The Unteachables Podcast

#133: Flipping your lid! The concept that changed everything about the way I responded to students in the middle of a meltdown.

• Claire English • Season 6 • Episode 133

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What’s actually happening when your student flips their lid?
And more importantly… what should you be doing when it happens?

HEAD TO THE BLOG HERE FOR VISUALS + MORE 😁

In this episode, I’m giving you a front seat to one of the most game-changing concepts I've learned about behaviour and brain science: flipping your lid. You’ll hear me break down Dr. Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain in all its gloriously awkward podcast-visual-form, but also how this little model changed everything about the way I responded to students in the middle of a meltdown.

Spoiler: trying to reason with a flipped-lid teenager is like handing them a trig worksheet in the middle of a panic attack. Not helpful. Probably going to make things worse.

We’re talking about:

  • What actually happens in the brain when students dysregulate
  • Why calm-down demands and consequences don’t work in those moments
  • How this one model can change the way you respond (and how students see themselves)
  • How to teach this concept to your students, even if you’re not a science-y person

It’s simple, powerful, and honestly... kind of magic when it clicks. Let’s roll the tape.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why traditional responses to dysregulation often escalate the situation
  • What “flipping your lid” means, and why it explains so much about student behaviour
  • How to teach students what’s happening in their own brains (without the shame)
  • Ways to embed the hand model of the brain into your class culture
  • What it looks like to lead with emotional safety first - not compliance

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

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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 and welcome back to the Unteachables podcast. Lovely teachers, I hope you're going well.

Speaker 1:

In today's episode, I wanted to go back to just a concept that, honestly, is just game changing when it comes to understanding our own behaviors and the behaviors of our students and our students understanding their behaviors. It is so empowering, it just when we can understand our brains better, when we can understand why we're behaving in certain ways, no matter how old we are, no matter what circumstances we're in, it just changes the game. I remember when I learned about this particular concept and it was like this sigh of relief in my whole, being just feeling, oh my gosh, like it's not that there's something wrong with me, it's just that my brain is responding to things that I'm going through, that I'm struggling with, or that's in the environment at the moment, and just that alone can be just yeah, it's life-changing to be able to understand this and know this and this is something that we can understand and, you know, really help us in our own lives. But it's something that our students can understand as well. It can be really simplified for our students. It can help them to understand their brains, and I am talking about flipping our lid. So if you are familiar with this it is Dr Dan Siegel's concept of you know, the flipping of the lid, the stress response and the way that we can explain that to our young people. If you do know about this concept, keep listening, because it's really good to have a refresher and to remember why it's powerful and to remember how we can embed this into our day-to-day practice. And if you haven't heard of this concept before, strap yourself in, buckle yourself in, because it is going to be awesome to be able to understand this better for you and your students Now.

Speaker 1:

I remember when I was first teaching and I had this really really tough year eight class and this one student, like, just came in bounding in, kicked the door open, was flipping over tables, was shouting, was swearing, and I was doing all of these things. I was trying to reason with her. I was saying you know, leave and come back, try again. Like everything I knew to do. I was trying to tell her to calm down, otherwise, you know there'd be consequences, because you can't be tipping tables over, you can't be, you know, shouting and screaming and swearing at me. How dare you Can't be doing this Like there's going to be consequences. So if you don't calm down now, this is going to happen. And guess what happened? She just told me to F off more. I told her that she'd be in big trouble and she did say F off.

Speaker 1:

I don't care, because sometimes when we have a student who displays these big, big behaviors, we talk to them and we try to resolve it and we try to get them to reflect on it and we do whatever we can in the moment to gain control back of that situation, because for us it is scary and you know, we feel like we need to resolve it right then and there. However, when we are expecting this of our students, I might as well have been telling this student to solve some kind of complex trigonometry in that moment, because what was happening is that she had her lid flipped, she was dysregulated and although I understood this as a thing I kind of understood yes, dysregulation and regulation and all of that kind of stuff I didn't truly understand what that looked like in the brain and what that actually meant for how I needed to respond to that student in front of me. I didn't understand that, the fact that she was dysregulated and really struggling in that moment, I didn't understand that that meant that me telling her to leave and calm down was going to escalate things further. I didn't realize that you know threatening consequences or I was just trying to do whatever I could in the moment and I was doing the best that I could, but I didn't understand what that actually meant for dysregulation and how I could really impact things positively by doing things differently and really thinking about what was going on in the brain. When I did understand what was happening in the brain and how that looked in the brain. It honestly changed everything about how I responded to behavior, even before I knew de-escalation strategies specifically, even though I didn't really know. Okay, here is what you can do if that happens, because intuitively as a human being, I'm like okay, if somebody is feeling like this, then, yes, they need more of that rather than what I'm going to be doing. So it became more intuitive the way that I was responding to these students when I understood what it meant to flip their lid. So that's what I'm going to be going through in this podcast episode.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to talk you through the flipping your lid model and it really is just such a simple brain-based way of explaining what happens when students' emotional brain takes over the amygdala, when their fight, flight or freeze response is triggered. So what is flipping your lid? It is coined by Dr Dan Siegel, definitely not my creation. I wish that it was, I wish that I had that many accolades and I knew psychology that well. But it is coined by Dr Dan Siegel and this hand brain model gives us and our students a tangible, visual and relatable understanding of their emotional responses and what's happening in their brains. So this is how you can teach it and this is literally with your hand. So I know you can't see me right now on a podcast, but hold your hand up. By the way, if you really do need something visual to have a look at, then head to my show notes and I'll pop something there for you to click on and have a look at.

