Picture the scene: a child comes to you crying. They're not often upset and usually busy and content at nursery. They tell you that another child has hit them on the head with a hockey stick. It's halfway through the afternoon, it's been raining all day, and you have spent your time changing children who are wet and sorting out squabbles. The activity that you'd planned carefully and bought resources for during your valuable weekend collapses before your very eyes. After administering first aid and some much-needed tender loving care, you go in search of the accused, who has been earmarked as a child who is causing concerns. What next?
Some years ago I made this mistake, reacting without full knowledge of the facts, chastising a child and sanctioning them with 'time out'. What I found out later at evaluation was that the incident had, in fact, been a genuine accident. I went home that evening carrying with me a distinct feeling of failure and the creeping guilt that maybe I wasn't cut out for a job that demanded such high levels of patience. I realised my sanctions had more to do with me than with the child. In the long term, it made me look at my own role in supporting children's behaviour in a very different way.
Behaviour is the one area of our work with children that brings with it a great deal of associated 'baggage'. We all have our own ideas about what is acceptable or 'good' behaviour is and what it looks like. This understanding is normally based on our own experiences of being parented and our own schooldays.
The 'decline of moral values' is a favourite topic in the media, often with little thought or understanding, for those who are keen to lay the blame at the doors of schools and those working with children. I don't subscribe to the view of the 'good old days' - they certainly weren't better for many children, and paid scant attention to their rights.
This emotional response to child behaviour can prevent practitioners from taking a professional view, and it separates behaviour from other aspects of learning. When we reviewed our behaviour policy, it was in relation to young children and the principles of the EYFS (although I do feel that many of the ideas behind our thinking are relevant to older children and also to adults).
We often have very high expectations of children's social and emotional learning - often higher than those we expect of adults. We are sympathetic when colleagues, relations and friends feel let down, upset or angry, and often allow them a certain amount of slack or space. We expect them to be similarly understanding of us. We employ a wide and sophisticated range of strategies to support others, especially when we have an understanding of the stresses and strains in their lives.
In turn, we need to appreciate that a great deal can happen before a child starts their day with us (arguments over breakfast, getting dressed, watching TV and so on) and that these events may be undetectable by the time that they walk though our doors.
The main reason for reviewing our behaviour policy was that the current one wasn't serving children or staff well and that it didn't take account of the role that children themselves play in determining their behaviour. The previous policy wasn't being followed consistently, nor did it put behaviour at the heart of the curriculum.
The Behaviour Policy is an 'ethos' policy (along with policies such as Learning and Teaching, Inclusion and Race Equality), and by being clear about what we believe, we can change the 'culture' of our setting.
Our new policy is split into three main areas:
- what we 'believe and want' (the rationale)
- what want to 'achieve' (purposes and objectives)
- what we 'do' (actions and outcomes).
All three contain a specific heading for Children, Adults and the Environment.
If we accept that behaviour is not isolated but has a clear connection to learning, then we need to explore related areas. We considered the following:
- communication
- emotional intelligence
- attachment
- the environment
- observation
- working with parents.
COMMUNICATION, EMOTIONAL LITERACY AND ATTACHMENT
Behaviour is a form of communication. It almost always needs more than one person to be involved. For that communication to be meaningful, our own responses have as large a part to play as the child's (more if you believe that our job is about guidance and support).
In accepting this, we must try to avoid a purely emotional response - our reactions have an enormous impact on how a situation develops. Almost always, the emotions and feelings behind challenging behaviour are acceptable. Children have the right to feel angry, threatened, confused and worried, and we need to let children know this.
We also need to let children know that they are valued and cared for, even when they are in the throes of powerful emotions, which they don't always feel in control of themselves (which is a frightening feeling for children or adults).
We need to support children in managing these overwhelming emotions while helping them communicate them in an acceptable way. In other words, we need to name emotions - as in 'I can see you are feeling very angry... How can I help you?' If as professionals we become upset, intolerant or impatient, then we are not supporting children's learning, but simply reinforcing reactive strategies.
Emotional literacy
Of course, to achieve this, we must help children become emotionally literate. In thinking about this we found Gardner's model of 'multiple intelligences' helpful (see p26).
Gardner divides 'personal' intelligence into 'interpersonal' and 'intra-personal' intelligence. Generally, this can be taken to mean managing emotions in relation to yourself, and managing them in relation to others. Children who are unable to manage their own feelings internally, will find it hard to manage themselves externally.
Daniel Goleman's research into emotional literacy has brought into the public domain the importance of emotional intelligence to a person's quality of life - both personally and for those around us! His work shows that by reflecting on our own responses to children's behaviour, we can exert a hugely positive impact on it. This really is about life-long learning, so no pressure then!
