It can be very frustrating when consequences and punishments are the 'go to' solutions for challenging behaviour.
Students who desperately need to run around and destress their vestibular systems... denied recess times.
Students who need to verbally process information... asked to not speak.
We need to replace these scenarios with restorative practice and begin with searching for the reason ‘Why?’ a child is exhibiting challenging behaviour.
I want to help…
I fully understand the frustration of teachers faced with 20+ students, running out of patience with the more challenging kids.
I want to help…
I truly believe that the need for behaviour mentoring is a 'hidden need' in our schools today (my own opinion). I actively want to push for the participation and recognition of behaviour mentors in mainstream classrooms to support students with challenging behaviour and to support the teachers who are engaged to teach them.
Recently, I have been researching the causes which underpin behaviour and I came across definitions for behaviour as Top-Down and Bottom-up. I liked the analogy very much as it is a super simplified way to categorise challenging behaviour. Behaviour is described as being intentional, where the student has a purpose and is displaying the behaviour with a particular goal (Top-down), or as the result of undeveloped skills (Bottom-up) sometimes referred to as stress behaviours (fight or flight responses).
One of my summer reading recommendations, ‘Beyond Behaviours’ by Mona Delahooke makes reference to a Top-down, Bottom-up approach. Mona claims that in order to determine if a challenging behaviour is Top-down or Bottom-up we need to consider two things:
1. The social-emotional development of the child; and
2. The cues which trigger the challenging behaviour in the moment.
Delahooke highlights the need to understand the root cause of the challenging behaviour which she describes as the lack of ‘developmental capacity to use words to represent sensations, ideas and feelings’ (Delahooke, 2019).
So I suppose we could identify the challenging behaviours which are Top-down as those wilful, intentional behaviours which many teachers recognise as defiant and disrespectful.
But...
If we can begin to understand that there can be different reasons behind challenging behaviours and start to realise that they also could be Bottom-up... We could change the way in which we respond to these behaviours.
I would certainly like to think so… What do you think?
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