Episode 158: Children throwing chairs! Dealing with bad behaviour in class

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School Podcast.

Welcome to the School of School Podcast.

Robin Potter

Welcome back to another episode of The School of School Podcast. I've got the usual suspects with me, Adam and Andy. Hello, you two.

Andy Psarianos

Yay, here we are.

Adam Gifford

Hi, Robin. Nice to see you.

Robin Potter

Oh, thanks Adam. So great to be here with you two. So, I got inspired because I saw, Andy was doing his muscle pose, like "Stop. Look at me." Well, yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Looks like Andy's enthusiastic pose.

Robin Potter

Okay, enthusiastic.

Andy Psarianos

Not trying to show. I'm not trying to flex or anything.

Robin Potter

Oh, okay. Thanks for doing the difference so that I know. There is a distinction. Right. Okay. But, you were looking strong and I was thinking ...

Andy Psarianos

Feeling strong.

Robin Potter

You could pick up a chair right now and you can chuck it across the room. Right?

Andy Psarianos

Throw it at the teacher.

Robin Potter

There we go. And that's our topic for today. Thank you. Bringing up throwing chairs because apparently things like that are going on in the classroom more so than you think. And it's obviously bad behaviour, but it's becoming really bad behaviour if there are chairs being thrown and yelling and all around just acting up. This has been going on since the dawn of time, but it's apparently becoming more and more common and we're not sure, at least the teachers are not sure how they can handle it because as we know now, nowadays in schools, you can't touch a child, of course. You can barely reprimand them. So, what do we do? How do we solve this? How do we help?

Andy Psarianos

Let's immediately go to the extreme, right? Because Adam it'll be interesting, 'cos you'll have a better idea about what teachers can do and can't do. A child is being violent and is putting people at risk, throwing chairs. Can the teacher grab that child and take him out of the classroom, for the safety of everybody else?

Adam Gifford

So there's a couple of things that you do. Short answer is, yeah. I mean if someone's a danger to themselves or others and there's an immediate danger, then you can respond appropriately to that situation. In those sorts of circumstances where a child's lost it, and I use that word, not loosely, because they have, they've lost all control at that point. You're not going to reason with them at that point, right? So you just got to accept that, that their brain's in a different place. It's that fight, flight or freeze, right? So they're in a different place. So trying to talk those children down when they're at that level is pointless.

And what a lot of people will do in that circumstance is actually remove the other kids. So it's easier to take them away from that situation. Because classrooms, I've had this happen before, except I wasn't in a classroom. It was in a temporary, the school was being built and I was in a church hall across the road from the school and this child kicked off and there were desks being thrown around. Lots of stuff. First of all, it's really scary. It's terrifying for everyone involved. So it's terrifying for the teacher, the children, and that child doing it. 'Cos they don't know what to do anymore, though they know they've crossed the boundary that's beyond ...

Andy Psarianos

It's desperate now. Desperation.

Adam Gifford

... anything reasonable. So they'll keep scrapping. They'll keep fighting until the end. I think the reality is that, I mean, I would be incredibly reluctant to ever try to physically restrain a child unless that is something that you knew was likely to happen. So there's some children that do get physically restrained. There are times where you might be more physical with children, like helping children get into, with children this isn't necessarily a bad behaviour thing, with children that refuse to come to school? Sometimes they're carried in to school, those sorts of things. But it's done in junction with other people and with the right training, so you don't just launch into it and start grabbing and restraining children, 'cos it can be potentially dangerous, right? For the teacher and the child.

Andy Psarianos

Oh, absolutely.

Adam Gifford

So, I think just in answer to your question, removing the other children or asking the other children to take themselves into another class, under some form of supervision, and you just watch and because the other thing that tends to happen is these children run out of steam and there'll be people listening going, "You can't just let them keep doing that." But sometimes you just got to let them go and get to a point where you let them reset because they're going to be unresponsive up until that point.

Andy Psarianos

I remember reading somewhere, I don't know how true this is, but it's really difficult, almost to the level of impossible, for someone to remain very angry for more than two minutes if no one is ...

Robin Potter

Responding.

Andy Psarianos

Throwing gasoline on the fire. Two minutes seems to be like, after two minutes, it's almost, it's really, really hard.

