Sasha Long, a board-certified behavior analyst, shares five steps for handling escalated children: prioritize safety and clear the space, regulate your own emotions first, model calmness through your voice and body, offer concrete choices for calming strategies, and use supportive language while postponing correction until they're calm.
When a student is overwhelmed and escalated, it can be challenging to know how to respond. How to respond in a way that will help that student calm down and reduce those challenging behaviors in the moment while keeping everyone safe, right? I'm Sasha Long. I'm a former special education teacher and a board-certified behavior analyst, and I'm going to share 5 tips for working with a student who is extremely escalated and helping them work through that challenging time. All right, tip number 1, 2 words: Safety and space. Before you do anything, before you get involved, before you talk, your first thought needs to be safety. If the student is engaging in any aggression, extreme disruption, property destruction, eloping, anything like that, your first thought is safety. Because the most important thing is keeping that child and the other kids in your classroom, if you are a teacher, safe. So think about removing other students from the area, removing damaging items, things that they could throw or maybe bang their head on, Removing those things. If the student is throwing themselves to the ground, maybe you put some soft pillows there, but you're giving them space. You're in that moment. If there's like that kind of blow-up, there's that extreme behavior, you're going to give them space but keep them space safe. So think of those two words: safety and space. Removing other students. We're not yelling, we're not getting involved. That's all we're thinking about first— safety and space. All right, number 2. This is the hard one. You got to get yourself in check. You gotta get yourself in check first before you do anything else. So we are giving that student space while keeping them safe, but before we get involved, we have to get ourselves in check because sometimes we contribute to the problem by overreacting. We don't wanna react here, we wanna respond. There's a difference between responding and reacting. A reaction is filled with emotion, a response is thought out. So you wanna respond. So take a minute, which feels hard when it's a stressful situation and it could be dangerous or there's extreme behaviors happening. Take a minute, get yourself in check. This is not about you right now. This is about helping that child who is having a really hard time, helping them through this time, helping them through this situation, helping them get through to the other end. That's what this is about right now. This isn't a personal attack on you. This is about right now helping them. So get yourself in check. All right, strategy number 3. We've given them space, we're keeping them safe, we're putting ourselves in check. Now we're gonna model calmness. You're gonna walk over in a quiet, calm voice. You want to be very aware of your body language. You want to be very aware of your tone of voice. You want to model what you want them to do. If you rush over hyped up with your anxiety and your stress level and all your feelings at an 11 out of 10, that's what they're gonna mirror. So keep your voice low, be aware of your body language, your facial expression, and model calmness. Now step 4, this is one of my favorites. Now we're gonna offer choices. Oh my gosh, choices are so powerful, and I think it's really important to give choices when someone is escalated or upset. Now there's a lot of great coping strategies we can teach and offer, but we're not gonna be like, hey, you should go for a walk, or you should take deep breaths. We're gonna give choices. I love tools like visual choice boards that give options for what to do. I'm going to show a few of those in a second because we want to empower that child to decide how to calm down. When I'm upset, I don't want someone to tell me how to calm down. I want to give choices. So give some options of things they can do. Hey, do you want to go for a walk? Do you want to stay here? Do you want to get a drink of water? Again, slower than that. I'm going real fast right now. If the student has lower receptive language or struggles with receptive language processing, we'll use those visuals. Let me show you a few examples of those. Here are a few of my favorite visuals for offering choices when someone is, is escalated, giving these calm down strategies, giving written options, because remember, text is a visual too, offering different calm down tools and having a choice board for that. If you're using something like a social story, again, we can pick a calm down strategy. Here's how I feel and here's what I will do. So lots of things that have options and choices, whether it's visual choices or written down choice or just a verbal choice, will be helpful with empowering that student to pick a strategy that will work for them. Strategy number 5 is to offer support instead of accusations while we are still calming down, while we are still in that escalated state. We're not back to regular levels yet. We are not pointing out what they did wrong. Hey, you threw over that bookshelf. You punched Johnny. Now is not the time to highlight the problem. They know likely what negative choices they made and what negative behaviors they engaged in. Now is not the time to point that out. —now is the time to offer support, especially for our kids that have a history of trauma. We want to show them and tell them that I'm still here for you, even though you engaged in negative behaviors. I am still here for you. Learning and those problem-solving steps will come later, but while we're still escalated, it is not the time for learning. People do not learn when they are in an escalated state. I don't learn when I'm really upset or overwhelmed. Now is the time to show that student that you are there for them. Offer support instead of accusations. Alright, those were the 5 tips for helping a student who is overwhelmed and escalated. If you'd like more behavior strategies and behavior tips, please follow my channel for more coming your way.