As educators it is our duty to support and empower children. If we believe that understanding and managing our emotions are directly connected to motivation and learning, and that emotional and mental well-being are inherent a fulfilled life, then we need to pay particular attention to these aspects of a child's development and incorporate them into our teaching. It also helps us be reflective about our practice.
Taking this as a starting point underpinned our policy.
Attachment
Bowlby's and Dunn's work on attachment is also helpful in understanding children's behaviour and how to respond to it.
Behaviour must be seen as part of the complicated social dynamic in which it is played out. Our appreciation of how others think, based on our own thought ('theory of mind') shows how important it is to build relationships intentionally.
What Judy Dunn was able to show in her research was that children begin to detect the emotions of people that they are close to and base their own responses on these very emotions. According to her, these emotional responses are seen at an earlier age than more intellectual responses.
THE ENVIRONMENT
Having reflected upon children's emotional needs, and our responses to them, we next need to ask ourselves whether our environment does support the behaviour that we value.
By environment, I mean primarily the practitioners, the resources and the routines within our setting. We all know what happens when we start a popular activity without enough resources - there are problems around sharing and turn-taking. By ensuring that we take this into account, we can pre-empt disputes, especially when children are learning to take turns and share.
In the review of our policy we included a section on what we did to promote positive behaviour, rather than react to problems that we have a part in creating. In many behaviour policies, this is set out as 'rules', or what we call our Code of Behaviour. Ours comprises the following:
- Be kind and friendly
- Be helpful and thoughtful
- Keep yourself and others safe.
What we had come to realise was that we would need to spend time and effort on labelling and naming children's actions to help them understand what these rules meant. For example, being 'thoughtful' is a complicated concept.
The code of behaviour applies to everybody at the centre. We created displays and talked to children to show the behaviour that we valued: 'You were kind helping Abdi to put on his coat', 'You are being so helpful sweeping up the sand', 'Are you keeping other people safe if you wave that stick around?' The reward that we wanted the children to enjoy from such behaviour was the benefits of belonging to a community, and the active support and joy that brings - in other words, inclusion.
Rewards and sanctions
Adult responses, as we have already seen, are so important to children, and so next we looked at rewards and sanctions. By rewards, I mean extrinsic, physical rewards, as opposed to specific praise, attention and encouragement (praise that makes you feel good).
There is more and more research into rewards (Kohn 1993, Deci and Ryan 2000), and it has shown that participants offered a reward for completing a task successfully do not perform as well as others who expect no reward.
This is especially true with young children, who often don't understand why they have been given a reward, such as a sticker (try asking them!). Meanwhile, the children who do need positive encouragement are often the ones who often fail to receive a reward (or do so in 'relative circumstances').
What we want children to learn is that there are 'inherent' or 'intrinsic' benefits to behaving well. Put simply, it's nice to be nice. We have a better and more fulfilled life by acting and behaving well towards each other (and knowing how to cope when other people don't behave well towards us).
To help achieve this, we decided that:
- We will use portfolios to celebrate children's achievement alone and with others
- We will use gym sessions, parachute activities, circle times and focused activities to help teach positive behaviour
- There will be opportunities throughout the day for children to listen and be listened to in groups of varying sizes - and alone
- There will be opportunities throughout the day for sustained independent play and clearly planned adult-directed activities. Children will have the opportunity to become deeply engrossed in activities that interest and motivate them.
- Adults will be able to ask for help from colleagues - all staff are responsible for all the children (not just key workers).
- Staff need to:
- watch incidents clearly before they intervene
- use specific praise as a matter of course (seven positives for every negative)
- use a range of interactions including extension, encouragement and distraction
- support the victim to express their feelings to the antagonist.
CHALLENGING BEHAVIOUR
Such an approach is fine when children are behaving beautifully and the sun's shining, but what do we do when faced with really challenging behaviour? If we take it as a given that behaviour is a form of communication, what we need to do is understand what we are being told.
In our policy, we outlined clear strategies for intervening in everyday situations such as conflicts between children. This involves the adult being a facilitator rather than a police officer - supporting a resolution, while remaining clear and supportive.
We aimed to resolve situations by being clear and non-judgemental, asking a child who has been hurt what they wanted done to make things right (such as, fetch a tissue or give back a toy), and not back ourselves into corners, for example, by demanding that a child say sorry. Actions speak louder than words, and saying 'sorry' can become a knee-jerk reaction, a convenient way to get the adult off your back more than displaying any real intention for resolving a situation and making amends.
We agreed that we would always refer to our code of behaviour, and that if behaviour became dangerous or unmanageable, we would ask a colleague for support.
We also accepted that when emotions are running high, a resolution is sometimes only possible when the children involved have calmed down. (Remember the saying: 'When a person is drowning is not the time to give swimming lessons!')
