Disempowering Destructive Classroom Behaviours.

Picture the scene, you've just started teaching a new class. You have spent time over the holidays putting up displays to go with your new topic. Word walls and working walls, all backed neatly with pretty borders - a nice learning environment for the students. You've put out trays at the front with all your resources for the first week. Trays of work sheets, trays with question cards, games, arts and crafts materials and anything else you could think of that your students might need.

The first day comes and everything is going well. Until a student gets upset and despite you using your best de-escalation strategies the child gets more and more upset until they angrily tear down your displays, tip all your trays of resources onto the floor and begin shredding the worksheets you had neatly put out. You successfully manage to support the child to calm down and to help clear up the mess. You use the school's behaviour policy and enact whatever strategies they have in place for this.

But at the end of the day, you're left with a classroom which is no longer a nice learning environment, it's a mess, your resources have been destroyed and you're left with a lot of work to try and redo the displays in time for tomorrow. And you don't even know if this will happen again tomorrow.

This article isn't about how to support the child with their behaviour. You will already be on this, and the school policies on this will hopefully support the child. But we all know this is not an overnight process. So what can you do in the meantime?

Disempower the behaviour! Change how it affects you and your classroom. 

1. Rethink how you back your displays. Can you back them with cloth or vinyl type materials rather than paper so that if they are pulled down they are unlikely to rip and can be more easily put back up? Do you even need to back them at all? Are the boards covered in felt which would be good enough as a backing?
2. Rethink what you put on to your displays. Can you make the displays so that they are up for longer and so you can laminate the pieces that go on to the display? This would mean when they are pulled down they are unlikely to tear and can be put back fairly easily. If you like to put children's work onto the display consider using blutack to fix these onto laminated backing cards. This will mean if they are pulled down they are less likely to tear and may even be pulled down while still attached to the laminated backing card. You could also consider photocopying children's work and putting up the photocopy and keeping the original in a safe place so that it can be photocopied again if necessary. 
3. Make use of high shelves and lockable cupboard storage for resources you do not need immediate access to. Ensuring that your resources for the afternoon lessons or the rest of the week are safely stored away means that you can relax knowing that in the event of student becoming destructive your whole week's worth of work won't be destroyed. 
4. Use decoy bundles of papers in strategic places that you know can be destroyed with no impact to yourself or the other students. Scrap paper from the printer area can be used for this. Bundle it up into a tray as if it is going to be used for a lesson and place it closer to the student than any resources you need for the day. That way if a student becomes destructive the likelihood is that they will aim for that pile first giving you time to move any other trays of worksheets or resources into a cupboard is necessary. 
5. Have students do their work on separate sheets which are then glued into their books or filed into folders. That way if a student destroys their own work you will only lose one piece of their work rather than an entire book of work from the year. 

These strategies will not change the student's behaviour but they will hopefully help the behaviours to have less of an impact on you, your classroom and the other students.

Share with us in the comments any strategies you have used to try and decrease the impact of destructive behaviours in your classroom.