I have been working with children for
close to a decade now and have been to many different workshops, trainings, and
conferences on the elements of child care, but one of the most important and
useful I have experienced is the crisis prevention training from the Crisis
Prevention Institute. http://www.crisisprevention.com/Home
Hearing Principal L talk about some of the recent
issues at District C, I was reminded of my CPI training and how various
elements may go into a student’s “bad day” causing them to lash out, and the
many strategies for de-escalation. This is definitely worth checking out and
there are a lot of helpful tips and strategies. Here is a page with a little
information on de-escalation. http://www.crisisprevention.com/Resources/Knowledge-Base/General/De-escalation-Tips/De-escalation-Techniques
To give you more of a taste of the different things
to check out involving crisis prevention is the verbal escalation continuum,
which is shown below, this is a design of the stages of a verbal crisis. This
has some intervention strategies at each stage.
Crisis prevention, despite being a fairly extreme term, is an important element of teaching. So many times, teachers who want to reaffirm their authority over the classroom will engage students who are behaving badly in front of the rest of the class. I've always seen this as a lose-lose situation-the student is embarassed, and in order to save face in front of his or her classmates, they disrespect and ignore the teacher. The teacher loses because the student they are supposed to be teaching is now no longer a part of your learning environment, and the student loses because they don't learn what they need to. This is why some of the suggestions at the website you provided made so much sense to me. Giving students their personal space and calmly responding to their behavior in a private manner prevents so many problems in the classroom because students don't have to prove anything when they are alone with just you. I saw these types of behavior managements being used at District C a couple of times, when teachers knew that a student was trying to push their buttons, and responded calmly and controlled the situation.
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