The Unteachables Podcast

#111: What moving countries with a toddler reinforced about classroom management and behaviour.

• Claire English • Season 6 • Episode 111

Share episode

In this episode, I reflect on my recent move from New Zealand to Australia and the unexpected lessons it reinforced about classroom management. Moving is always challenging, but relocating with a toddler highlighted the profound impact of predictability and structure on behaviour. 

This experience reaffirmed a key classroom management principle: predictability is the brain’s best friend. I explore how structured routines, such as entry and exit procedures, transition cues, and scaffolding techniques, can help regulate behaviour and create a sense of safety in the classroom. Tune in for insights on how to proactively support students and foster a more predictable learning environment.

Listen in as I discuss:

  • The Impact of Predictability on Behaviour. How my toddler’s reaction to moving reinforced the need for structure in managing emotions and behaviour.
  • Classroom Routines as a Proactive Behaviour Strategy. Entry and exit routines, transition cues, and structured scaffolds that help mitigate dysregulation.
  • Practical Classroom Applications. How small changes, like consistency in expectations, can positively influence student behaviour and engagement.

Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!

RESOURCES AND MORE SUPPORT:

Connect with me:


Speaker 1:

Oh, hi there teachers, welcome to the Unteachables podcast. I'm your host, claire English, and I am just a fellow teacher, a toddler mama and a big old behavior nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behavior and classroom manage has left us playing crowd control, which is not something I subscribe to, because we're not dancers, we're teachers. So listen in as I walk you through the game, changing strategies and I mean the things that we can actually do and action in our classrooms that will allow you to lean into your beautiful values as a compassionate educator and feel empowered to run your room with a little more calm and, dare I say it, a lot less chaos. I will see you in the episode. Hello, hello, wonderful teachers, welcome back to the Teachables podcast. My gosh, is it flipping awesome to be back here with you? And if you're an avid listener and you're thinking but you were here just a few days ago, I actually wasn't.

Speaker 1:

All of the episodes you've been listening to throughout February were pre-recorded, because we've just made a huge move to Australia and it has felt very huge. It has been exhausting, it has been overwhelming, overstimulating, it's been all of the things. So here I am sitting in our new apartment in Australia, in Sydney, and if it's a bit echoey for the episodes I'm about to record, I apologize, because we have very few belongings in the house so there's nothing to absorb the sound of my loud voice so it's kind of bouncing off the walls. But we've spent the last two weeks kind of trying to furnish a completely empty flat because in the UK and if you're in the UK I'm sure you're aware or maybe it's just a London thing but everywhere you rent is fully furnished and we haven't had to actually buy our own furniture for the time we've been together. So my husband and I so we've moved into this flat. It's completely unfurnished. We've had to go through the process and purchase all the furniture and we're still waiting for all of our personal belongings to come from New Zealand, like all of Ava's toys and books and all of our clothes. I think I've had the same outfit on for the last two weeks because all of the things that I bought have either been soiled by my toddler eating on my lap or, you know just, it's too hot to wear anything that I bought over. I completely forgot how humid and hot it was in Sydney in summer. So this has been a rude shock. So it's been a bit of an adjustment. Our belongings are still waiting on the dock in New Zealand. They haven't even left New Zealand to go on the journey to Sydney. So I don't know how long it's going to be. But all of that to say, if it's a little bit echoey in my house, I apologize and hopefully it does not hinder all of the things I'm about to talk about.

Speaker 1:

And what I am about to talk about has a lot to do with the move, because moving is hard, obviously, and I've done it many times in my life, both, you know, at home and abroad. You know I moved to London seven years ago by myself, with nothing except for a bag. We moved with a baby from London to New Zealand and that was tough. But moving with a toddler has been a totally different ball game than anything that I have experienced. It has been very, very tough, but not for the reasons that I thought it would be. I thought the flight might be difficult. You know flights are a bit hard. No, that was the easy part. I thought that the fact she didn't have any toys was the hard part. No, that was. That's fine. We don't need toys, you know, she can just jump in the kitchen with me and we can do some stuff there or go to the park or go outside and play in the dirt Like it's not a problem.

Speaker 1:

It has been the change in routine. It's been the fact that she's lost everything in her life that she once knew, except for us, of course. You know her routine back in New Zealand was waking up. I promise you this has something to do with classroom management. I promise you I'm going to, in a roundabout way, get back to the big message that I want to teach you for this episode, but stay with me. So she'd wake up in the morning she'd see her grandparents, she'd go and wake up her granddad, like you know, papa's sleeping. Go wake up, papa.

