Simon Currigan: 0:44

Are you seeing more pupils with a history of trauma in your school or classroom and their behaviour is heightened, unpredictable, and difficult to manage safely? Then you're not on your own. And definitely keep listening because we're going to give you a relationship based simple step by step framework you can use to respond to their behavior that's been proven to work in classrooms around the world. Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan. My cohost 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 gonna 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 the latest evidence based strategies before anyone else. This is the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. Welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. My name is Simon Currigan. Sit yourself down and make yourself welcome. Before we get on with the behaviour stuff, I just wanted to share some geographical Atlas related news that I've got or ambition really. I live not far away from a place called Kingdick's Hole. True story. And I can't wait to visit. Also, my hit list are Bellend in Dudley and Fanny Hands in Lincolnshire.

Emma Shackleton: 2:15

No. I'm not going down this rabbit hole.

Simon Currigan: 2:17

I'm joined today by my co host, Emma Shackleton. Hi, Emma. Those are all real place names. Time to sneak in a quick question.

Emma Shackleton: 2:23

Is it family friendly?

Simon Currigan: 2:25

Absolutely. According to a teacher tap survey in 2023, what percentage of teachers said they felt that their leadership team listened to them most of the time?

Emma Shackleton: 2:39

Okay. So teachers who feel listened to by their leadership team, I would like to think that this is fairly high. 65%. Go on. What did the survey say?

Simon Currigan: 2:51

Alright. You're a bit of an optimist on this one. The answer was 44 percent. I'm not sure whether that's high or low, really. It didn't give a breakdown of the 65%, but that still leaves a lot of teachers out there who feel like their input isn't valued or aren't sure whether their voice is being heard.

Emma Shackleton: 3:13

Okay. Why did you ask about that?

Simon Currigan: 3:15

Because today, we're gonna explore using an approach to managing confrontations with students and challenging behavior known as PACE. And PACE is all about building empathy and relationships with students so they're more able to reflect on their own behaviour and emotions and make social and emotional gains from there. It's literally the opposite of jumping into an incident and talking about expectations of what rules the child has broken. It's not about removing boundaries and limits, but its goal is the same as traditional approaches to managing behaviour. So it's about helping kids regulate and for them to know what happened during an incident from different perspectives, why it happened, and coach them to function successfully in school.

Emma Shackleton: 4:05

Oh, that sounds good. But before we get to that, a quick reminder to our listeners. If you haven't done so already, please do subscribe to the show. Subscribing makes it easy to hear future episodes, and it prompts the algorithm to share school behavior secrets with other teachers, school leaders, and parents. Sharing the information with the people who need it most helps us to grow the show. It's a win win.

Simon Currigan: 4:31

And, right, I don't know if we've mentioned this before, but if you're working with pupils who are presenting challenging behaviour and you don't know why they're acting the way they are and you want to help them by digging into the root causes of that behaviour, we've got a free download that can help called the SEND Handbook.

Emma Shackleton: 4:49

The handbook is a simple tool for linking the behaviours that you see in class with possible underlying needs like trauma, autism, and ADHD.

Simon Currigan: 4:58

And I know you know this if you're a regular listener, but we have to say it. It's not there for us as educators to try and make a diagnosis because we're simply not qualified to do that. We don't have that training. That's the role of medical professionals.

Emma Shackleton: 5:12

But what the handbook can do is start to help to get the ball rolling. Helping you and your teachers in school to get the right professionals involved and to help you to start to put early intervention strategies into place because that is always going to benefit the child.

Simon Currigan: 5:29

The handbook also comes with fact sheets containing key information and strategies about conditions like PDA, ODD, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, DLD, and more.

Emma Shackleton: 5:40

So if you'd like to get your hands on a free copy, we'll put a direct link in the show notes to where you can download from our website. All you've got to do is open your podcast app, tap on the episode, and this will bring up the episode description where you'll be able to see the link and click right through.

