responses, what we say and what we do, and how we say and how we do those things, because there's information in how we do things and how we say things, not just what we say and do.
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And the environment we've set up to help a pupil manage their emotional state.
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So we might reassure them or reduce demands on them or help them make sense of a feeling or give them some space to think things through.
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Over time, we also do that.
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We help them co-regulate and help them learn their own regulation skills by helping them develop skills that they can use themselves.
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It's more than standing beside a student who's distressed and speaking softly until that distress kind of melts away.
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Now, being regulated yourself obviously matters.
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Of course it does.
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If you're getting drawn into a heated argument and then you become louder or more threatening, or you start taking the student's behavior personally, that makes helping them much harder on your part.
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But being regulated is different from being expressionless.
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You can model regulation and still sound concerned.
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You can still have some energy in your voice and still be making thoughtful decisions about what you're going to say next.
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The question is what that energy tells the child and where you take the interaction step by step.
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Think about telling someone about an event in your life that's really upset you.
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Maybe you've been treated unfairly at work.
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So you tell the person that you're with, and they respond in that perfectly polished customer service voice: I understand your frustration.
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If they did that, would you feel understood?
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Or do you feel like you've basically been put on hold by a colleague?
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You might start explaining the situation again and adding more detail, and you might get a bit more animated and louder to sort of express your frustration so that they get it, because their response has shown you that they don't get it.
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And what you want is when you're sort of angered or frustrated, you want to see that the person that you're speaking to is on your side.
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And when you're sitting there and their emotions are staying fairly static, what you're thinking is this person doesn't get me or they don't get my problem.
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So people can experience our beautiful calm delivery in class in a similar way.
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We might feel enormous empathy on the inside for what's happened to them, but if our words and our face and our tone don't communicate it, the child might misread our intentions.
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And okay, a quiet voice will be exactly what some pupils need.
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I'm not arguing against quiet voices.
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I am questioning the idea that there's one special calming voice that we should all put on, regardless of the child or the situation, because all kids are different.
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So let's go back to Amma here.
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This time his teacher says with some genuine concern and expression, you thought you'd scored, and then they said it didn't count.
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That really upset you, didn't it?
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There's a bit more life in that delivery.
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You're showing him that what you've heard matters, it's important.
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You haven't said or agreed that the other children cheated.
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What you've done is you've injected some intensity in your tone.
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You haven't promised him a VAR replay, though, let's be honest, the outcome of that would probably make everyone angrier.
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What you're doing is through your tone and your words, when they're married together, acknowledging his experience without judging what's happened.
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And for Amya, that intensity might be the way I did it there, injecting some of his frustration into my delivery.
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That really upset you, didn't it?
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I'm not copying the way he spoke.
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I'm not shouting like he did.
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What I'm doing is I'm doing some mirroring at an increased intensity for me, but not at the same intensity as him.
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So I'm not saying if the kids shout, we shout.
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Or in some cases, Amir might respond better to a more sympathetic tone.
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That really upset you, didn't it?
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Both would convey emotional understanding.
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Both have a kind of intensity to them, but a different intensity.
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And the one that I would choose would depend on the child because kids are all different and they respond to different things like all human beings.
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And then after we've had that moment of recognition through our tone and through our body language, what we do is we pause.
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And pausing for teachers can feel really uncomfortable, especially when you're conscious of the clock, because
teachers, if a child says nothing, we're used to jumping in and prompting them with questions or nudging them towards an answer.
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But in this case, don't do that.
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We give Amir a moment just to digest what we've said.
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We don't want to follow it immediately with a breathing strategy or a calming strategy.
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We don't want to jump in and say, now breathe, now sit down, now explain it properly.
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Otherwise, that bit of connection you've done, it just rings a little untruth.
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It sounds a bit false.
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Like we're following a set of instructions on a policy for how to regulate someone.
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It kind of extracts the humanity from it a bit.
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We don't want it to sound like, oh, we've done the empathy bit of the conversation.
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Now it's time to move on to the instructions and strategies.
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So suppose that mayor then says, they always do it to me.
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You might then respond, yeah, you feel like you're being left out all the time.
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You're checking your understanding on an emotional level.
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Now he might then correct you.
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And if he does, that's useful information too.
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You can use that to move the conversation forward.
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And as he becomes more able to engage, what you do is you slow your pace and then you lower the intensity in your voice, bringing his emotions down with you.
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And then you offer a small next step, like, look, we can work out what happened.
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Let's stand over here for a moment, away from everywhere else, where it's peaceful and it's quiet.
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That's the direction we're aiming for.
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Enough emotional expression, a bit of intensity to communicate we understand how he feels, then support and tone a voice that kind of helps his emotions settle back down.
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I'm not saying match the child's intensity, and I'm gonna say that again, I'm not saying match the child's intensity, because if Amir is screaming or shouting, then screaming at him or shouting back at him isn't the solution.