Speaker 1:

So hold your hand out, your palm out, and there, in the kind of base of your palm, that is our survival brain, that is where the brain stem is and the cerebellum is and your reptilian brain is responsible for those basic functions like breathing, and it's also where you will find the hippocampus, the brain's memory center. And then, with your palm out, I want you to fold your thumb into the middle of your hands and that is your feeling brain. That thumb is representing the amygdala, the brain's guard dog, which is in charge of sounding the alarm when there's danger and triggering fight, flight or freeze. The amygdala does an incredible job of keeping us safe. And then I want you to fold your fingers over and that kind of looks like a fist now, and I want you to kind of rest your fingers on top of that thumb and that is your thinking brain.

Speaker 1:

Those four fingers represent the prefrontal cortex and that's in charge of thinking and planning and rationalizing. When you are calm and regulated, this is what's in control. The prefrontal cortex is calling the shots. This is called your wise owl. It's the one that can think and rationalize and when we know, when we're engaged in something that is your prefrontal cortex engaged. So that is like a nice little representation of your brain. Open up your palm. You know you've got the base there. You've got all of the um, the breathing, the reptilian brain. Then you've got your thumb in the middle, which is the amygdala, your brain's guard dog, and then the wise hour, the thinking and feeling prefrontal cortex then connects nicely to the top of that. They're always talking, you know. They're always kind of feeding back to each other.

Speaker 1:

However, what happens is if you are, you know, under stress, if something happens, when you feel like you're in danger, sometimes we flip our lids and when that happens, I want you to imagine those four fingers just flipping up and now, all of a sudden, our thinking brain is not connected and we are being led by our feeling brain, our amygdala. You can see that thumb there, it's out there, it's leading the charge, so that amygdala is calling the shots. What we need to be doing is returning to calm and putting those lids back on. We can be flipping our lids all the time in smaller ways. Those lids back on. We can be flipping our lids all the time in smaller ways. Some of us are really great at reconnecting our amygdala and our prefrontal cortex. Some of our students are constantly walking around with their lids flipped.

Speaker 1:

So that is kind of like the basic way to explain the hand model of the brain and I'm sorry if I absolutely butchered that, but it is such a great way for us to understand that if a student walks in so let's go back to that year eight student she walks in, she is tipping a table over, she's telling me to F off. In that moment her amygdala is in charge. Her rational thinking brain is not there, it's not connected. She's not going to access that. So when I'm saying to her, hey, like how about we just go outside and try again? Like, think about the consequences or anything that requires her to rationally think about what's happening, when I try to reason with her saying you know, leave and come back, or like it's not going to work because she is not led by her rational brain, she is being led by her amygdala.

Speaker 1:

So what we need to be doing in that situation is reconnecting the thinking brain with that feeling brain, because otherwise we can't work with them. So it needs to be the first port of call for us to be able to support our students to regulate. That's why regulation is so important and that's what I didn't understand years ago when I was trying my very best, with whatever tools I had to regulate and, as I said before, like even without having the explicit strategies to understand how to approach my students, after learning about flipping the lid and after learning about what the brain is doing in response to stress or when big behaviors are happening intuitively, I was like, okay, now I get it. What I'm doing right now isn't going to work because neurologically it's not going to work. Like the brain is not going to respond to that. That student is acting without thinking. It's pure adrenaline, it's cortisol. You know, if they're shouting and crying and running and shutting down their logical reasoning, brain is not in control. So I can't try to reason with them, I can't try to have those conversations. Like it's not going to learn, their brain is not online.

Speaker 1:

So once you understand that, you realize in those moments when they're in crisis and it is it's their brain in crisis, it's their brain feeling unsafe and thank gosh, our brains do this, even though it might be a little bit of a hindrance in our modern society because we get flipped by everything, like you know, getting caught in traffic or the photocopy are not working. All those kinds of things can help, you know, make us flip our lids, if you're like me, and I've got a very short thread for that. But you realize then that it's not about them being defiant, it's about their biology and it's about their brains keeping them safe. And if students have been wired in a way where they are flipping more frequently, it actually makes them, you know, like their amygdala is just this superpower that has helped them stay safe their whole lives. So why teach it to our students? I want you to think about it through the lens of yourself and your experiences first.

Speaker 1:

So what times in your day-to-day do you get the most dysregulated, the most angry, the most overwhelmed? You know like is it when you're trying to get out of the house in the morning and you feel like you just can't speaking from experience with a toddler at the moment you just can't get out of the house in the morning and you feel like you just can't. Speaking from experience with a toddler, at the moment you just can't get out of the house and they don't want to put their pants on, they want to put their shirt on and you know everything is really hard. Is it in those moments? Is it when you're going to work in the morning and you have to drive and you feel anxious about driving? Is it when your principal sends you an email saying, hey, can you come in and have a chat this afternoon? It's still only 8am, so you've got the whole day to kind of sit there and stew on it.

