Module 8 – Behaviours: Reasons and Restorative Practices
Estimated Time: 20 minutes
Student Aims:
· To be able to define the term ‘restorative practice’ and understand its implications
· To have the ability to identify the different factors that can affect a student’s emotional behaviours
· To understand the consequences of bad behaviour and be able to identify its underlying elements
· To recognise the recommended methods for teaching social skills, and how they can be applied in the classroom
· To be able to hypothetically apply restorative practice in both emotional and social behaviour situations
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8.1 Introduction
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Pupils with SEN can often have behavioural issues, ranging from anger to excitement, that can manifest as a verbal or physical expression.
These issues can be either emotionally or socially oriented and will most likely require a particular way of handling protocol. As we have discussed, behaviours will vary and will depend upon the special needs of the pupil.
In this module, the reasons for some of these behaviours will be discussed, as well as the recommended approach to attempt to resolve difficult situations.
What Is Restorative Practice?
The term ‘restorative practice’ is named quite literally in that it is a practice that aims to restore – in the case of the education system – peaceful interactions between people.
Essentially, restorative practice is a method used by teachers and administrative staff that encourages adults and children alike to assume responsibility for their actions. Applying conflict resolution as early as possible is the focus of this approach, and it encourages people to be responsible for discovering solutions to their problems without blame.
Restorative practice helps individuals involved understand: a) how the conflict situation arose, b) what their role was, and c) how they can both resolve the current situation whilst avoiding its recurrence in the future.
8.2 Understanding Emotional Behaviours
Emotional behaviours essentially reflect how a pupil feels.
When a pupil experiences something they like, they are happy; when they experience something they do not like, they are often angry or sad.
It is important to be aware that special educational needs students can often struggle to manage their emotional behaviours. Several factors influence these behaviours, and you should understand them in order to teach and help the student manage their emotions.
The Influential Factors of Emotion
A student’s emotional behaviours can be highly influenced by many things that teachers and support staff can appease or control.
These behaviours will vary based on a number of factors: the student’s awareness and level of self-control, his/her special needs, and his/her general environment. Some pupils with learning difficulties may exhibit extremely good control of their emotions, while many pupils in the same circumstances may not.
It all comes down to how able a student is to sense and comprehend not just how they are feeling, but how they can harness and control what they are feeling. Some students may not have the capacity to look deeply into why they feel the things that they do when certain situations arise, and that is something that should be considered and accommodated.
Other students may need to be taught the method of self-evaluation and reflection, which can be a challenging process. An individual student’s special needs and his/her experiences or background are important factors in a student’s overall control of emotions. Depending on the profile of the individual student, the level of emotional control will vary from very good to challenging and erratic.
Often, this comes down to how well the student can communicate and participate. When a student is not being understood, that can generate a great deal of frustration. The same applies to situations when students cannot participate with their peers. The resulting emotions will often be anger at feelings of exclusion. Students who have a degree of self-awareness and reflection will be able to rationalise these feelings, but many SEN students will not have the higher-order thinking skills required to reach this realisation.
The general learning environment may be the most influential factor that impacts students with learning difficulties and their emotions and behaviours. The environment in which the student is immersed may contain many negative triggers.
For example, some students that are surrounded by a lot of noise cannot concentrate, which can make them frustrated. Other students feel anxious when they are alone and surrounded by quiet.
A special educational needs environment should be created with the student’s needs in mind, to prevent negative triggers and facilitate positive ones.
Closely monitoring a student’s response to particular situations can help you to discover what adjustments can be made within the student’s learning environment, to help prevent further negative emotional outbursts.
8.3 Understanding Social Behaviours
Social behaviours are behaviours that the student exhibits during social interactions.
Some examples are the ability to participate in a conversation, to cooperate, to communicate effectively, and to occupy a peaceful space with other people.
Social behaviour is an important component of everyday life because, as humans, we often depend and rely on some form of human contact on a daily basis: this necessity leads to a healthier and better quality of life. However, some SEN students may not have the self-reflection to appreciate and manage social interaction. Not all SEN students will exhibit challenging behaviour, but some students may struggle due to difficulties with communication.
