Inclusive Behavior Management Tip 4:

Teach Self-Regulation

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Teach Students What You Want Them to Do

Ever gone to work after having had a bad fight at home, hit traffic on the way to work, spilled your coffee, and then a student starts going off and you felt like you were going to explode?

No one has perfect self-regulation all the time. Everyone has triggers, responses they wish they can take back, and coping strategies that help them, sometimes, keep from giving those responses.

Folks who specialize in Autism have spent a lot of time thinking about how you teach self-regulation and finding concrete ways to help students build their skills. The programs below were mostly developed for students with Autism (minus the mindfulness), but they work for all students (and teachers too!) as a way to make something very big and abstract concrete and actionable for students.

Most of these were designed to be used 1:1 with a student, but they adapt well to whole class lessons as well.

Programs That Help Teach Self-Regulation

Zones of Regulation

Zones of regulation is a pretty basic idea. Students learn to label whether their emotions are in the blue (sad/down), green (happy/calm), yellow (worried/excited), or red (panicked/angry/over excited) zone. Then they learn strategies to help them regulate their emotions to get back to their desired zone. Zones of regulation is very happy to take your money– but almost all occupational therapists have this! If you think a student needs zones of regulation, ask your OT and it is likely that they will be able to get you materials and train you on it for free!

The Incredible 5 Point Scale

The Incredible 5 Point Scale does pretty much the same thing with numbers but it is also super flexible. Like, you can make a five point scale for stress from things that don’t stress the student at all to things that make them explode or focus on identifying emotions and strategies. Even better, the company has a ton of free materials online! This base scale is super easy to use with students and really helpful as a tool to refer back to.

Social Thinking is a completely fabulous program that many speech and language pathologists own and can help train you on. One of the core concepts, one that is SUPER useful for behavior management, is expected and unexpected behaviors. Rather than talking about good and bad behaviors, you talk about expected and unexpected and teach students to identify the two and to learn to label their own behaviors as expected and unexpected. There are a lot of resources out there that folks have made related to this– but SLPs should have the real original material and can, hopefully, share.

Finally, there are social stories. Carol Gray is one of the big people in social stories and her website has some good resources. Basically, social stories are a script that allows students to rehearse situations before they happen. Social stories can be about friendships, lining up, challenging emotions, or really anything. While they are thought of for Autism, we all benefit from the opportunity to rehearse hard things before we have to do them for real– and that’s what a good social story does for you (and for students!)

Mindfulness

So I am kind of obsessed with mindfulness for students. Everyone needs a pause button, a space between stimulus and response. Mindfulness can give that to students. In fact, I’m so obsessed that I wrote a whole blog post on it.

If you are looking for quick and easy things to try with students check out:

Square breathing: Also known as box breathing it is easy to teach and for students to use.
4-7-8 breathing: Just as easy to teach and use, 4-7-8 breathing has a ton of research behind it.
Finger breathing: An easy way to get littles focused on their breathing.
Mindfulness videos: The ones on mindfulness for teens are pretty good.