Speaker 1:

You know she was going to daycare, she was coming home. She knew all of the people at daycare and she was really connected with them and she had a really good attachment with them. She knew all the names of her friends at daycare. So you know, you know she'd come home to go to bed, all of that routine. She knew where she was eating, when she was eating, what she was doing and she was a really happy girl and of course she has big, big feelings, just like all toddlers do. And I read something that was just so helpful for me the other day and it said that toddlers, they have every single emotion that they're ever going to feel in their life, but none of the skills they have to regulate them. And that applies to all of the young people we're working with, by the way. But they are just getting better and better at regulation and managing those as they get older. But that was really helpful for me to hear because I really needed that reframe when I was going through all of this stuff.

Speaker 1:

But prior to the trip, even though she was obviously a toddler and she still had those big feelings, there weren't many situations that we had experienced where a cuddle or some food or a nap or some fresh air or some water couldn't kind of fix and shift her out of those big feelings or those you know. Really, like you know, when she was having a bit of a tough day, it wasn't too hard to fix that with those things. But the second that we started the move and I'm talking the second that we started packing things up things totally changed and it came to a head. We went to the hotel at Auckland airport and since then she's been very hard to keep happy. It's getting a little bit better now and I'll talk about that in a second, but she was very, very hard to keep happy.

Speaker 1:

We took her up to the restaurant to have some dinner and she'd say, yes, she wants to color. But then two seconds later she'd be throwing her book and, you know, screaming mama, mama, mama, mama, mama. But wanted to be on me, but wanted to be off me and like nothing would make her happy. And this continued for about 10 days. It's only really started to shift back into a place where she's a little bit happier, but I've never experienced times with her where I couldn't give her a cuddle. Or, you know, try to co-regulate with her and things would get better. Or maybe it's just that she's becoming more of a toddler and entering, you know, like those more toddler-y years. You know she's just turned two, but either way, like the dysregulation, the screaming for me, I carried her every second of the day for 10 days. She wouldn't even walk like let me walk into another room without having a complete meltdown and needing to be on me All whilst we were trying to get everything sorted.

Speaker 1:

We had no furniture, we had no comforts, none of our belongings and all of those things. So all of this was happening in this really like high pressure environment, like we were trying to unbox things like furniture that we bought just so we could have a chair to sit on, and I wouldn't be able to put her down on the ground because I'd have to have her on me and if she was on me, she wanted to be off me, and if she was off me, she wanted to be on me. It was just really tough. So what we were doing was sitting on the floor because we had no dining table. We have one now, thank goodness.

Speaker 1:

But we were eating with Ava on the floor of the lounge room and she'd have a mouthful of her food, she'd stand up, she'd run around and we had no way of reinforcing boundaries with her. We had no, no way of kind of establishing any routine with her, because we had nothing to like to really, I don't know reinforce that. It was very hard to get her to sit on the floor and eat it was. She wasn't used to that. She was very hard to get her to sit on my lap to eat. She wasn't used to being on the floor so she'd take a mouthful, she'd run around and this continued and this continued and she just became more physical. She was just becoming increasingly dysregulated. Poor Bubba, it was just really hard for her.

Speaker 1:

She was going through it and all the while I've been really trying to remain very regulated myself. I've been trying to co-regulate with her in the best way that I can. But even knowing all of this stuff about how crucial that is, I have really struggled with it because as adults we still like that routine and we still thrive on having our comforts and having, you know, things around us kind of sorted. And it was just chaos, like everything was just flipping chaos. The last seven minutes of me just talking is just to say everything has been chaotic At the moment. Things haven't changed much in terms of our living conditions, like in terms of our living arrangement. It'll still be about two months before we get our belongings and even our lounge delivered. But things with Ava, with things with my, with my toddler, have become far easier because of one single change, and that change was that we've got a dining table and we've been able to have some predictability and continuity around mealtimes.

Speaker 1:

So there's not much that I can control at the moment, but I can start to reinforce the boundaries around eating, around breakfast, around lunch and around dinner. We must eat at the table, we must eat together. We sit down as a family and we do this every single morning, every single night and she has been delighted by it. She sits at the dining table and she sits there and she rubs the table and she's like dining table, with a smile on her face. She says breakfast time and she runs up to the table and she's like up and she taps her new little booster seat because we don't have any of her belongings.