Difficulties with Communication and Interaction
Many students with learning difficulties will have only positive social behaviours, but some may exhibit challenging social behaviour. However, the same is true of students who are ‘neurotypical’ – i.e. mainstream in their cognition and needs.
It is possible to easily identify a student who may be in need of some social interaction guidance.
Examples include a student who cannot join in a conversation with one of his or her peers, or a student who needs to be taught how to take turns when speaking or playing a game.
Some students will find it extremely difficult to cooperate with a peer when an interaction is engaged. Many autistic students will fall into this category, not because they are badly behaved but because they do not comprehend these socially implicit rules and may need to be taught explicit ways of interacting with others.
Finally, an extreme example of challenging behaviour is seen when a student becomes physical in their interactions with others. Social and communication conventions may need to be explicitly taught and positively reinforced on a regular basis.
It is desirable to help students know how they should behave, not how they have failed to behave. All good teaching is positive. If a student has failed to behave correctly, it is preferable that he/she is reminded of the rules, and they can then judge their recent behaviour against them.
Difficulties with Communication and Interaction
There are several consequences to a student who demonstrates bad social behaviours, especially on a recurring basis – these include exclusion, lack of relationships, and loneliness.
Exclusion is one of the most common and often detrimental consequences of challenging social behaviours. The school environment is a very social place. If a person cannot identify social cues or doesn’t feel comfortable participating in large groups, then often that student is excluded. Exclusion occurs when a group of people does not allow a person to participate in their group.
For instance, if there is a group game being held during the break, which most of the students are engaged in but they do not invite or welcome a particular student, or blatantly ask him or her to leave and not participate, that is exclusion.
The most detrimental exclusion is the kind that results in a group being unwelcoming – this is a result of a group of people who are judgemental and unwilling to accommodate the needs of someone who is different to them.
A lack of relationships is often a result of exclusion. A student that is not able to engage socially does not have many people that he or she can socialise with. A relationship is cultivated mostly from communication, and when the student cannot manage that task intuitively, then relationships are very hard to create.
Relationships are important because they help an individual to identify their personal community – a group of people that he or she feels particularly connected to. They are a group of people that a person can share important elements of his or her life with, like emotions and the general feeling of safety. Relationships are an integral element in a good quality of life, and without them, the individual may experience more severe negative consequences and emotions.
Loneliness is another consequence of bad social behaviours. Loneliness is the result of an absence of the benefits of relationships. It is the sensation and perception that someone acquires when they do not feel a sense of belonging to a group of people or feel comfortable and safe.
Loneliness can manifest in a few negative avenues. For instance, it can often lead to further aggression and anger from the student, because he or she only knows the absence of connection and has anger toward that absence. Loneliness is a terrible thing. However, these consequences have the ability to be remedied through the steps that will be discussed in the next section of this module.
8.4 Teaching Social Skills
Social skills instruction should be structured and generalised to all students but also individualised – when possible – to ensure the best learning success.
There are three main methods of teaching social skills.
The first is to teach the skills in the environment in which they are most likely to occur or be used. For example, teach in your classroom the behaviour you expect to see in that environment.
The second is to teach the skills that are most appraised by the student’s community – in other words, what his or her parents, teachers and friends identify as appropriate behaviour.
Finally, you want to teach the skills through different mediums, like text and games or books, and apply them to a variety of different situations and settings.
Social skills are skills that are used in so many aspects of a student’s life, so you have to think of almost every moment as a time to teach. You should take advantage of this by teaching social skills over the course of the school day in various ways.
The following are some ways to introduce social skills:
· Reading and talking about children’s videos and literature – many stories for children are focused on social skills topics, such as making new friends or taking responsibility for one’s actions
· Incidental teaching – seizing the moment of interaction between you and a student for social skills practice
· Use of social stories – the use of social stories can be a good way of teaching these skills to some students because this method can give the students a script for various situations and how to act appropriately
In order to teach social skills effectively, you have to enforce – or rather, encourage – the lessons consistently, on a daily basis. Seize every opportunity to allow students to practise positive and appropriate social skills, and to reflect on how and why some behaviours are appropriate and some behaviours are not. Repetition is what will drive the message home, and will have the most long-lasting impact on students’ lives.