Speaker 1:

Like in the day to day, what kind of things get you the most dysregulated? And in those moments your lid is flipped, your rational brain is disconnected from your amygdala. You're feeling that adrenaline. Are there times where you've been told to calm down before and you became angrier? These are the kind of things that help us to understand how important it is to be aware of the stress response.

Speaker 1:

So when you teach this to your students, you're giving them this beautiful gift of self-awareness and language for what's happening inside them and it kind of takes away the shame around behaviors. It helps them then to take accountability without that shame. Like you know, like we, our goal with our students is to help them take accountability, to help them create change in their lives and in the classroom. Having this model to support them with those behaviors they go okay, like these are the behaviors that I'm exhibiting. There's no shame around this. It's just how my brain and my body is responding. So how can I do something to change this? What strategies do I need? It builds empathy across your class, like you know hey, their lids flipped. Like I get it. And having that as a cultural part of your class, like that is just so beautiful. It creates a lovely shared language for when you have discussions with your students about their behaviors and it really does support a restorative and trauma-informed response to behavior because, like it's just shouting from the rooftops that you are not your behaviors and you need strategies to be able to manage this better. Like it's not your fault. Like you know, there's choices to make and we can work on those choices, but we need to also work on strategies to help you make those choices. It's just so empowering and this really isn't like just something fluffy. It really is a foundation to any classroom where we want relationships and regulation and respect to be central to learning and to get the most disengaged and vulnerable students on board and get them buying into what we're doing on the day-to-day.

Speaker 1:

How you can teach this it can be super informal, like in this podcast. I took you through the hand model of the brain in about five clumsy minutes. I don't know if I did a very good job of explaining it. As I said, head to the show notes. There's a visual there for you. It can be really informal. You can just talk to your students in class about it. You can demonstrate with the hand model. You can talk to students one-on-one about it. If there are students who are struggling the most, you can get really good at using the hand model yourself and you know kind of pulling it out at a moment's notice. There are also heaps of videos on YouTube that take you through the hand model of the brain, so you can also show them that. A couple of them are quite boring for students, though, and they're quite science-y, so I find it most powerful for us to be able to so maybe watch the YouTube videos and then kind of get to know how to do it yourself.

Speaker 1:

I find it really much more powerful for us to be able to show them just with our hands and get them to follow along with you and then really embed this into everything, like embedded into you know, the discussions you're having. When you notice someone's you know not feeling great to say like is your lip, lip to the moment, like embed that language and hardwire that language. So students start to embody that and recognize that because it's all about dysregulation. So when they're able to, you know, be reflective on that and be aware of that, then they're more likely to have the buy-in they need to implement that regulation strategy. Or use your calm corner or like whatever it might be in your classroom you're trying to get students to do this is going to give them the buy-in to do it, and I really hope that it's helped you as well to kind of go, oh, okay, like when I'm having a moment at home or like when I'm feeling.

Speaker 1:

By the way, the most I feel overwhelmed is after school, because we are always kind of absorbing things and you know like our window of tolerance gets more narrow and more narrow as the day goes on and I find my lid is most flipped when I get home and I just need to decompress, like being able to recognize that in ourselves, when we are just not feeling good and we just need something to reconnect our thinking brain and our emotional brain. It's just so powerful, and maybe even having the language to explain that to your kids or to your partner or to your parents or whatever it might be in your situation. But I just find this so empowering. When we can understand what's happening in our brain, we can be empowered to change it in ways that actually work. So actually, if you head over to my blog, I have all of this stuff there so you can put it into practice. I'll put the links there. I'll put everything there for you. So head over to the blog. I'll pop the link to the blog in the show notes as well. That way you can kind of implement this in the best way you can.

Speaker 1:

If you're in the behavior club as well, by the way, I've got lots. Like I said, I've got a lesson on flipping your lid. I've got heaps of stuff that you can use to explicitly teach your class this stuff. But you don't need anything like fancy If you just want to get started by doing the hand model of the brain with your students. Like that is brilliant.

Speaker 1:

And just remember that we don't know what we don't know Like I didn't know how self-destructive my behaviors were when I was flipped. It was my brain and my body trying to keep me safe. I'm thinking about me and my teams and my early twenties and just how beautiful and liberating and validating it was to understand that. And it will be for your students too, because it's it's so damn human, like it's just such a human thing that we all experience. So, taking away the shame, increasing accountability, increasing that buy-in, it is just magic for us to be able to do that Students can't regulate what they don't understand, to be able to do that Students can't regulate what they don't understand. So when we give them insight, we can see so many things shift.

Speaker 1:

And that is it for this week's episode. I hope that it was really helpful. If it was, feel free to send me, as always, a message on Instagram I love to hear it or an email if you're more of an email person. And, yeah, even leave me a nice review. That would mean the absolute world and it helps me reach other educators with this free resource, which is the goal. Big love for the week ahead and I will see you next time.

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Claire English

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