Helping Your Team See Behaviour as Communication

There are some behaviours that can completely change the feel of a room.

A child hits another child.

Someone bites.

A child screams when it’s time to pack up.

Another seems to spend half the day saying no.

When that happens, an educator’s first instinct is often:

How do I stop this?

There’s a different question you can help your team learn to ask:

What is this behaviour trying to tell us?

That small shift can change the conversation from managing an incident to understanding what might actually be going on.

We can see the hitting.

We can hear the screaming.

We can count how many times a child has bitten.

But those are the things happening on the surface. They don’t necessarily tell us what is driving them.

A child who pushes another child away might be angry.

Or overwhelmed.

Or protecting something they were playing with.

Or trying to join in and not yet having the words or skills to do it.

Same behaviour. Very different possible reasons.

One of the most useful things you can do as a leader is help your educators stay curious long enough to investigate.

Instead of:

“Why does he keep doing this?”

Encourage:

“What seems to be happening when he does this?”

That changes what people look for next.

When a team is dealing with challenging behaviour, vague observations aren’t particularly useful.

“She had a difficult day.”

doesn’t give you much to work with.

Compare that with:

“She became upset three times today, and each time it happened when we moved from outside to inside.”

Now you have something the team can investigate.

Encourage educators to look at three things:

• What happened immediately before?

• What did the child actually do?

• What happened immediately afterwards?

Was the room particularly noisy?

Had another child taken something?

Was the child being asked to transition?

Were they waiting?

Trying to enter someone else’s play?

Did the behaviour result in another child moving away, an educator coming over or a transition being delayed?

You’re looking for patterns, not excuses.

This is another area where leaders can make a big difference.

“He’s aggressive.”

“She’s difficult.”

“He’s an attention seeker.”

Once a label takes hold within a team, it’s very easy for everyone to start interpreting the child’s behaviour through it.

Bring the conversation back to what actually happened.

Instead of:

“Sam was aggressive.”

Try:

“When another child reached for the truck, Sam pushed their hand away and shouted ‘mine’.”

Now there’s something useful to work with.

Sometimes the behaviour tells us something about a skill the child hasn’t yet developed reliably.

Waiting.

Negotiating.

Entering play.

Managing disappointment.

Asking for space.

Using words when frustrated.

Moving from one activity to another.

If that’s what’s happening, stopping the behaviour is only part of the job.

The next question for your team becomes:

What do we need to help this child learn?

It’s easy for a team discussion about behaviour to become entirely focused on the child.

Sometimes the environment needs investigating too.

Is the transition too long?

Is the space overcrowded?

Are children waiting with nothing to do?

Are expectations clear?

Is there enough of a particularly popular resource?

Sometimes the most effective response isn’t something you do to the child.

It’s something you change around them.

This is where having a team becomes incredibly useful.

One educator sees one incident.

Another sees another.

Someone on the afternoon shift notices something else.

Individually, those observations may not mean much. Put them together and a pattern can suddenly become obvious.

That’s why creating a team culture of specific observation rather than judgement matters.

And understanding what’s behind behaviour doesn’t mean allowing children to hurt others or removing boundaries.

Sometimes an educator needs to intervene immediately.

They can stop the behaviour and remain curious about what caused it.

Those two things aren’t opposites.

At your next team meeting, choose one behaviour your educators are finding challenging.

Don’t start by trying to solve it.

Ask:

What exactly are we seeing?

What tends to happen immediately before it?

What happens afterwards?

When doesn’t it happen?

What might this child need help learning?

Is there anything in the environment we could change?

Then agree on what everyone will observe over the next few days.

You may find that the answer becomes much clearer when the whole team is looking for the pattern rather than simply trying to stop the behaviour.

The Confident Team

Practical ideas for building confident, capable early childhood teams.

Louis Bell | Founder of Praxibel

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