Pushing
One of my children has pretty severe emotional and behavioural problems and was a big challenge for the teachers he’s had for the past two years. It seemed to have been getting worse, then slightly better as we understood more of what was going on inside his head at his worst times. This year he has barely been a problem at all, and not in the classroom. The only times he has really struggled have been on the playground a few times.
Since half term though he has been wobbling on the edge of a big breakdown and I’m finding it very hard to deal with. He is pushing me constantly, defiantly, but in the state of mind he is in I can’t come down on him very hard or else I will have a large scale problem on my hands which will impact on the rest of the class in a big way. I have to remember that I have younger children in there this year too who have not had to deal with his behaviour in class before and are likely to get very scared.
It was a constant battle today and I don’t want to let him get away with things that the other children wouldn’t but sometimes that seems to be the only way to deal with him, like low level disruption is the lesser of the two evils. It’s hard then for the other children to behave themselves when they see him getting away with things.
In the end this afternoon I was lucky enough that someone was available to withdraw him and spend some time one to one with him. We are processing a statement application for him just now but it is taking a very long time and he needs this kind of support regularly. Without that I doubt I would have managed to get through all of my teaching this afternoon. He did come back and apologise to me at the end of the day but he couldn’t give me or the TA a reason for why he was behaving the way he did. Usually he is very articulate about what has gone on to cause an outburst. I just wonder if anything happened at home over the half term or over the weekend.
Any tips or ideas on how I can deal with this low level disruption without tipping him over the edge?