Robin Potter

Which would seem like forever, in the classroom, I'm sure, two minutes would seem like a long time. But as you've just said, Adam, by removing everyone else and letting that child blow off some steam, for lack of a better word, then it sounds like they quickly run out of steam.

Adam Gifford

I think the other thing, too, is that there's the initial part where it might be the anger and it kicks off, but then it's very rare you meet a child after that who isn't terrified with what they've just done. So then they're thinking, I don't even know how to get out of this. I've backed myself into a corner and I don't know how to get out of it. Of course, the other thing that you'd also do is you'd inform senior leadership. So whether that's sending a child to go and tell someone in senior leadership or most classrooms have got a phone in them or something where you communicate something. So, if there's teachers listening to this, you'll have a behaviour protocol and you'll discuss all of these things. But chances are your senior leadership will have had more training or you know the children. But I think you're right in that it's that initial phase that if you're trying to do something in that initial two minute phase, it's a lost cause because you're talking to a reptilian brain that just is not going to have any sort of reasoning. That's gone. It's pointless.

But you do see a lot of teachers getting angry at that because you're thinking, why isn't this child responding? They should be listening to me. Why are you doing that? And you're thinking, that is the most redundant question at that point because that child's not thinking about, oh, hang on, I'll consider that. Let me just put down the chair for a moment and I'll talk to you reasonably. It's not going to happen. It's just simply not going to happen. But it's that aftermath about how do you then manage the situation that at that point where I've just chucked some chairs around the classroom, I've just chucked some desks. Now I don't even know what to do because I'm in trouble. I'm so far out of my depth now. Now I'm panicking. Now it's not necessarily anger, but it's fair.

Andy Psarianos

You've crossed that line now, right? So throwing another chair isn't going to put you in any more trouble. 'Cos you've already crossed the line, right? So now you're in save yourself mode, whatever that means. Like you said, reptilian brain has switched on. The amygdala in your brain is running the show now, right? The reasoning is not part of the situation. You're in complete panic mode now, and it's like fight for survival reptilian style, right? So it's like how do you stop people from hurting you? You throw more chairs. There's no logic behind it, right?

But that's extreme cases. Now let's just go to maybe a more realistic case. So let's just bring it down to primary/elementary school level. You've got a bunch of kids, you need to get them all on the bus 'cos you're going on a school trip and Billy doesn't want to get on the bus and he's running up and down. You say, "Okay, everyone on the bus," and boom, there goes Billy, and he's running down the field, right? And now you got a bus full, you got to deal with this situation, right? And these things do happen, right? So now what can you do about that?

Adam Gifford

That starts in September. So that's, what I've just said is so unhelpful because we know this from parenting, right? And I always used to say, just in case either my children or all the people that I've ever taught or been in school with, don't just go, "You're such a hypocrite, Adam Gifford."

But I always used to find it a lot easier to manage 500 children than, say, my two. So I'll put that out there now because I think the one thing that I seem to manage reasonably well when I was teaching is I tended to be quite consistent and clear so they knew what to expect. So that's why I'm saying it starts in September because if you say you need to do this and you don't want it to be continually threatening, but you're just saying that's the way it is, and if you don't do that ... So I think that becomes part of it because if children think, yeah, I know what happens, you talk to me and you say, it's like when you listen to parents in the supermarket. "If I count to three, if I count to three." And it's the longest two in the world, because they realise if I get to three, I don't even know what I'm going to do.

I'm in the middle of the supermarket. What actually happens at three? No one knows. So let's never get to three. It's the same thing with teaching, right? That if the child runs off and you make it clear, if you're not back here on this bus in five seconds, you're not coming. So it's up to you. That would be my approach, because if I've established a relationship and I've established consistency and depending on what that child's situation is, I'd only say that if I think that I'm going to win. If that child's run away 'cos they're in that space that we talked about before, I might have to deal with things differently. And that's the decision you make at the time. If it's just like, oh man, you're just being a little brat, and come on. We both know you can do better than this. I'll tell you this, you'll know I'm telling the truth and the choice will be yours. And I think it's just knowing the child to feel pretty comfortable with making that sort of, what's the word I'm looking for? Like options.

