Early childhood professionals need to be able to model how to express feelings in appropriate ways. But how can you be an effective model when you're feeling upset or under stress? What are some of the ways you can monitor your own feelings and reactions?
And how can you respond calmly to children when you may not feel calm inside? When children are having difficulty, it's easy for adults to just take that personally. It's important for teachers not to assume that when a child does something really impulsive that they're trying to be mean or that they're doing it to push buttons. That's not really what's going on.
One of the things we work with teachers a lot on is how to recognize their own hot buttons. What are those behaviors that drive you crazy? When this child does this behavior, this is what happens to me. And describe the symptoms, describe...
what it feels like to get escalated and get aware of that. When I'm frustrated, I call it my ball of rage in my stomach. You know, you're just, they're pushing your buttons and there's nothing you can do that's going to change that at that particular moment.
When you're in an environment. where you're in close contact with human beings, especially uninhibited, very expressive young human beings, that it's normal to feel sad. It's normal to feel despair.
It's normal to feel scared and furious and angry. If I'm feeling that in the classroom, and that's how internally I feel, it's going to be projected on them. And that's not fair to them. It's not fair to me.
It's not fair to anybody in the room. That's been a real taboo subject when we think about that with teachers. We shouldn't have these feelings about kids, but the truth is we're people too.
It's really important that we start to recognize our personal feelings when we're in a relationship with a child. Every teacher has a child that does push their buttons, and I think those children are the children that need you the most, and you have to keep that in mind at all times. I think teachers can get stressed out at work sometimes, in the classroom. It can be very busy and hectic. If your kid's having a meltdown, your brain goes on fire.
You feel like it's an emergency. And the adult has to learn how to de-escalate, not just get affected by the child's feelings and react that way. Can you tell me what was happening? Want to turn with the flashlight?
Yeah? Who was using the flashlight? Me. You were using it?
Okay. So let's go talk to Sandra and say, Sandra, I was using the flashlight. A starting point for a lot of people is recognizing that they do have that opportunity, rather than just feeling out of control themselves. You just got to sit back and watch, and then take a breath.
You got to... For yourself too. Okay, we're not going to explode or anything.
Let's see what's going on here. We really talk to teachers about how their personal reaction should not be their professional action. Stop it!
Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Oh wait, pause, freeze, freeze. Remember this morning we talked about talking to Hunter?
You don't need to yell at him. That we go from knowing enough that we can enough about ourselves and what we're experiencing emotionally. Because a lot of the time it is something that is really bothering them and is upsetting them.
So if you kind of ask and probe a little bit, they are able to express a little bit of what's wrong and it's easy to talk with them and try to figure out a solution. You're Marvel? That's okay, I'll get it back for you. I go for humor. I just go with that.
And if they see you laughing, they don't have any choice. They'll start to laugh and giggle. Get everybody in a good mood.
You can't tell jokes, not with this crowd. You're going to find something silly to do. I forgot. I forgot. So what we like people to do is put a reflective kind of conversation in place with the colleagues that they work with.
That this is difficult for me. So there are times where, like, I'm tagging out now. Now I need you to step in.
These are plans that we need to have in place. We definitely support each other in the classroom. We also pick up a lot of each other's kind of cues as teachers.
Sometimes if one teacher needs to just go out in the hallway, we're really able to do that and communicate to each other. We do a lot of self-speak to the children about it, like, wow, I'm really frustrated right now. And my teacher assistant will be like, oh, Ms. Ashley, is there anything I can do to help you? And we use it as a learning opportunity to mirror to them, first of all, how to support a friend when they're in that place, but then also so that they become aware of how we're feeling.
When we think about what the next steps have to be, we really first have to acknowledge our own feelings. That's what we're asking kids to do is acknowledge how they're feeling and then express it in an appropriate way. So teachers really have to practice those.
skills too. Being able to use those moments as teachable moments with the children so that they can understand first of all it's okay to feel frustrated everybody feels frustrated and upset or angry at times but how you handle it and what you do with it that's what matters.