Simon Currigan: 5:57

And now without any further delay, it's time to put on our nose clip, slap on a rubber glove, extend out our hand gingerly, and grasp the cold fish we like to call behaviour. So today, we're gonna discuss an approach to supporting children who are becoming dysregulated or engaging in sort of challenging behavior called PACE. PACE is an acronym, p a c e, and it was developed not by us, but by Dan Hughes in America. And it was developed really specifically to work with kids with a history of trauma or adverse childhood experiences, but it can actually be used in a kind of wider range of situations than that. It's based on how parents tend to respond to infants when infants get upset or they're miscuing in social situations. And and when you look at parents that do this well, what they do is they attune to the child, and that's what the PACE methodology does. Right? So we attune to the child. We use empathy. Instead of jumping in and adding kind of, like, negative energy to the situation, the parents will slow down and be calm with the child. They coregulate. So it's all about connecting first and then helping the infant to understand the experience, understand what's happened, and to interpret it in a way that's gonna be of benefit to them in the future. So something's gone wrong in in the current situation, and we're kinda coaching them and helping them understand what happened. So in future, they've got the information and knowledge they need to do better. Obviously, you need to do this repeatedly over time for them to develop that knowledge. So that's kind of like how parents tend to respond to infants. However, this approach actually works really well for older children, especially those whose background didn't help them process and make sense of those early experiences effectively. And when we're using PACE to support children we were working with, often, we're in a really heightened difficult situation where we're improvising. And what happens then is it's actually really, really stressful and actually having these frameworks to refer to and use to takes the pressure out of the adult because you know you're following a sort of proven evidence based methodology to supporting your children when they're heightened. You don't need to use all of the parts of pace in each situation. It's gonna depend on the child and the situation you're in. It's really a framework for how we interact with the child. So it's not like you do p first and then a a next then c next and then e next. You know your kids. You know the situation you're currently trying to deescalate or work through with the child, so you use your judgment about what's gonna work best in that situation. It's great for diffusing confrontations. And what it does actually is it builds trust and connection between you and the child forming a more solid relationship. So what happens moving forward is they're more likely to trust you and let you sort of work alongside them and allow you to coregulate them, and they'll trust you to kind of mediate and resolve issues. So we've kind of trailed and teased the PACE acronym or initialism. Emma, do you wanna start with the first p?

Emma Shackleton: 9:15

Yeah. Yeah. So the p stands for playfulness. I'll go through all four letters, and then we'll do each one individually. So we've got p for playfulness. We've got a for acceptance. We've got c for curiosity, and we've got e for empathy. And as Simon said, you don't have to go through these techniques or strategies in order, but it's useful to have these concepts in mind. And I really, really like this idea of thinking about stressful situations upfront as the adult so that you're mentally prepared with what to do next time. Because when you're in a moment and it's a stressful situation, it's really hard for you to think clearly and strategically. But if you've done that thinking ahead of a situation when you're calm, that means that your support and intervention is probably going to be a lot more considered, a lot calmer, and a lot more useful and effective. So the p is for playfulness, and playfulness diffuses the confrontation. So if somebody is upset or overwhelmed and somebody else comes along and gets upset or overwhelmed, that is not going to lower the tension. So used really carefully and definitely not in a mocking type of way, coming from an angle of playfulness can really help to take the heat out of a difficult situation. It lowers the tension. It gets everybody feeling calmer, and that means that sometimes, you know, this happens a lot, doesn't it? A small situation can really, really quickly escalate like wildfire, and you think to yourself, wow. How did we get to this? I I only asked them to pick up a pencil or I only asked them to get their coat and suddenly, boom. So what we're trying to do at every step of the way as the adult is think about what can I do which will mean that the tension drains away from this situation? How can I be the water in this situation with the fire rather than adding fuel to the fire? So in a class situation, this might look like using a more playful tone when giving a reminder, for example. Instead of going in, you know, with your teacher bossy voice and being assertive, it might mean just being a little bit more fun, a little bit more relaxed, having a smile on your face. You know, it's not the end of the world if children don't get into a straight line immediately. But if that's the goal, the way that we ask them to get in the line will make a big difference to how the children actually get into that line. So instead of being bossy or shouty, we can be more playful, make it a little bit fun. The key here is to really think about your facial expression. Lots of people don't realize how much of their emotions leak out of their faces and bodies. So you've gotta be real good poker face here. You've got to think carefully about actively softening your facial expressions, letting your face relax, smile rather than going in with stern body language. And softening your face has 2 really great benefits. One is it communicates nonverbally to everybody in the room that you're not cross. This is not a threat. This is not a confrontation. But also actively softening your body language communicates to your own brain that this is not a threat situation. We don't need to get excited about this. We've got it under control. So it gives really great biofeedback to your own brain. So really being conscious of your face and your body when you're dealing with behaviour or correcting behaviour will have a big impact on how that interaction goes with the child.

