Look for What’s Behind Behaviour, Always
Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash
Children come to schools with their own prior knowledge, various skills, talents and challenges that impact their learning. We try to accommodate this across subject areas, but often when it comes to social and emotional learning, why do we assume these kids come to us with the same amount of knowledge? Or that they will pick it up naturally if they don’t? Children begin to act out or display low level misbehaviour in the same way, over and over again and we continue to discipline and blame them for it, but not actively help them solve the underlying cause of it.
We have so many problems with mental health in our society for a lot of reasons, and I bet one is we don’t look for the root cause of behaviour in schools enough and tend to just discipline really quickly, over and over again, until it becomes something that the child has to learn to fix on their own and carries the shame with them because they’ve either tried to solve the problem and failed, or because they’ve been told off so much they’ve internalised and become anxious, fearful or angry.
No. Let’s stop diagnosing behaviour. Children really need us to start looking for the root behaviour to see what their missing.
Hunger?
Anxiety?
Boredom?
Fear?
Tired?
A disorder?
A Bad day?
Family or friendship problems?
Trauma?
Or maybe they just don’t have the necessary skills and support to handle what they’re dealing with?
If we can’t help them figure out what’s up and support them through it, how are they going to learn to recognise what’s going on and then keep implementing the strategy to handle or solve the problem? As adults we struggle with this, hence all the self help books, but children are just supposed to sort it out on their own? (unless it gets so disruptive its that it’s too difficult to manage and we’re left with no choice).
But how many times does a child need to be told off for the same behaviours before we decide that maybe we need to find a different way?
Maybe one that helps them...