The next topic in our early childhood course is guiding children's behavior. Another term you might hear when talking about this is people might also consider this classroom management skills. Again, I like to start out with a quote or end with a quote. "Most challenging behaviors serve the same purpose as other forms of communication, such as speech, non-verbal gestures, and facial expressions." I think this is an important quote, because most children's behaviors in a classroom are a type of communication. What we need to do as adults, as teachers in the room is tried to figure out what the children are trying to communicate with this behavior. What is guidance? Guidance is helping children to demonstrate positive and appropriate behaviors in order to function in social and educational environments. Guidance is not punishment. Punishment is a form of discipline that doesn't reflect upon a person's actions. In guidance, we want to reflect upon the child's actions to better help them to understand how to deal appropriately with those in the future. I'm going to talk about some different strategies for guidance. I'm going to talk about positive discipline, redirection, rules and responsibilities, consistency, having a well-organized classroom and to create a positive environment. Positive discipline, what is it? Positive discipline is using positive language when we are talking about a behavior to a child. We want to explain to the child what is acceptable in that situation. Instead of saying to a child, don't hit, we want to say, well, how about instead of hitting we discussed this and we talk it through so that we can tell them what we expect and do it in a positive way. Ways we can do this are its show-and-tell. If a child is exhibiting a behavior that is not acceptable to you in your classroom, then we want to tell them what the behavior is that we expect from them, but also show them. A lot of people you might see with gentle touches. If a child is hitting or pushing another child, we might go over and say, we use gentle touches in our classroom. But while we're saying this, we might pet the child on the shoulder to show them what we mean by a gentle touch. Another way to talk about positive discipline is making sure that we're setting limits. The children know what those limits are. If they know what is expected of them and what their limits are, they're more likely to follow them because they understand what we expect from them. Explain the consequences. If a child is doing something in the black area, if they're throwing blocks and you have gone over and you are talking to them about throwing blocks. What can happen if you throw blocks? Your friends might get hurt. We might break a toy, whatever it is that you want to say to them. But you also want to say, this is what is happening now you are throwing the blocks. It's not acceptable. This is why it's not acceptable and give them the consequences. If this behavior continues, you will have to leave the black area and go play someplace else so they know if they throw block again, what's going to happen? Catch children being good. Children, strive for attention and if the negative tension is the only tension that they're going to get, they're going to keep doing those behaviors that you find unacceptable. If you see a child acting in an acceptable way doing something nice for another child, following your rules and expectations say something, catch them in a positive behavior. That way, they don't associate that attention with always negative behavior. Know when not to respond. That's a hard one for some adults. If a child is not causing harm to another child, maybe causing harm to the materials in your classroom and they're doing something small that really doesn't affect anyone else, maybe it's a good idea to pretend you don't see them. You can't do this in all behaviors that has to be just the small ones that are going to affect other people in a negative way. But sometimes, like I said, if a child is used to getting attention for inappropriate behavior that might be what they are doing this for. If you're not giving them that attention, the behavior might go away. Positive discipline reinforces good behavior because that's the way you're wording things, you're talking about what's expected and what is appropriate. Most of the time it will eliminate unwanted behaviors if you follow through on all of these suggestions and ideas. Redirection, another form of discipline. Redirection is really redirecting a child's behavior, or thinking and attention from one activity to another. If they are throwing a ball or throwing a block in the block area, and you might go over to them and say, "Well, I see that you're throwing blocks. That's probably not a good idea in our classroom for these reasons. But why don't we go over here to our large motor area where we have balls or bin bags that we can throw and we can try and hit the target." Have these spaces available for children to do the behavior that you think is appropriate in this situation. Redirection addresses behavior before it accelerates to a point where a child might be out of control and not able to calm down. You have to really pay attention and catch that child before they start accelerating. Use a calm tone of voice and clear wording. When you go over to redirect a child, make sure they understand what you're saying. You're very calm, you're quiet, you're not yelling at the child. You're using a pretty much not a monotone, but you're not showing any excitement I guess, in your voice. That's really important because we want the child to calm down. We want them to understand that we are not anxious and we're not frustrated, so we can help them to calm themselves down. Redirection can be done with a verbal, physical, or sometimes a cue or sometimes with just proximity. Verbal is when you actually talk to the child and tell them what you're going to do instead of the inappropriate activity. Physical might be where you place your hand on the child's back and you guide them to another area while you're talking to them with a cue. If it is a child that you often have to redirect them, I know just by maybe the look on your face or a hand motion that you need them to do something else at the moment or proximity. It's often a good idea if you see a child starting to exhibit some behaviors that you go near to them so that they understand that you're close to them and you are keeping an eye to make sure that they are doing what's appropriate and following your expectations. Rules and responsibilities. Every classroom should have rules or responsibilities, expectations, however, you want to word it. You should have these on a poster that is displayed on your wall at the children's level. It