Speaker 1:

We had to buy everything new. So we've kind of also upgraded her to all of the big kid things. That was probably not something we had to do all at once. So we've kind of also upgraded her to all of the big kid things. That was probably not something we had to do all at once, so all of those changes probably didn't help. So she wants to get up on her booster seat, you know. But this has had a huge flow on effect to everything in our day to day, and I mean everything. She's more settled, I feel more settled. We have a bit of structure again.

Speaker 1:

So all of this and this is when I'm getting back around to the link with classroom management, and it is a really important one it all just reinforced for me the power of predictability when it comes to the brain and behavior. When we have things in our life that we can predict, when we have routines, we have structures in place, our amygdala is able to preempt and prepare and it gives us a feeling of safety. We don't need to be on high alert all of the time because we know what is to come. Just like Ava and just like her mealtimes. At least, she knew that when it was time to have a meal, she had a dining table she had to sit at, she was with her family and there was starting to be a little bit of routine and structure. She started to eat more. Everything has started to get a lot better, and this shows up in our classroom in a variety of ways, and this is actually one of the golden rules of classroom management in my book. It's never just about the behavior and it underpins one of my pillars in that, because predictability is the brain's best friend.

Speaker 1:

So when it comes to dysregulated behaviors in the classroom, yes, we need to know, obviously, how to respond and resolve all of those things when they do pop up. But there is so much proactively to mitigate these challenges before they pop up. So a solid entry routine. For example, how do students enter the room? Is there a starter that's really achievable for them, that's in the same place every lesson, or delivered in the same way, or that they just know is going to be delivered in one of a couple of ways? Is there a map to their learning that they can reference so when they sit down, is there somewhere in the room that they can look and even just see in three dot points what they're going to be doing that lesson? Oh, up on the board. I can see I'm doing my do now. I can see that I'm then doing a group activity around I don't know Macbeth and then I can see that I'm doing an exit task. I can see what I'm doing and when I'm doing it.

Speaker 1:

Do they know, you know what they do when they get into the room? Do they know how to unpack? Do they know where they're sitting? You know what they do when they get into the room? Do they know how to unpack? Do they know where they're sitting, you know, is there a predictable space for them to go? Or are they going into the room thinking, oh crap, I just had a fight with Jenny. Where am I going to sit today If I sit over here, then are they going to say, oh, go away, my friend wants to sit there.

Speaker 1:

Having a predictable seating plan, I believe, is one of the most crucial things for me in terms of, like, mitigating some of those challenging behaviors and increasing the predictability in the room. So, thinking about that entry routine, how can you increase the predictability around that? Then a solid exit routine. You know things like exit tickets, things like where do students put their books when they leave? How can they communicate if they don't get the work? All of those kinds of things that give them a sense of safety, knowing that if they don't get it, there's something to do. If they have their books and they finish their work, where do they put them? Is there something that closes off the lesson? They do every single lesson.

Speaker 1:

Then there are things like transition routines, so non-verbals that students are able to follow. So where do you stand for attention? Do you use music? Do you type up on the board? How do you transition from one thing to the other in a way that's predictable and that students are able to pick up immediately and just non-verbally know exactly what to do before you even give them your instructions. And you know things like scaffolds are used for tasks.

Speaker 1:

So when you're doing paragraph writing, are you using the same paragraph structure? Are you giving them a pure paragraph so they know? Okay, when I go through this paragraph writing, I know that I can start with my point. I know that I can give an example. I know that I go into my explanation. So routines and structures and predictability around what you're expecting in the room, and the list just goes on and on for all of these micro moments in the day where you can increase the predictability. Last month, by the way, I spoke all about exit routines, so you can head back and check out all of those episodes if you want some more guidance.

Speaker 1:

But your action step for this episode is to just have a think about your current routines. What is predictable in your classroom? What can students expect when they come into the room and just do a little bit of an audit? You know, see if there are any metaphorical dining tables that you can pop up in your room to increase the predictability and the routines, and just thinking about how you can get those students walking into the room and going. I know what's happening here, I feel safe, I feel settled. Okay, lovely teachers, that is it. I hope that was useful. I hope it was helpful and, if it was, it would mean so much for you to head over and leave me a review. It really does help me immensely when it comes to reaching and supporting more teachers, and I could use a little bit of a boost through all of this chaos that is happening at the moment. I would absolutely love to read a couple of your reviews. Anyway, that is it. Take care and I shall see you in the next episode.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Claire English

Host