Fact
Special educational needs (SEN) teaching assistants support teachers to help children with special educational needs and disabilities.
Source: nationalcareers.service.gov.uk
8.5 Incorporating Restorative Practice in the Classroom
Restorative practice can be applied to both emotional behavioural problems and social behavioural problems.
As discussed earlier, restorative practice is the method of conflict resolution that encourages a person to take responsibility for their action without blame and help decide a resolution. This can be a challenging task in a mainstream classroom and when working with students with SEN.
The principles of restorative practice can be understood except in cases where students have severe learning difficulties and may lack the ability to focus and interact, often because speech is limited. So, mindfully applying elements of restorative practice whilst expressing these in an explicit, accessible and structured way is the key to facilitating self-reflection and learning.
Emotional Behaviour Application
Restorative practice can be applied to emotional behavioural problems. Most often, the method will be applied to a situation that has resulted from an emotional disturbance.
For example
A student who has a sudden outbreak of anger could have expressed it by damaging a physical object, or by getting into an unjust argument with a peer. In either case, the first step is to address the manifested issue: have the student acknowledge what happened and why it happened.
If another student is involved, have the two come to a resolution. Then, the next step with the student who had the emotional outbreak is to have them investigate why they felt what they did, and why they acted as they did as a result.
This type of contemplation will help them create an inquiry process each time they feel something strongly. A common way of anticipating challenging behaviour is to give a student a behaviour chart that they point to, describing how they are feeling on a scale of 1-10. This will alert staff that a conversation needs to be had before emotions negatively escalate.
Again, it is important to note that students with severe learning difficulties may have specific procedures applied to them. The methodology you would follow is that which the student’s SEN team, the SENCO, and the student’s psychologist should determine.
Social Behaviour Application
Applying restorative practice is more intuitive for situations surrounding social behaviours. In these settings, there are at least two parties that can create the scenario of the situation, help one another understand it, and then resolve it through collaboration.
Generally, there are three reasons to apply restorative practice to social behavioural situations.
First, you, as the educator, can identify the situation. If you notice anti-social behaviour from a student (whether they are neurotypical or have SEN), then you know that restorative practice is the method to the solution.
For example
If a student is using inappropriate language or is crossing a physical barrier (e.g. touching when it’s not wanted by the other party), then you can apply the method.
Conflict between two students is another sign that restorative practice is needed for resolution assistance: if two students are fighting verbally or physically, it is time for intervention.
The second reason that restorative practice is easier to apply to social behaviour situations is that the narrative of the situation is easier for the students involved to understand. All parties experienced the situation in which you intervened and asking them to recall it will allow them to dissect the experience and piece together why the situation was not good. It allows them to deeply explore and realise why the behaviour of either of the parties was not appropriate.
Finally, restorative practice in situations evolving from social behaviours allows the parties to resolve the situation together. It is an opportunity for each party to work with the other, and learn from and help the other, in order to reach a mutually acceptable resolution.
The purpose of restorative practice is to assist individuals in realising which behaviours are appropriate, and which ones are not, and generally understand why certain behaviours lead to certain outcomes.
Conclusion
Understanding emotional and social behaviours is essential in all education environments and for all students. In the case of students with learning difficulties, however, they may need explicit guidance and intervention strategies in order to fully comprehend and reflect on their behaviour and the behaviour of others.
Students might need to discuss motives, actions and consequences arising in specific situations. They may not immediately understand the reasons behind challenging behaviour or the specific needs of the other students involved. It is essential to make implicit rules of conduct explicit, and if these break down, restorative practice will help improve understanding and communication.
In this module, you were introduced to the reasons behind certain behaviours and how they could be changed for the better. You now understand that positive language and instructions are imperative as opposed to telling students what they did wrong. You can help them understand what went wrong and how this can be addressed in the future.
You learnt what emotional behaviours and social behaviours are and how to identify the different factors that can affect these behaviours. You also know the recommended methods for teaching social skills, and how they can be applied in the classroom.
Finally, you learnt how to apply restorative practice in behavioural situations in the school.
In Module 9, we discuss how to support students with sensory impairments and physical disabilities.
WELL DONE!
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