In this blog, I am going to teach you why it is so important to stay calm when you have got an escalating student. We are going to look at how your brain works and how your student’s brain works in those sorts of situations and we will look at what you can do to keep the situation under control.

Prefer to watch the video, click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bcPzPqobg0

So what happens in your student’s brain when they start to escalate? If you have students that tend to throw tantrums, both younger and older children, maybe they tend to get escalated, aggressive and angry. They get into those fight, flight or freeze modes. Theres some really important stuff you need to understand about what’s going on in their brain and your brain. You need to know how to keep the situation under control. 

The Amygdala

There is a part in your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is responsible for your fight, flight and freeze responses, these are your instinct responses. Your instinct is what you do on autopilot. This is when you’re not thinking about what you’re doing, you’re just doing it out of habit. You’re doing it out of repetition. For example, your breathing. You don’t think about breathing, you just breathe. Walking is another thing that you do on autopilot, your brain has learned to control it without active prefrontal cortex thought. Your defense mechanisms are the same. The fight, flight or freeze defense mechanisms are all about helping you protect yourself when you feel like you’re in danger. 

This is the same sort of mechanism that animals have, for example, if you’ve ever watched a nature documentary and see an antelope getting chased by a lion. The antelope has this instinctive response that makes them run away. They do it in a split second, they don’t think about it they just run to save their life. It’s this part of the brain, the fight, flight or freeze part of your brain, that gets triggered when a student is escalating. 

When someone is getting angry, out of control or starting to get distressed, they are in self-defense mode. To understand this fully though, you need to understand how the amygdala is triggered.

The amygdala is controlled by your emotions. Your emotions are interesting because they don’t actually have language, they just feel. So you feel sad, happy, angry, threatened, scared but you don’t actually go through the process of thinking about “Why” you feel that way or “what” caused you to feel that way. You don’t actually analyze the situation with your emotions. When your emotions feel threatened, scared, or in danger what they do is they talk to the amygdala. They say “hey time to activate our automatic responses. Time to get ready to fight, run away, or freeze because we feel threatened or in danger.”

Here’s the problem though, if you have somebody that is just controlled by their emotions – you’ve probably met people like this, emotionally unregulated people who just react to feelings –  they don’t spend much time processing the problem and analyzing whether the reaction is warranted. They are simply responding to what they feel. I’m; scared, angry, sad therefore I will react before I’ve thought about it.

To do this (think through the problem before reacting) we have to engage another part of the brain called the Pre-frontal cortex. You’ve probably said this to your students before, “you need to think about what you’re doing”. What we’re actually saying is we need you to engage your prefrontal cortex.

The Prefrontal Cortex

The prefrontal cortex is your thinking brain, it’s your logic. Your prefrontal cortex actually has a conversation with your emotions. In an emotionally healthy person, the prefrontal cortex can observe our emotions and help us to analyze the situation. Your prefrontal cortex collects data. It then creates a story that influences your emotions and it’s reactions. This is why it’s so important to manage your thoughts and the stories that you tell yourself because your emotions will end up triggering a response. If we or our students fail to engage in this part of the process, we simply become reactive, uncontrolled, and fail to make the best decisions that we can when we are emotionally escalated. 

Let me give you an example If you’re walking down a dark street in a dangerous part of town. A part of town where there’s been a lot of muggings, you hear footsteps behind you. You hear somebody walking up behind very quickly. Your prefrontal cortex will take in all the data. It will say ok dangerous part of town, lots of muggings, it’s late at night, I’m by myself… there’s a pretty good chance I’m going to get mugged. It will say to your emotions it’s ok to be scared, you have a reason to be scared, we need to do something about it. Therefore your emotions will say right I’m scared right now, I need to get ready to either run away or get ready to fight. So your emotions take over and they get you ready for an instinctive response.

Now there’s something else that happens when your emotions take over. As soon as your emotions take over they shut down communication to your prefrontal cortex. You stop thinking and just start reacting. The antelope doesn’t sit there thinking if it should run away from the lion, it just reacts. Once the emotions take over you’re running, fighting, or freezing. That’s it. The time for thinking through the problem has already passed. 

