Behaviour management or behaviour education? Some children need more external guidance, parameters set and reinforced by the adult mentor as they are yet to have developed the internal means to regulate the self especially in challenging situations.
But the end goal is to help young people develop the capacity to manage frustration successfully, to succeed at school in all facets of their learning and interactions, and to deal with disappointment in a healthy manner.
Dr. Albert Ellis, creator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) said the future of psychotherapy is in the school system and he invites us to apply his ABC Theory of Emotional Disturbance principles in daily teaching practice. Ellis' paradigm teaches how thinking, feeling and behaving are interlinked and that events of themselves don't determine how we feel and behave as our habits of thinking has something to do with it. Do we tend to think in rational ways or do we have a more irrational slant on happenings in our lives?
Rational thinking is called Success Helper or Brain Friend thinking and irrational thinking is called Success Stopper or Brain Bully thinking. Each is linked to a different emotional and behavioural response to events. These ideas are introduced via the Have a Go Spaghettio! Success Helper approach to Social Emotional Learning (SEL).
It teaches young learners that the belief constructions we build in our heads can either be helpful or unhelpful. This insight can help our young learners work towards developing a more internally placed locus of control and improved frustration tolerance.