Robin Potter

It's such a good point, though. The fact that I think about that when I, same, in the grocery store and I see a parent and a child acting up and screaming or maybe having a tantrum on the floor and you see how the parent's reacting to that child? And as an observer, I may be, I'm being honest to myself, judging, thinking, well, why aren't they doing that? Or why aren't they removing them from the situation? But the fact is, that parent knows that child far better than I do. In fact, I don't know that child at all. And they're probably, they've been through this a million times, so they know how to manage that.

So you put that into a classroom situation, September, 1st day, someone had a complete meltdown and a tantrum and throwing chairs and screaming and kicking and hollering. You, as the teacher, may not know how to handle that child because you didn't have enough experience with them. But three months into it, you're probably a pro and you probably have a much better way of dealing with them and knowing, yeah, okay, I've seen this before. I'm not going to react the way I did in September. I'm going to react now because of the relationship that I have with that child. I know how to handle this better and be better equipped and be able to help them in the best way that I know how now that I have established that relationship.

Adam Gifford

And I think the flip side, Robin, is when you say those things, sometimes the parent said something and they're thinking, why did I even say that? I had a parent the other day. This toddler is standing up in the trolley. "Well, if you fall out, it'll be your fault." I'm thinking, well, what good's that going to be if they're on the floor with a broken arm? What are you going to do then? Sit there with your arms folded, tapping your foot going, "I told you that would happen. Now what are you going to do?" No, you, as a responsible parent will drive that said child to the hospital, you're not going to let them fall out." So you've given a scenario in which the words have come out of your mouth and you've realised, I've just created the impossible scenario. And I think coming into September, it's those sorts of things, too, that where it's a positive thing as well, "Right guys, if you do this, we're going to do this and it's going to be really nice," and I'll follow through on that every time.

And so it's not just, if you do this, there'll be a punishment, but simply being consistent. So if you come to me and do this, this is what you'll get. If you come to me and tell me this, this is what you'll get. So every day you turn up to my classroom, you know what you're going to get from me. There'll be no surprises and I'll be consistent every day that you guys show up and I show up, this is what's going to happen. You've got something important to tell me, I'll make time to listen to you. And I think if you do that often enough, where I see real behavioural issues is when the children don't know what they're getting day after day, they're not sure they're predicting moods, they're doing all of those sorts of things, then it's very difficult 'cos you don't know, does the teacher mean it this time round? Or are they not really meaning it? Those sorts of things.

And all of those processes happen in a split second, right? So children aren't considering that. They're making a decision and acting on it. So I think it's that sort of thing that if you're consistent with everything in your approach, but being mindful of that from the first day, these are the things that are important to me and those sorts of things. It's hard. I mean, you develop it as you get better, like anything, I guess. You don't know what you don't know, right? So you only get September once a year. So for me, there's always a big list coming into the next September. Must do this in September. Must do this.

Andy Psarianos

Do we prepare teachers well enough?

Adam Gifford

No, but it's also, I think it's difficult because without, I've probably used this analogy before. Like gardening, right? You only get one time of the year to do one thing and then you've got to wait another year. You can't force it. So it's like, do we prepare garden as well? If you still need that experience to see how it works. Because the one thing that we don't know is if you go into a classroom, you don't know what the dynamic in the cohort is. So that's going to be its own dynamic. You don't know, like some children, and I know this for me, I can talk about, oh, consistency and da da da da da. There's plenty of children whose behaviour I never cracked, that I couldn't get them. I couldn't establish a relationship enough that the behaviour was at a point where I think it would've benefited me and the child, but also the whole class.

Andy Psarianos

And I think that's an important thing because it's a thing that as a non-teaching professional, you may not think about. But the reason for a child, let's say being disruptive, or not doing what you ask them to do may be rooted in some deep insecurity that they have that takes some unpicking. So an example I was discussing yesterday with a friend who's having some issues with her son at school, and I brought it up before. I suspect, I don't really know, I suspect from what she's told me that he has, so he's in Year 4, he's having some difficulty reading. Okay?