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That's not what I'm aiming at.
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And saying, that's outrageous, I'd be furious too, at the top of your voice, could make that unfairness feel even bigger.
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And actually, you're prejudging the outcome of the conversation because Amir might well be in the wrong.
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We're trying to acknowledge how strongly he feels through our intensity and our tone of voice,
but at a lower level without fueling his outrage further or shouting ourselves.
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And heads up, for some kids, they might find when adults become more animated or louder threatening.
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So for those kids, that acknowledgement may need to be very much more understated.
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So obviously adjust this for the student you're working with.
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Now, what about that breathing exercise or getting out that emotion tracker or the calming corner?
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Are we throwing those out?
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No.
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As with LEMSIP day and night capsules, timing is everything.
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A caffeine-fueled daytime pill won't help you at night.
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The caffeine in them will just keep you awake.
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The right time for taking a daytime LEMSIP capsule is during the day.
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So if you're introducing or reminding Amir about a regulation strategy, you need to do it at the right moment.
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If you pick the wrong moment when he's not ready, and you bombard him with, tell me your number, choose a strategy, show me your breathing.
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That can make things unintentionally more intense.
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They can raise his stress and the demands he feels he's under, and that just makes things worse.
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From our perspective, we're trying to support him when we do that, but from the child's perspective, it might feel like they're being overloaded, like it's another thing that they're failing at because they can't do it right now.
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And then you end up with even more intense emotions.
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If you do, by the way, want some strategies to train your students to use when they're calm.
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We've got a free download that can help called How to Help Children Manage Anger and Other Strong Emotions.
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It includes a simple emotion tracker and a step-by-step approach to helping pupils recognize when their feelings are building and then practice what to do before they become overwhelmed.
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It's preventative.
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It's something to work through together when your pupils calm, not when they are upset in the moment.
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You can get your copy at beaconschoolsupport.co.uk and clicking on the free resources tab at the top, and you'll see it in the list of free resources right at the top of the page.
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That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk.
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Click on the free resources link, and I'll also put a direct link to that resource in the episode description.
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So all you have to do is open up your podcast app and tap straight through.
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One useful approach though, if you want to kind of like debrief afterwards, if you want to check how you've done to co-regulate a student, is to afterwards, when they're calmer and more comfortable talking, just ask them.
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Say, when you were upset earlier today, was there anything that I did that helped?
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And was there anything I did that made it worse?
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And learn from their feedback because kids are brutally frank.
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They'll just tell you what you did right and wrong.
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That's why we don't let kids do performance management on the adults.
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They just make us all cry.
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So if you're working with a pupil and it's hard to keep them regulated, don't take what they say the wrong way and don't take what I've been saying today in the podcast the wrong way.
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I'm not saying it's your fault that they've stayed distressed and that you've got it wrong or you should feel bad about that.
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That child might be full of distress from all over the place.
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It might be from home, school, friends, relationships, online.
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And when they become distressed, there's no magic set of words that's gonna make all of that go away.
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There's not one perfectly worded sentence that will dispel those emotions.
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But the actions that adults take do influence the outcome if they don't dictate it.
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And getting feedback from the student can be helpful, and reflecting on how you've responded to pupils can be helpful as long as you don't slip into kind of like negative judgments about yourself and start convincing yourself that you can't do it or you made things worse.
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So we want reflection rather than being judgmental.
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And here are three questions to take away that will help with that process.
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First, ask yourself in that situation, did I show that I understood why whatever has happened was important to the student?
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Think beyond whether you've said the right phrase.
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Think about the delivery.
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Did you sound like you meant it?
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Second, ask, is my response reducing the child's stress or pressure, or am I adding demands to them when they look and feel overloaded?
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Look at a pupil's reaction rather than assuming a strategy is calming because it's been labeled as calming in a textbook.
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And thirdly, what does this particular pupil need to stay calm in the 20 minutes after they become heightened or distressed?
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Do they need warmth?
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Do they need less conversation, less interaction?
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Do they need a clear boundary?
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Do they need a bit of space?
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Do they need some distance?
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Do they need some sensory input?
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Let what you know about that individual student guide you because you are the expert in the kids that you work with after all, and there is no one size fits all solution.
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And you know what?
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Co-regulation done well leaves you sounding like a human being supporting a child.
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You can show concern, you can acknowledge the size of their feelings, and still remain kind of like this steady influence that helps them get on top of their emotions.
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But that's different from putting on like this facade of pure calm because heightened pupils are often looking for an adult that gets their frustration rather than a yoga teacher whose emotions are perfectly centered and immovable.
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Hopefully, next week I'll be back with my normal voice.
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Although, if you prefer this one, do let me know.
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Maybe we'll start some weird side podcast together sponsored by Lemsip.
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Anyway, voices aside, I hope you have a brilliant week, and I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.