describes the expectations for behavior. It's what you want them to be doing in your classroom. Like the positive discipline, the rules or responsibilities are written in positive terms. It's because you're saying what you're expecting them to do. You might see some rule charts that say, walking feet, gentle touches, inside voices. Those kind of ideas. You're not writing. Don't run, you're not writing, don't yell. You're writing it in the positive terms so children understand what they can do that is acceptable. On your rule chart, your responsibility chart, usually four simple rules is a good idea, maybe five if you have one that you really need to include. But most of the time you are going to see around four on a rule chart. Like I said, it should be posted in your classroom down at the children's level. It should include both pictures and words. The picture should describe what the words are saying. You want to make sure that your words are specific and concise. If we are using walking feet, those are really simple, very to the point, and children understand what they mean especially if you're talking about these often. You don't want to be too wordy and write, "When in the classroom, we need to walk from one area to the other so that we don't trip and fall." Whatever it is. You want to make sure that you're specific and concise in your rules. This poster is just not something pretty that you put on the wall. You talk about this every day. You might talk about it in your circle time to remind children of what the rules are. Every day you are also referring to it if a child is showing inappropriate behavior. If they are pushing another child, you talk to them first, you talk to the other child and then you might go over and refer to the rule chart and ask them, say, do you see one of these rules that you were not following just now and they're going to be able to tell you that it is the gentle touches it. That is what rule that you have on there. Then you want to talk about it a little bit more. Consistency is so important for young children. They need routine. They like to know what's going to happen and they like to understand the next steps. So consistency helps develop security for children and trust. If they can understand what's happening next, they can feel secure in their environment. They are better able to explore and go around and make friends and be curious and do many, many different activities. You just want to make sure that the children have a clear understanding of your expectations and your routines in the classroom. The expectations are three rule chart, the routines, you are also going to have some kind of picture schedule somewhere where children can refer to it and have the times on there because children can't tell time in preschool, but you want to have the order on there so children can look at the words and the pictures and they can see the picture of free play, and they know after free play comes lunch. They can see what's happening next, not necessarily when it's happening in a timely manner. Consistency helps teachers as well as the children. It makes us feel more organized, and if we feel organized, we feel less stress. Children can feel more relaxed and comfortable. They know that they can trust us, they know they trust what's going to happen in the classroom, they know that if they exhibit a behavior, they know what's going to happen in that case. Building trusting relationships is one of the most important things for us in early childhood. If we can be consistent in our classroom, it's definitely a great first step for building these relationships. A well-organized classroom is really important and some people don't really think about this in a behavior management kind of way. But think about your classroom, if your classroom is cluttered and things all over the floor and the toys are broken, and children don't know where to put toys when it's time to clean up, how are they feeling? They're feeling anxious, they're feeling confused, they don't know what to play with, they don't know where to go, what to interact with. This really sends a message to everyone entering our classroom that we feel that the classroom's important, the children are important, and we really want to do the best for them and make the best environment. A well-organized classroom fosters independence. Independence is something we're trying to teach young children and feelings of competence. If we have our art center in interest areas separate from the other areas, and everything in our art center is labeled. We have a label on the shelf that has a picture of markers and the word marker. Then we have a bin that has the markers in there and in that bin, there's a picture the same one that's on the shelf that shows a picture of markers and it has the word markers. Children know when they are at the table and they're using the markers, they know which bin they go in, and then after the bin is cleaned all up, they know where they go on the shelf. They don't have to wonder, they don't have to be confused, they don't have to ask you for help in any cleanup. Predictability is so important, consistency routines, children like to know what's happening. They like to know where things are going, what their classroom looks like, what their interest area is, what areas are in the classroom. It's really important for us to have that predictability for children. Yes, it's okay to change out your toys once in awhile, but you should not change everything in your classroom on a Friday afternoon. So on Monday when the children come in, everything is different for them because that can cause a lot of issues for children because they're coming in and it's not predictable, it's not routine for them and they're confused and they're anxious. If you do change out your toys, just change one of your interest areas on a Friday and then the next Friday you can change a different one so that when children come in, there are still some familiar objects for them. Social interactions, if you have your area separated into different interests areas then children can feel comfortable going from area to area based on their interests, and they really can get involved in their play and in interactions and relationships with other children. In a positive environment is really important for classroom management. If you do not have a positive environment that welcomes people in there and makes people coming in feel comfortable, it's going to cause some confusion and anxiety just as in the well-organized environment. We want to make sure our classroom is clean and well-maintained and consistent and predictable. We also need to have a little bit of variety in our schedules and activities. By that, I do not mean our daily