Notes and reflections from Part 7: Understanding dysregulation and responding to challenging events 

Reframing challenging behaviour

What kinds of challenging scenarios have you experienced? How have you interpreted those experiences?

Think back over what you have learned in this part so far and in the rest of the course as a whole.  

What sorts of things do you think you might observe and record to help you understand the meaning behind challenging behaviour?

When and why challenging behaviour may occur

Thresholds: Triggers: Think about a specific child in your classroom. Can you think of anything that might act as a shake of the coke bottle for them?

Think again about the students in your class.

Are there any that might be masking? What makes you think so?

Understanding emotional regulation

Different strategies for helping students to emotionally regulate:

Different strategies for checking in on emotional states and levels of regulation:

Strategies for promoting emotional regulation

Proactive strategies that can help to support emotion regulation:

Managing challenging events

How can you support yourself to make appropriate decisions when a challenging event is occurring? What helps you to stay calm (physical actions, mental narratives, and so on)?

Key features of the ways of responding in the moment:

How should challenging events be presented to the rest of the class to develop empathy?

What happens in the brain when someone becomes dysregulated:

Class profile activity

Drawing on UDL, plan to explicitly teach your class about self-regulation and some skills they might use, as part of an upcoming lesson or activity. You might like to start by teaching your students about regulation, perhaps using the zones of regulation or some other way they can measure their own level of regulation, to provide a shared vocabulary for checking in and reminding students about the supports that are available. For older students, this activity might be related to reflective writing or journalling. Talking about what level of regulation students experience, how this varies in different contexts, and what they do to help regulate themselves is useful for all students. If this is something already quite familiar to your class, use this activity as an opportunity to reflect again and review how well regulation supports are working for your class. Again, draw on UDL principles to ensure that it is readily accessible to all students. 

	Learning goal:
Options for Engagement	Options for Representation/Input	Options for Action and Expression/Output

Notes and reflections from Part 8: The importance of teacher wellbeing

Teacher wellbeing

Which of the drivers of burnout that Chris mentioned (increased responsibilities, loss of autonomy, isolation, inability to escape work, fear of disappointing others, and teacher shortage) do you think apply to your teaching context? In other words, are you at risk of burnout?

Strategies for preventing burnout from the healthcare system:

Triage

	Customised Language	Approved Examples
Level 1—Immediate
Level 2—Emergent
Level 3—Urgent
Level 4—Relevant
Level 5—Flexible

Shared Workflow

What might be the benefits to sharing work across teachers?

How might a shared workflow help you and your colleagues manage the increased workload in relation to supporting all your students, and neurodivergent students in particular?

Think about the different ways that you might share tasks related to supporting neurodivergent students with other teachers. Every educational environment will vary in staff size, budget allocations, space availability, and many other factors influencing the choices that teachers make. 

Who do you think could contribute to your workflow team? What might be the advantages and possible setbacks?

Begin to think about what shared workflow might be ideal for your team. Consider the pros and cons of trying to create an off-week.  

Do you have any ideas you could present to colleagues for discussion?

Emotional boundaries

Use the following three prompts to weigh the assets and liabilities associated with your chosen task quantitatively and by importance. This provides further insight into the likelihood of positive progress. 

Define the problem or issue of concern: Identify the causes driving the issue of concern. Can you explain why or how these causes are creating the problem? Explain or draw a diagram that illustrates how your proposed actions will mitigate or eliminate the causes driving the problem. Note that your actions must mitigate the causes driving the issue or you won’t resolve the problem. If you drew a diagram, you might like to upload it here:

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