Simon Currigan: 13:13

So what that might look like here is imagine we've got a child who's engaging in task avoidance. Maybe they're sitting there not doing any work. One approach might be to go in and say, look. The expectation is you need to do your work, pick up your pen, get on with it. Now if the child is kinda like boiling underneath with their emotions, then that's actually likely to escalate the situation. What we can do with playfulness, we can go in with just, you know, like, kind of like a just a just a gentle tone, a bit of a smile and say something along the lines of not working for you. You know, you're staring it out to to see who wins either. That kind of thing going in from the side to try and get just a smirk from the job because if you can get just a half smile from them, you're finding a way in. And then you can start engaging in the next part of the PACE acronym where you can engage in a problem solving situation. What you've done there is instead of having a head on collision where you are telling the child to start their work and they're saying no, and you're both kind of digging in in this game of chicken. Actually, you're coming alongside the child, and you're forming connections with the child. And what playfulness does actually is it kinda makes it clear. The relationship that you have with them is stronger and more powerful than the behaviour that they've engaged in. You're trying to reach them at a personal level to say, look, you know, this behaviour may not be working, might not be successful in this situation, but actually I see you as a human being. There's a connection between us. This doesn't have to be the end of the world. When we kind of minimize that and kind of deescalate and take the pressure away and form that connection with them, what it then does is it gives them a way to transition away and get back to normal running in the classroom. We've moved from a game of chicken to opening a conversation about what's wrong and how we can move things forward. Now, obviously, there are times when playfulness is appropriate, and there are times when it is not. If you've got a child throwing a chair across the classroom at a window, if you've got children who are physically attacking each other, it is obviously not the time for a bit of dry humor. Okay. It's not a time to sort of lighten what's happening. But most incidents don't start like that. They start with smaller frustrations, and that is where playfulness can come into play because it just takes the tension away and opens conversations rather than ending up in closed arguments where you end up with kinda like a win lose situation that fuels the escalation. So that's playfulness. It's not jumping in with 2 feet and being stern. It's actually thinking about how can we just loosen that release valve, take the tension out, and work together with the student.

Emma Shackleton: 15:46

I think what's also important to note here is as with all behaviour management or behaviour support, you're gonna be using your knowledge of the child. So some children hate it if the teacher tries to make a joke or uses humor because they feel like they are being laughed at. So if you're detecting that and you know that the child doesn't like that, then you're obviously not gonna do that. But even when you are giving instructions or reminders, you can still think about your body language and the tone of voice. You don't have to be daft and silly about it, but you can just make sure that there's a little bit of softness and a little bit of kindness. Because the child, if they're in distress or they're overwhelmed, their antennae is up looking for threat. And if they detect any level of threat or confrontation from you, that's definitely gonna escalate the situation.

Simon Currigan: 16:40

Can I add one thing there before we move on, Emma, as well? It reminds me of a case once where I was working with a child, and they they were really angry. And we used to have this sort of section of the classroom with some of the reading scheme in, and they just went over there and they were kind of like venting and they threw the books on the floor. The humor doesn't have to actually be about about the child so much. You can make it about the thing that's gone wrong. So we made a joke about, yeah, I don't like that reading scheme either. So you can actually turn the playfulness on yourself, which actually depersonalizes it. It it's not about being a comedian. It's just about finding a shared moment of empathy, I think.