Maybe there's an underlying cause for that. Maybe, and sometimes people drift through school and these things don't get picked up, right, for whatever reason. So whenever he has to do it, it's an opportunity. His escape mechanism is to be disruptive because he doesn't want to be found out, right? So he'd rather be in trouble for misbehaving than have everybody know that actually he's in Year 4, but he's reading at a Year 1 or Year 2 level, right? And maybe, let's imagine all kinds of reasons why that might be. It might even be that he needs eyeglasses. We don't know, right? It could be that, we don't know. So, this is my suspicion. I don't know that this is the case. So now, because when I asked the mother, I say, if you read him a story or if he watches a story, can he recount it? Can he tell you who the characters were, what happened? It's a comprehension problem. Doesn't seem to be a comprehension problem. Okay, well, but if he reads it, he can't do it. But if he hears the story, he can.

So, somewhere there's an issue, right? But he's very disruptive child. At school he's always getting into trouble, right? Well, it seems to me entirely likely that that could be the root cause for him being really disruptive. And sometimes teachers, it's really difficult, right? Because all they see is being disruptive and there's 30 kids in the class and they got to get through this lesson and all they see is he's being disruptive and then it's a behavioural problem and they don't have a chance or don't have an opportunity to get to the root cause. That's just one really simplistic example. But there's a thousand reasons why behaviour might be a problem. And I don't know that schools are equipped or will ever be able to be equipped to diagnose what all these root causes might

Adam Gifford

I think one of the things that had an absolute profound effect on me, I probably talked about him before, a guy called Peter Sinclair, who I was lucky enough to have as part of my teacher training. And I think it's a message worth repeating. As he said, never stop going back until you've found the root cause of the behaviour. He said, if you just deal with the behaviour because the child's not doing something or they're disruptive, you'll just get used to that, do that day in, day out. And he said, never stop until you've literally exhausted everything. So if you think this happened beforehand, so it's only happening on a Tuesday, for example. Well, is it any part of the lesson on Tuesday? Yeah. No, it's actually at one o'clock. What's happening at one o'clock? What's the lesson? Okay, the lesson's this. Okay, so da da da da da. So what we do in the lesson at one o'clock on a Tuesday is I randomly select someone to read out loud.

There's your boy, he kicks off. That's the thing. Have a conversation with them to see whether or not being picked at random makes them feel anxious. That's the point that you need to get to. And I think that that it's harder than you think, but if you don't follow that process, and it's really easy just to deal with the behaviour at the time. If you don't follow that, well, I'll flip it on its head. If you follow that process, gee, that can be a powerful thing. And what I've also found is that when you get to that cause the relief for the children is massive. Absolutely massive. I'll never forget, I learned it with this boy in my class. Every time we were doing something, he'd start to be low-level annoyance, but enough that I was getting the parents involved. So Pete got back into my head and I thought, right, follow it back. Follow it back.

What had happened was, is he did have a conversation with his mother and his mum had said, "You don't need to do handwriting as long as your writing's legible." That was the word. So powerful, he'd listened to his mum. I'm saying your presentation needs to be good. You need to sharpen up your presentation. This isn't good enough. This was manifesting itself in all sorts of different ways that had nothing to do with handwriting. But when we got to it, and so basically he was torn between, I need to listen to my mum, I need to listen to my teacher. And it caused him anxiety. So when I found that out and I finally got to, this is at the heart of it, it was really easy to deal with.

We had a talk about that. I accepted it must be really difficult if your mum said to you one thing and you want to make your mum happy. Of course we all do. And you want to make me, it must be really tough. And it was like, yeah, it was. And then there we go. Now he's a different kid. And it's not just about the, we didn't avoid that behaviour, but actually it was just better all round. He was a happier child.

And so I think that that's something that we need to make sure we do is that often time is spent dealing with the actual behaviour that lands you in it. And that might include senior leadership, parents, everyone gathers around and talks about the fact that you threw a chair, but we're concentrating on the throwing the chair? Children don't want to come to school to throw chairs. Find out what it is that's led to all of those steps, that meant that they've picked it up and felt that's the only thing that I can do to do whatever I need to do. And that can be hard, but I think it's on us that we have a responsibility to do that if we want to manage it.

Andy Psarianos

Find the cause.

Robin Potter

Probably a good place to end. That's what we needed to hear, Adam. So, thank you.

Andy Psarianos

Thank you for joining us on The School of School Podcast.