At such occasions, we decided we would have 'thinking time'. This is different to 'time out'. It means a short spell away from other children and activities in the company of one adult who can provide space and calm to enable the child to come to terms with the situation. Here, the child needs to know:
- that such behaviour will always be stopped
- why it is unacceptable to behave in such a way
- that the child is still wanted and valued
- that adult help will be available to help the child avoid such behaviour in the future
- that if the unacceptable behaviour arose from strong feelings of anger or frustration, there is nothing wrong with the feelings themselves, only the way in which they were expressed.
We also need to recognise that a child who has 'lost control' (by, for example, swearing, or throwing things) is demonstrating that they may be feeling any of a range of painful emotions. They may be scared, hurt, confused, angry, anxious. It is important for us, as early years practitioners, to confirm their feelings and let them know that it is our job to help.
Sometimes the extreme behaviour of children can raise powerful feelings within us. For example, we may find it very hard when a child swears, but we must remember that children are 'learning', and our job is to support them in learning how to manage their behaviour, rather than provide a knee-jerk reaction of horror.
OBSERVATION
When children were causing a recurring concern, we agreed to use a variety of strategies to support them, the main one being observing to find out what was really happening rather than what we thought was happening.
We agreed to use the 'ABC' (Antecedents, Behaviours and Consequences) model of observation to discover the triggers for children's behaviour, and to see if the consequences for challenging behaviour were acting as some sort of reward to the child involved.
Persistent 'bad' behaviour can point to emotional difficulties, but by keeping a record of such behaviour we were able to pinpoint the additional support that a child needed. It is amazing how being very clear about what is happening helps us to understand how to support children to cope with difficult times.
ONE YEAR ON
So where are we now? The policy has been in place for a year and both our own monitoring and that of our 'critical friends' (including Ofsted, both in education and daycare) shows that it is working well.
We need to do a review with staff and monitor the policy's impact again one year on. We don't have a solution to every behavioural problem that we encounter, and some children can still show very challenging behaviour. However, I do feel that the way that we see and respond to such behaviour is more positive.
Above all we are reflective about what we do. For me, this is the core of effective early years practice - to think about what we do and to be prepared to change it if it is needed.
As it states at the beginning of our policy:
'We believe that children need to be able to manage their own behaviour "intrinsically", ie. through self-management, rather than "extrinsically", ie. through the constant input and direction of others. Therefore, we must support children to this aim and not "punish" or "penalise" them. What we want them to learn is to develop the skills, knowledge and attitudes to become autonomous in making good judgements and choices in relation to others. We know this will have positive effects on their future lives.'
All of the ideas in this article have come from what I have read, the outstanding practitioners that I have worked with and, of course, the children and their parents whom we work with every day. Little of it is original, but I hope that it does stimulate some discussion and thought.
Most of all, I want to thank our staff team, who have been responsive and open-minded in trying new ideas and thinking deeply about this and the other issues it has raised. Behaviour is such an emotive topic and one that everybody has an opinion on, but I do believe that by helping children manage their own behaviour "intrinsically" it will make a difference to the quality of their lives (and, of course, the lives of others).
Michael Pettavel is head of Randolph Beresford Early Years Centre, London
WORKING WITH PARENTS
Policies don't work in isolation, and so with our behaviour policy, we wanted to be sure that we worked closely with parents and shared our ideas and strategies with them.
We didn't want to demonise children whose behaviour was causing us concern, and we needed to make sure that what we shared with parents gave a balanced view of a child's time at nursery.
We identified a clear system of sharing information with parents when behaviour did cause concern, and made sure that the senior management team were aware of what parents were told to avoid any unexpected surprises! We wanted parents to know that we had dealt with a situation and that we would continue to monitor their child's behaviour and involve them in supporting their child.
We hold curriculum evenings for parents every term. On completing our new behaviour policy, we made it the focus of that termly meeting.
Many of our parents and children speak English as an additional language, so we translated the policy into our community languages, enlisting the support of bilingual parents. We made videos of children following our policy and parents reading sections of it in home languages. We made fridge magnets of the code of behaviour in different languages and talked to parents and their children, recording their own ideas on flipcharts.
We were able to explain the rationale behind the changes and gather parents' support in following a similar code at home. The policy was well received, and now when new parents and children start at nursery we go through the policy with them so they understand the reasons behind it.
FURTHER READING
- Howard Gardner Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice (Basic Books)
- Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence (Bloomsbury)
- John Bowlby Attachment and Loss/Attachment (Vintage)
- Judy Dunn Young Children's Close Relationships: Beyond Attachment (Sage Publications), The Beginnings of Social Understanding (Blackwell), Sisters and Brothers (Harvard University Press)
- Deci and Ryan The What and Why of Goal Pursuits
Photographs by Teri Pengilley At Randolph Beresford Children's centre, London.
