Stuart Shanker: 0:44

Self-regulation refers to how we manage stress. And the reason why that original definition is so critical is because it tells us that we can manage stress in a maladaptive way or in a growth promoting way.

Simon Currigan: 1:00

Welcome to the school behaviour secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan. 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, 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. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world. So you'll get to hear their latest evidence based strategies before anyone else. This is the school behaviour secrets podcast. Hi there, Simon Currigan here and welcome to this snackable essentials episode of school behaviour secrets. In these mini essentials episodes, I'm going to share with you one important piece of information or golden strategy or insight from a previous interview episode that you can start using straightaway with the kids that you work with. Because in a world where we're bombarded by information all the time, it's helpful to get reminders of these key strategies so they can continue to make a difference in your classroom. In this essentials episode, I'm going to share an insight into student behaviour from Stuart Shanker all the way back from Episode Two. Stuart is an author, speaker, and expert on how stress chemicals fuel children's behaviour, knowing this is core to understanding how to deescalate a pupil and identifying what might be causing them underneath the surface to become dysregulated in the first place. Here's Stuart explaining how our nervous system attempts to manage stress and its impact on pupil behaviour.

Stuart Shanker: 2:44

One of the things that we did was we had a

Simon Currigan: 2:44

Could you talk a little bit about how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems trying to up regulate and down regulate, you said you can see the child trying to cope with this increase in stress. team scientists that began to assemble what are called stress inventories. For us, what we wanted was a list of every kind of stress that you can find in scientific literature. Some of them were very surprising. For example, it turns out that birthday parties are stresses, you know, and begins to all make sense. And you can get those stress inventories for free from our website. And so what we wanted to do was to simplify it, because in the moment dealing with a kid that you see is becoming overstressed. You haven't got time to pull out a stress inventory. And we did what's called factor analysis, we wanted to know what are the basic groups of stresses, and what we found was there are pretty much these five domains. So all of the examples that we have can be fitted into one of the five domains. So the five domains are physical, biological, emotional, cognitive, social, and procession. Okay, so let's start off with physical. Let's take a typical classroom, all the kids all the students are sitting at the same chair and desk. And you wouldn't normally think of that in terms of you know, self regulation, but what we found was that for kids that have poor proprioception know proper perception is this internal sense. It's like the five senses, but it's an internal sense where your body is. But what they found was that for kids with poor proprioception, the result of forcing them to sit for a long time in, you know, the typical desk chair arrangement was behavioural issues. What they studied was what happens if I change the seating? What if I give them some kind of seating, which is not as stressful on their proprioceptive system? And the answer was, there was a dramatic drop in their behavioural problems. So that's what we're doing in our five domains. Okay, so in the emotion domain, suppose you've got a kid that has been conditioned never to get angry, and the child starts to get angry. And so they're punished for it or shamed for it by their parent, because in our family, we don't get angry. And what we really want to know is, you know, what were the stresses that led to this angry outbursts, and what's a constructive way of dealing with it. But now suppose that instead, what we've done is we shut it down, you do not behave that way. So now what happens is the child may well inhibit their anger. But inside, if you could peer inside what's going on, you'll find that their heart rate is beating like crazy, their sympathetic arousal is off the charts. So what we've done is we've created a problem for down the road. So what we want children to do is we want them to understand why certain emotions are running away on them. So it's not a case of controlling their emotion. It's a case of understanding how the connection between stresses and the emotions that they're feeling and then giving them tools that will help them reduce the stresses so that they can manage more effectively the stresses. Now, an interesting question is, at what age can you begin to teach this to a child, and what we found is you can begin to teach around the age of three. And that was Stuart Shanker explaining why you might see heightened or dysregulated students in your classroom and how to identify the causes of that dysregulation. I'll put a direct link to Stuart's book and website in the episode description. And of course, you can head back to episode two to hear the entire interview - it's definitely worth your time. That's all we've got time for on this essentials episode. If you've enjoyed listening today, please spend 30 seconds rating and reviewing us when you do that. It tells the algorithm to recommend school behaviour secrets to other listeners. And that helps us grow the podcast and reach other teachers, school leaders and parents just like you. And while you've got your podcast app open, do remember please to hit subscribe so you never miss another episode. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to seeing you next time on school behaviour secrets