Emma Shackleton: 17:13

And I think you touched on it earlier. It's just getting things into context. You know? This is not the end of the world. So throwing the books on the floor is not what we want to happen, and it's not okay, but the world isn't going to implode because somebody's thrown some books. So we're taking out the intensity in that situation. So we've got p for playfulness. In the PACE acronym, we've got a for acceptance. And this is about the adult not judging the child for what they are experiencing right now. So in our life, emotions just bubble up. And remember, there aren't any good or bad emotions. Emotions are just emotions, and they come and go. And we've actually got very little control over them a lot of the time, so we shouldn't judge people based on the emotions that they are experiencing. So when we are coming from an acceptance point of view, we're going to listen and accept the child's thoughts nonjudgmentally, and this is hard. You don't have to agree with what the child is thinking or saying or their perception of the situation. It doesn't mean that you're colluding with that, but you're also not going to be dismissive. You're not gonna push their thoughts and feelings to the side, and you're not going to argue with them. Even if you blatantly can see that the way they are reading a situation is very differently to the way that you are reading it, now is not the time to have that conversation. When they are heightened, they are not in a learning brain state. So this is not the teaching point. So acceptance is literally listening and accepting. They are feeling something right now. They are perceiving a situation to be happening a certain way. And the way that you can show your acceptance is by neutral body language and using a technique called reflection, where you're repeating back what the child is saying. So it might be, for example, the child might be saying, it's too hard. I can't do it. This is too hard for me. And you might be saying, I think what I'm hearing is you're finding the work too hard. Or you might say, I think you're saying that you think this work is too hard for you, and that made you upset and you ran away, for example. Or it might be if a child thinks another child has done something to them, and maybe they have or they haven't, that's their perception so were going to validate that perception by saying ok so another child has done something and that's what made you angry? Now whether or not that is what really happened, that is what the child perceived to have happened, and that has triggered a strong emotion in them. So we are accepting the situation from the child's perspective, and we're accepting that they're having a big feeling around that. It still doesn't mean that it's okay to hurt somebody else or hurt yourself or break things, but we are accepting this is what you think has happened, and this is how you are feeling about it. And that's okay.

Simon Currigan: 20:30

And do you know what's interesting here? Even if you know the child is actively lying, and even if the child knows they're lying, actually, what you're doing by investing the time in listening to them is that you're saying, like, I am here, and I am taking what you are saying seriously. And that actually builds your relationship with them. And what we we definitely wanna reinforce is this is not the same as accepting the pupil's behaviour as being okay. It's not the same as saying there's no limits on what they can do or say. I think it's Alcoholics Anonymous have the saying all progress starts with the truth. And what we'd need to do as the adult is understand the truth from their perspective because without that, we're gonna find it difficult to make progress. So it might be that you put firm limits on place on their behaviour and you put firm boundaries in place. But this approach helps the child understand when you talk it through that it's the behaviour that's at issue, not the child as an individual, not the child's individual worth. It's not about your relationship with the child. So what we do in this phase is we're accepting whether that's true, right, wrong. We're accepting that in this moment, this is how they feel. These are their thoughts right now, and we're not going into whether what they've done is right or wrong. We're trying to understand what's driving their behaviour, what their motivation is, and we're putting ourself in their shoes as well as we can. So as the adult, what we can do then is we can identify any misunderstandings. Perhaps there was an incident in the classroom around a social situation or, they've misread an expectation, and they've become frustrated or angry or embarrassed or anxious, and that's led to an issue. Perhaps there was a gap in their social or emotional knowledge. But unless we sit down and listen actively to the child without interrupting or arguing, then we will never get to that gap. We can't support them with them because we don't know what it is. So that's what this section of pace is all about. Accepting that this is how they feel right now, not accepting that break in the window or throwing something or swearing at someone else is okay. It's a different kind of acceptance.

