Emotional Regulation & Response

There are many triggers that may cause students to feel more volatile emotion at school and those levels of emotion can be affected by environmental factors such as hunger, temperature, texture of clothing, situations happening before school or with friends at school. Frustration with school work or the wrong tone or phrase from a teacher or classmate can easily cause a situation escalate when a student is unable to emotionally regulate themselves. To be proactive, it's important you (as a teacher) are not only aware of what emotional dysregulation and escalation looks like and how to best handle situations, but also how to prevent issues in the classroom by maintaining composure and modeling regulation whenever possible.

In the classroom, you are mostly seeing the following phases of de-escalation:

prevention
escalation
recovery & restoration

There is also a crisis phase, but at that point the issue is typically moved outside of the classroom and passed off to the administration or a team who has received specific crisis training. If you ever find yourself in a crisis phase, there are still practices that you can follow to best handle the situation until support arrives or the student begins to de-escalate.