Interventions for

Before you start, a few important points:

Interventions:

Reading Your Body Signals

• • • Help students recognize physical signs the human bods sends during emotions

      • • breathing rate, muscles tighten, face turns red, eyes narrow, heart beats fast, sweat, stomach gets upset, voice gets higher/louder, clench my fists, etc.

Reframing

• • • Helping students change their expectations or perspectives in order to make sense of a situation and get emotional relief

    • Teach students that we often create stories in our heads based upon prior experiences.  We need to reframe the way we think and act by adding new information or a different perspective to our thinking

Behavior Prompts

• • • Visual representation of the replacement or appropriate behavior

    • Tape to desk as continual reminder

    • Redirect student with minimal attention (pointing, holding up, etc.)

    • Peer models can be taught to provide visual cues too

    • Digital photos of the actual student engaging in examples & nonexamples work best!

    • Student can illustrate their own visual behavior prompts so they’re meaningful

    • Examples provided:

      • • How to follow directions

        • How to treat others nicely

        • Sitting properly

        • Not Sitting properly

        • Calm down

Teach Waiting to Be Called On

• • • Teach your expectation for waiting to be called on (raise hand, green light signal, etc.)

    • Ignore shout outs

    • Track and share the number of times he raises his hand

    • Read social stories about hand raising

    • Provide visual prompts on desk

    • Let students develop his/her own reminder

      • • Example:  Sign that says on one side “I have a question” and on the other side “I want to share something”.  Teach him/her to raise the appropriate sign to learn the difference and become aware of own behavior

Self-Monitoring

• • • Charting for patterns

      • • Look for patterns of good results and patterns that cause errors

        • Use video recording of performances to observe and chart patterns

        • Chart actions at intervals to analyze and improve choices

• • • • • Journaling to Develop an Internal Coach

        • Teach students to reflect on their emotions and activities and learn from them.

        • They could journal about:

          • • Was I productive today?  If not, what am I saying to myself when I go off task?  Am I giving up?

            • Did what I was reading or hearing make sense to me?  Did I need to ask a question?

            • Am I confident that I can be successful?

            • How did I handle things that distract or upset me?  Should I have reframed a situation to reduce my stress?

        • Requires lots of guided practice in self-monitoring

    • Practice Collaboration Skills

      • • Reading Nonverbals

          • • facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, posture, tone of voice, etc.

        • Active Listening

          • • listening with empathy

            • paraphrase and listen reflectively

Establishing Routines and Accountability

• • • Teach students the desired behavior and why.  See “Consequence Map Template” and “If Then Chart Template” to guide your discussion with the student.

    • Increase engagement that promotes independence and student responsibility

    • Get students reflectively involved in their own learning

    • Teach students to work independently

    • Share clear, reasonable limits, and expectations into daily routines

    • As students violate procedures, ask “What guideline they are forgetting?”

    • Offer structure

    • Include students in self-assessments of their own learning gains

Building Language for Managing Emotions

• • • Teach that people cannot control emotions but can control how we react to them

    • Vocabulary Continuum Strategy

      • • Create vocabulary continuum with emotional words such as: miserable, awful, poor, average, good, excellent, and superb

        • Give students starter words such as flexible, uncertain, thoughtful, calm, satisfied.  Have them create their own range of emotions on both the positive and negative sides of the selected starter word.

        • Encourage students to use these words to express their emotions rather than actions.

    • How Do You Feel Poster (Elementary)

    • Most Common Emotions List (Secondary)

Identify Emotional Triggers

• • • Help students understand their own personal emotional triggers that lead to stress and conflict and how to manage them

    • Listen to body signs and catch themselves before they react

    • Understand perceived emotional threats (unmet needs such as getting attention, being respected, needed, right, free, or included)

      • • Our brains are on the lookout for these unmet needs and reacts to them with emotions

    • Help students realize that people make different choices based upon prior experiences and beliefs.

Anchoring

• • • Anchoring is when certain triggers elicit strong emotions anchored to past experiences, another idea, or other emotions.

    • Teach students what anchoring is so they can use it with self-calming techniques in order to regain control over their emotions.

Learning Self-Calming Techniques

• • • When thinking conflicts with emotion, emotion always wins and leads to poor decisions.  We need to teach students how to override the emotional hijack happening in their brains.

    • Self-Calming and Anchoring Techniques:

      • • Counting

        • Remove yourself

        • Breathe

        • Think calming thoughts

        • Relax your muscles

        • Meditation

        • Mindfulness

        • Practice

    • Self-Calming Poster Reminder