Children with Challenging Behavior

04/21/2009

Children with Challenging Behavior

There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.
Margaret J. Wheatley, writer

Children with challenging behavior is far and away the leading training priority for teachers identified in our current Exchange Insta Poll. And, this has been true for over five years of doing this survey. [If you want to share your views on Teacher Training Needs, you still have 16 hours to participate in the Exchange Insta Poll.] A number of reasons have been proposed for this phenomenon:

Cultural: Children today, from the earliest ages, are exposed to enormous amounts of violence on television, videos, and computer games and are given the message that you solve problems with aggression.
Societal: This theory points the finger at parents whose lives are so hectic and stressful that they are not spending enough time nurturing their children and helping them develop self control.
Environmental: Contaminants and additives in the air we breathe, the fast food we consume, and water we drink are polluting and impacting our children's health and dispositions.
Professional: In classrooms of highly functioning teachers, there is little misbehavior to manage — children are engaged. The prevalence of misbehavior in programs is attributable to low pay and low skills of our workforce.

We hesitate to select any one of these theories as the answer. But, it is clear that children's challenging behavior is an issue our field needs to address in order for children to have positive, nurturing experiences in our programs.

Exchange's Many Resources on Challenging Behavior

Exchange has a number of extremely helpful resources for supporting teachers in dealing with children with challenging behaviors:

Our Beginnings Workshop book, Behavior, has 24 articles written by experts in the field on how to deal with challenging behavior.
Ten Out of the Box Training Kits on "Positive Discipline" provide directors with all the resources you need to conduct in-house training sessions.
Two Exchange CEU modules, "Managing Challenging Behavior" and "Social and Emotional Development", provide credit for reading Exchange magazine articles.
Exchange's newest resource is the DVD Facing the Challenge (an expertly crafted video training tool).

For more information about Exchange's magazine, books, and other products pertaining to ECE, go to www.ccie.com.