This is what’s happening with the kids in your class when they’re escalating. Their emotions take over and they go into instinctive reaction mode. They are no longer thinking. Saying things to them like “you need to think about what you’re doing” or “we need to have a conversation about this” is futile. All of those kinds of things are all prefrontal cortex mechanisms or thinking modes. They can’t do that once they’re in fight, flight, or freeze mode. They can not think because that communication line is shut down.

So if you have got a child that’s in the emotional part of their brain and they’re reacting, not thinking. Trying to get them to think and to talk is useless, it’s a waste of time. They will react more the longer that you talk. The first thing you need to do is get them to calm down long enough so that it reopens this communication line.

Stay Calm

They will only reopen the thinking part of their brain once they are calm. So the primary thing you need to do in those situations is to stay calm. If you start to escalate, get angry, or start to react to their behaviour what happens is you’re going to do the same thing they do. You’re going to go into your emotional brain and start reacting with a fight, flight or freeze response. You’ll stop thinking and then instead of just having a student that’s reacting we’ve got a teacher that’s reacting as well. 

We don’t need that, we don’t need a situation where both student and teacher are reacting together. What we need is a teacher that remains calm and can calm the student down. If you stay calm and keep a lid on things what will happen is your student will start to de-escalate. They will start to calm down, they will start to think. Once they’re thinking you can talk to them, you can get them to say sorry, you can get them to give an account of what happened. It doesn’t happen in the moment, it happens after they are calm.

Matching – Brain to Emotions 

Why is this so important to remember to stay calm even if you feel yourself reacting? To help you fit in with the people around you, your brain has a mechanism that causes you to instinctively match your emotions with the people that you are with.

Have you ever been with someone that’s in a really good mood? When they’re in a really good mood you walk away feeling good about yourself. Your brain matches their emotion and can put you in a good mood too. Have you ever been with somebody that’s always miserable, negative and always complains? You walk away from a conversation with them feeling miserable and complaining because your brain is matching their emotion.

This happens when the kids are escalating as well. Your brain will naturally want to match the emotion of the child. You will naturally have a tendency to start reacting yourself. You will naturally have a tendency to feel threatened and scared, you’ll want to fight or run away. So it’s really important that you take over your emotions with some prefrontal cortex thinking and manage that. 

It’s also so important you know how to calm yourself down in these situations. If you are naturally an emotionally reactive person this is going to be more difficult for you but it’s not impossible. Step back from the escalating situation, breathe slowly and calmly to keep yourself calm. Talk in an even tone so that you’re keeping the child calm and keeping yourself under control. When you talk in an even measured tone it helps you to calm down. When you are calm the child is more likely to stay calm. Keep calm no matter what.  No matter what’s going on, whether they’re throwing a chair at you, flipping a desk, swearing or disobeying you, You cannot afford to escalate. You need to stay calm.

Now here’s the thing, I will say this, the only time you need to perhaps react in a manner that is very escalated is if somebody is in harm’s way or you are in harm’s way and you need to make a split decision to ensure the safety of yourself or others. If property is getting damaged you don’t need to escalate. Don’t worry your school has insurance and you’ll work it out if a desk gets flipped over as long as no child is being hurt. We can pick the desk up afterward. If they’re breaking stuff in the room or swearing at you, you need to learn not to react to that. 

I always say I don’t get upset by kids who swear at me. I’m not going to lose sleep over a 13 year old that calls me an f-wit. I don’t care what 13-year-olds think of me and you need to be like that as well. You need to make sure that you keep your emotions under control so that you don’t start escalating. keep calm no matter what.

When you stay calm you’re in your thinking brain, you can make good decisions for both you and the student. When you keep calm it calms a child down and it helps them to de-escalate. It helps to put them back in their thinking brain, then you can have an actual conversation with them. Then you can actually say “hey tell me about what went on”. You can have a calm measured conversation when everybody is calm and that starts with you! 

Thanks so much for taking the time to read this Blog. I hope you got a ton of value out of that. Don’t forget to comment and let us know what you thought or if you have specific topics you’d like us to cover let us know in the comments.

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