schedule that should remain the same, but we want to have different activities in the classroom. For our creative art activity, it doesn't always have to be the same one every day. We can change that up. We can change the interests areas, like I said, not the whole classroom, but change some of the activities so that children can find some new things to do when they come in. By changing the schedule, it's not necessarily changing schedule, but we want to offer variety in our schedule. Young children, we should not expect them to sit for three hours at a time. In our daily schedule, we need to make sure that we have large motor activities pushed in and in-between a lot of those sitting activities. We don't want to have a circle time and then a lunch, and then another circle time and then a nap. That's a lot of time for children to be sitting. In those circle times we want to make sure that we're offering large motor, maybe have an outdoor time before lunch or after lunch. We have a variety and set it in activities where we're not moving a lot and activities where there's a lot of large motor. We want to relationships again, I can't emphasize enough the importance of relationships with the children and the families of the children that you care for. We want to encourage holistic development of children, and by that, we want to think about the whole child. We want to make sure that we are offering activities and materials for the development of their social, emotional, their cognitive, their physical, including large and small motor skills and their language development. We definitely need to teach and model self-regulation skills. If children really cannot control their strong emotions in an inappropriate way, our classroom management is definitely going to be a little bit harder. We want to make sure that the activities and the materials that we provide for children are really engaging to them. We want to think about what their interests are and supply materials and activities based upon interests of the children in the classroom. This increases their attention and focus. If you supply in a hands on activity that they can really become involved in because they're very interested, some children will sit for long periods of time and really engage in those materials. Well, and if they're engaged in those materials, it's going to provide for really meaningful learning experiences for the children, and it's going to motivate them to make mistakes and do some creative thinking and do some critical thinking. It's going to motivate them to go a little bit more beyond their comfort level if they're really involved and really engaged. Self-regulation, mentioned a little bit in the last slide, is the ability to understand and control strong emotions. Children are not born with self-regulation. They do not often understand these emotions that they're feeling and why they're feeling them, and what might be an inappropriate way to express these emotions. We need to help them with that. The best ways to help them with that are modeling, and getting them to talk about their feelings and showing them that it's okay to have those feelings. But what matters is how they express them. We want to be able to have children have the ability to delay gratification. We're in an age where everything is immediate. We get on the Internet and we immediately get the answers to the question that we have, we text somebody and they immediately respond back to us. That's not often the case all the time. If we get used to that and we expect that all the time when we don't get that immediate gratification, it can cause some problems, so we want to make sure that sometimes children have to wait a little bit for something. I don't mean when you have an art activity and they have to sit for ten minutes while you're getting it ready.That's not okay.But if I am speaking to somebody and a child comes over and they're not hurt and they're not crying,they just have a question for me, I can say to them just a second I'm talking to this person right now and you can ask me that question as soon as I'm done. They can wait those few minutes to ask you that question and it's a good skill to have. We want to teach children to regulate their behaviors and be able to show them in appropriate ways. Encouraging physical activity is a great outlet for some emotions and feelings that children have. Make sure that besides your outdoor time, you have indoor time also that encourages some kind of large motor or physical activity. Role modeling is a great way to show children self-regulation. We can talk about how we feel. We can talk about how we feel and how we go about handling those feelings and how we express those feelings. It's okay for people to be angry and children should be okay and not feel bad about getting angry. But if you're angry and you hit the person next to you, then that's not okay. But if you're angry and you go to the cozy corner and you manipulate the toys over there and you sit over there for a few minutes until that you're feeling better, that's a better way to express that emotion. Getting strategies for the children if they are feeling strong emotions is very important. A lot of times you will hear taking deep breaths, or they might call them belly breaths. I've seen them done in a few different ways. Standing up where you put your hands over your head and take a deep breath and let it out. I've seen in centers where children lay down and they might have a stuffed animal or something on their chest, and they are encouraged to take a deep breath and watch that stuffed animal rising on their chest and then coming down. There are different ways that you can do that. Sorry, and they're called [inaudible] Counting is another strategy that you can teach children. If you're feeling a strong emotion, go over to a certain area in the classroom and count slowly to 10. As you're doing that, think about how your body's feeling and what is happening. Walk away. It's important for us as adults if things are happening that we have to know when we need to walk away before that we do something that we are going to feel bad about after. It's a good idea to teach children that at a young age. The cozy cube. Lots of different plate or words that you might use for that, cozy cube, cozy corner, relaxation area, whatever it is. But it's an area where you're having some soft toys, some soft pillows, maybe some fidget toys, some books on emotion, some posters, some cards that show different facial expressions so that children can go over there and they can whatever it is that they need to use to calm themselves down and figure out how to rejoin the group at their own time and in their own way. Culture, you need to think about culture when we're