Barb’s Behavior Blog
Stories, Strategies & Inspiration
Imagine what it would feel like to have a class full of children who self-regulate when upset and nobody gets hurt day after day, again and again - all without feeling like you’re putting out fires, running around to challenging behaviors…
Sounds like a dream, right?
Well, of course there will always be some challenging behavior in preschool but it is possible to proactively support children to learn to self-regulate, cooperate, and use their words way more often than their hands.
You feel like you have a decent set of challenging behavior strategies but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t quite effectively support that one child in the way you’d hoped.
Or maybe your class this year seemed to be going great in the beginning of the school year - until one child “regressed” when they got a new baby sibling or a new child joined your class who hits or “talks back” and not your seeing ‘copy cat’ behaviors and things seem to be getting worse and worse overtime.
When I became an early childhood professor, I had over 15 years of experience as a preschool teacher, and yet…
In my first year of teaching student teachers, I learned something vital from experienced colleagues and classroom teachers: the importance of transitions in and out of group activities, like circle time.
I had always sung transition songs like, “Come on over to the blue rug…” and while they worked for some children, they weren’t consistently effective.
I soon realized that successful teachers use highly effective transition activities — into and out of group time.
How do we make story time, circle time, and large group compelling, engaging and worth coming to for young children?
Developmentally it can be a tough time of day for some children.
Yet, learning to gather as a group, attending to the teacher, and participating is a worthy goal, given that this habit and skill is expected in later schooling.
Most early childhood program leaders report more severe challenging behaviors…from more children, more often…than ever before.
Children and families come to us with tremendous hardship and oftentime trauma.
Early childhood teachers are still undervalued in society and usually underpaid.
Many U.S. based programs and teachers are now burdened with tremendous assessments, paperwork, requirements, and detailed specification for child outcomes.
While those assessments are nothing but well intentioned and good tools, completing them can feel burdensome and often pulls teachers out of interactions with children.
In most programs children’s time in open-ended play and exploration has shrunk.
…yet play is THE BEST WAY for children to naturally acquire self-regulation and social-emotional skills (the skills they need to avoid using challenging behaviors).
Increasing numbers of children receiving special education services attend early childhood programs where the teachers typically have no training in this area.
Most child development programs (CDA, AA, BS, MS) don’t graduate teachers bursting at the seams with excitement and confidence for working with challenging behaviors.
So, what does it mean to be a LEADER supporting teachers with challenging behaviors in this context? (Bear with me even if some details like #4 or #6 don’t apply to your program).
How do we empower teachers for challenging behavior success in this context?
How can you do the work required to support them efficiently given all your other work?
Those are leadership questions.
I’d like to keep having leadership conversations with you about this. Would you like to?
Let me know your thoughts and questions in the COMMENTS below.
Center directors, owners, site supervisors, Head Start managers, and coaches…
What if we’ve been leaving critical elements out of how we all think and talk about “challenging behavior” in early childhood programs in 2024?
What if, to empower teachers for challenging behavior success we need to rethink things and step into a new kind of leadership in this area?
Are you seeing more severe challenging behaviors in your program…from more children, more often…than ever before?
Do some of your long-time staff members say that the challenging behavior strategies they use just don’t seem to work like they used to?
Do you find yourself with the same children in your office - or walking down the hall to help - day after day, week after week…because teachers are at a loss of what to do?
Yet, when you, a coach, trainer, or specialist suggest new ideas some (many? most?) teachers seem to dismiss the ideas as unrealistic or something they’ve already tried?
Learning that circle time is not the best way to teach preschoolers changed my teaching.
As you know many preschoolers (especially these days) resist coming to the rug, have trouble sitting still, roll around on the rug, interject “off topic” remarks or otherwise interrupt our plans.
It turns out that developmentally this is to be expected of 2-5 year olds.
But yet you may be required to hold these large group experiences.
Or, at the very least it’s customary in your program, center or school.
So what’s a teacher to do!?
I’m so excited to speak with you today.
If you’ve realized you’re in “reactive mode” with challenging behaviors…
(You feel like you’re putting out fires when it comes to behaviors in your classroom and you haven’t consistently been planning ahead to prevent repetitive behaviors.)
And, you’ve DECIDED to get out of reactive mode…..