Emma Shackleton: 22:43

That's right. So we've got p for playfulness, a for acceptance. So let's move on to c, which stands for curiosity. So, again, in this vein of listening, tuning in, understanding the meaning behind the words, understanding the communication behind the behaviour, using curiosity instead of judgment helps the child explore their feelings and what went wrong. And this is acting with genuine curiosity, and this can be really, really hard to do because when children behave in particular ways, that pushes our buttons, and it causes a visceral emotional reaction in us as well. So we've really got to be super aware of our own feelings and our own demeanor, and we've got to kind of squash that down for now, prioritize the child so that we can be curious about, I wonder why they responded in that way. What were they thinking around that time? What actually happened and what went wrong? What were the child's perceptions around it? And then as Simon said, once we understand that in a calmer, cooler moment, we can start to teach them about managing and coping with those feelings and emotions, and that will then make positive changes in the way that they behave. If we don't do that teaching part, the child will be stuck in a cycle of something happens, they respond. Something happens, they respond. So where we actually want to change or modify behaviours, we've got to really listen in and be curious about why why did they respond in that way? What happened there? When we are judgy, when we are blaming, that immediately gets people's backs up, and they normally go one of 2 ways. They either become aggressive and they go on the attack because they feel like you're not listening and you're being mean to them or you're telling them off, or they shut down and they won't engage. And neither one of those options is going to help us get to the bottom of how the child is feeling about this and why they are responding in this way. So the way to be curious is to use open questions to get more information about what the child is thinking at the time and, again, thinking about our tone. So you might say something like, I wonder what you were thinking when, and then x, y, and zed. Now if I say that same question again in a different tone, you'll hear the difference in the intonation. What were you thinking? That's completely different, isn't it? So it's curious and wondering. What do you hear and see the other child do before, And what what do you think was going on? Or even saying something like, can you help me understand what happened before he took the pencil sharpener? So saying things like that, can you help me to understand, opens up the opportunity for the child to think about what happened and then articulate it. And in that way, you'll be able to get to the bottom of the feelings that motivated the child to behave in that way.

Simon Currigan: 25:53

One tip here actually is to avoid one open question in particular, which is asking them why they did something or or why something happened. Because often, they don't actually know. But what they can do is when you ask questions like Emma just said, you know, what do you think was going on, or can you help me understand? What that does is the child's probably able to answer those questions because it's kind of factual concrete information that they can access, that they can tell you. They might not have the emotional awareness to know why if he was in a highly emotional state. Often, when we're heightened, we don't know why we've done things. We're just fueled by our feelings. So one tip here is definitely avoid asking the child why they did something. But another thing you can do is suggest your own ideas to help them clarify their thinking. Let's imagine a situation here where one of the children's been working and another child borrowed their pencil sharpener and and the other child got really upset. A question you might ask is, could it be you thought the other boy was stealing your pencil sharpener? And then you just hang back, and you don't jump in with any more ideas, and you let them just think about it and talk about your idea. So that's prompting something in their head that's gonna help them to understand the situation that they're in that they may not have considered. Or you might say, tell me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you were worried you would never get the pencil sharpener back. Because many children who have a history of trauma or ACE's don't actually appreciate that an object can be taken away in return or they don't trust in the past, they've had things taken away from them by parents or by, you know, experiences in their early childhood. Things have been taken from them, and they've never been returned. So they don't believe that once something's been taken away, it's gonna come back. Or you could prompt a question like, is there a part of you that felt angry when he took the sharpener, but didn't know what to say? And things like, is part of this because you feel sad that your dog is poorly and has to go to the vets tonight? Looking at actually, this has nothing to do with a pencil sharpener, and that actually there are things going on at home that are background emotional churn that are affecting the way that you're acting right now. So you wanna keep the tone light. You wanna keep it curious. When you go in with this curious kinda tone, this curious state of mind, what it does is it puts the child in a state where they're able to really sort of open up and talk about what happened. And when you're prompting them with these open questions, you're helping them reflect on not just what happened, but their own thoughts, how valid their those thoughts are, and whether the behaviour was kind of appropriate for the situation they were in now they've had time to reflect on it, or you've helped them to reflect on it. And remember, some kids might not understand what they've done wrong for a range of reasons, and they might actually feel that they're being attacked by the other children or the adults. They might understand. The other child sitting next to him should have asked to borrow the pencil sharpener. But that, you know, in that in that social situation, the appropriate thing to do is to use your words and kind of try and understand what's happening in that situation and negotiate a reasonable reasonable outcome. They might know something's gone wrong that the pencil sharpener's being taken away, and they feel angry or, you know, attacked by that. And they know they're now in trouble with the adult because they were shouting and swearing, but they're not quite sure why they don't see the chain of cause and effect. So approaching with curiosity rather than interrogating helps the child reflect and learn for themselves. And when we have those conversations, what we're doing is we're making lots of implicit unspoken knowledge about those social situations more explicit so the child knows what to do next time.