thinking about anything in our classroom, including guidance. Because families at home have different traditions, different religious beliefs, different parenting styles, anything that they might be doing differently at home we need to have a discussion with the families and talk about what our policies are, and what our ideas and strategies are in school or in your home, in your home classroom, and what the parents ideas are and how we can work together to figure those out. Make sure that you are understanding, if you have families with all these differences, and what their beliefs and their understandings are. Different steps for guiding behavior. We have spoken about a few of these, but we need to make sure that we're guiding the problem-solving. By guiding, I mean helping children to figure out how to do it themselves so in the future, they can figure it out. That doesn't mean figuring it out for them. That doesn't mean stepping in and solving the issue for the children. It's walking them through it, discussing, maybe a compromise, whatever it is, but trying to have children figure it out themselves with your guidance. Asking questions that allow children to form their own solutions. If you go over and there's conflict going on, you want to hear both sides of the story. You want to talk to one of the children and say, "Well, what do you think we should do?" You want to ask the other child, what do you think we should do? What do you think the best solution for this will be? You want to go back and forth with the children until they can decide what the best solution is. We need to model, again appropriate skills and behaviors. Children are always looking at what we're doing and they're watching us all of the time. We'll need to use and teach listening skills. It's so important for us to model those listening skills so that children are also understanding that other people have things to say and it's important to listen. We need to differentiate our guidance. If you have children in your classroom who maybe have some special needs and disabilities, they might have a little bit different expectations or rules that are typical in developing children. We need to understand how we can figure those out. Again, consider the whole child. We need to think about their social, emotional, their physical, their language, and their cognitive development in all of our activities and all of our strategies that we do with children. Knowing to use developmentally appropriate practice. Think about the age of the child. Think about their developmental level. Are they really going to understand what we're saying to them? If we think maybe not, we have to have a different way to approach it and to help them understand. We always need to think about Maslow. It's something far from the past, if you ever took a psychology class or something in the past, probably something you haven't thought about in a while. If children do not have or people don't have their physical needs met, physical needs meaning food, shelter, bathroom, roof over your head. Those physical needs in order to survive, then how are we going to be able to control our emotions? How are we going to be able to collaborate in a group? If we don't have safety and security needs met, we don't feel secure and safe in our environment, how can we be able to express our feelings in a positive way? We need to think about all of Maslow's, this hierarchy and make sure that we are supplying children with what they need. I don't want to say in the order, but we need to make sure that their physical needs are met, their safety and security and their belonging and affection before we get to those other parts that we need to work on. Affirm appropriate behavior. Again, catch those children being good. Talk about any kind of behaviors that you see that are appropriate and that you're expecting in your classroom. Empower children. Give them the opportunity to make choices for themselves and just make sure that the choices are okay with you. Don't ask a child, do you want to go outside today if that is not a realistic choice and all of the children have to go outside. In another way, you could say, would you like to hold my hand or would you like to hold Sally's hand while we're walking outside? You're still giving them a choice, but you are still taking them outside because that is not a choice for the child. Establish your expectations. That rule chart and children knowing what you expect of them is so important for their behaviors. Arrange and modify the classroom environment. You need to make sure that if there are a lot of conflicts, say in the black area, does that mean your black areas is too small? Does that mean you have too many materials in there, not enough materials in there? Are you allowing too many children to go in there at the same time? Think about your environment if you're having conflicts in certain areas and what you can do to change that, to help with those conflicts. Develop a partnership with families. Make sure that you're talking to the families about what is happening with the children that you are caring for, especially their children? Well, that's what you should be talking about, their children. If you're having issues, if you have questions, go to the families and say, this is what's happening here. Do you see this at home? If you do see it, what do you do? How do you handle it? You're making that partnership with them and you're showing them that they are the parents, they are their child's first teacher and what they say and do at home is important to you. Use and teach conflict management. We've talked about modeling quite a bit, modeling the resolutions. Don't solve the problems for the children, but model how to do it. Talk about doing something else. If it's something simple and a child can walk away, which we talked about before, and go do something else, sometimes that does solve a problem. Talking it over. Make sure that you're allowing all people or children in the conflict say their piece. Taking turns. That's a hard concept for children and some adults. Because taking turns and sharing do not necessarily always mean you have a toy that I want, you have to give it to me because I want it, now that's not fair to the other child. Figure out what that means to you. Does it mean I can go over to the child and say, can I use this? Do they have the right to say yes or no? If they say no, teach maybe that they could say, when I'm done with it, I will give it to you, so that the other child is still going to get a chance to play with the toys, but the one that has it already can finish what they're doing. Making sure that you're teaching children different skills. That is it for classroom management. Thank you very much.