Emma Shackleton: 29:42

So we've had p for playfulness, a for acceptance, c for curiosity, and finally, e for empathy. So this is where we show the child that what they were thinking and feeling is important to the adult and that we are taking the time to support them even in hard times. We're not just going to interact with them when they're good or compliant or happy. When things go wrong, we will be there for them. So we can talk about the emotions and feelings that they are experiencing. We can emphasize that the emotion is temporary. It will come and go. Feelings are like the weather. You can have more than one feeling at the same time, and it's like clouds going past, isn't it? They might not realize that. When you're having a big feeling, it can feel like this is it forever. It can be all consuming. So talking about that can really help to build relationships. And we are seeing the person and connecting with the person behind the behaviour. You'll sometimes hear people talk about separating the behaviour from the person. I know that feels difficult to do, but just because they've made a mistake, it doesn't mean that they're a bad person or that we don't like them now. So it's helping them to understand all feelings are normal and that they can come and go. And and like we said before, being empathetic is different from agreeing with the child's actions or their viewpoints or endorsing or corroborating. We're not saying that it's okay to throw the pencil sharpener or whatever they've done. That's not okay. But what we are saying is they are okay. We still like them. We still care about them. We've got a human relationship with them regardless of the fact that they've made a mistake with their behaviour. So it's more about making them feel heard and seen, all of that before we start talking about rules or limits or boundaries or consequences. And we're also communicating to that child that they're not alone. They don't have to deal with hard things on their own. We are there standing side by side with them because we care about them, and and we want them to be okay. And as Simon mentioned earlier, for some kids, they haven't had that. There hasn't been a reliable, dependent adult who has stuck with them through thick or thin. So we're really teaching them that this is a possibility that other adults can form meaningful connections with them.

Simon Currigan: 32:20

So if you want to show empathy, again, recap what the child has said with phrases like, I think you're saying that or let me say that back to you to make sure I've got it right in my head. And what you're doing is you're showing you've listened and you've thought about what they've said. You're not just going through a, like, a tick box formality of listening to what they say before you drop the hammer on a punishment. The message is together, we will get through this. You won't be abandoned because of this mistake. Your relationship with this adult can survive the behaviour. And I've worked with a number of families, and I can't kind of reinforce this enough. In most households, if there's an argument or a a disagreement between an adult and a child about behaviour, what will happen after the discussion or indeed the telling off depending on what household you're in? There will be a moment where the adult says to the child, brings them back together, has the connection, and and they'll say, I still love you. It doesn't matter. We can fix things. Now in some households, that doesn't happen. And what happens is the child learns that the adult and the child have an argument, and they see the adult's fury. They see the adult's anger or they get told off or whatever. But then that moment of reconnection doesn't happen. So they might not appreciate that relationships can be repaired after an incident. The solution to that is empathy. And when you think about it, in your own life, if you've made a mistake as an adult, you're more likely to talk to someone that you view as empathetic about it than than someone who's gonna judge you or damn you or be inquisitorial about it. And you you kinda see this in the medical profession. When doctors make mistakes, often what happens is they'll get sued. There'll be a malpractice suit, and then there's public judgment and shaming. So in the medical profession, the strong temptation when a mistake is made is to cover it up and not own up and bring mistakes to light so they can be examined with empathy in a nonjudgmental way. Unless that empathy is there and that supportive procedure is in place, then we don't learn to address mistakes so they don't get repeated in the future. So to conclude, the PACE acronym is p for playfulness

Emma Shackleton: 34:31

a for acceptance.

Simon Currigan: 34:32

C for curiosity.

Emma Shackleton: 34:34

And e for empathy.

Simon Currigan: 34:36

And that's what we've got for you today. If you found our explanation of using PACE useful, remember, don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode with your friends and colleagues on social media. All you have to do is use the share button on your podcast app. The app will make it easy to post this episode. We'll share a direct link of this episode in a message or a text or whatever.

Emma Shackleton: 34:56

So thank you for listening today. We both hope that you have a great week, and we can't wait to see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets. Bye for now. Bye.