De-escalation Tips
Teachers can effectively de-escalate student behavior by staying calm, using a low, steady voice, and employing active listening to validate feelings. Key strategies include providing personal space, offering choices to restore a sense of control, and using non-threatening, empathetic body language. The goal is to connect with the student before correcting the behavior, preventing further escalation.
Listen to this podcast before the next high-stress moment hits. This episode gives you 20 concrete, connection-based strategies for what to actually do when behavior is escalating. No lectures. No “power through it” advice. Just real, doable moves that lower the heat without losing control.
Key De-escalation Techniques:
Maintain Calm and Safety: Remain calm, keep a low voice, and avoid overreacting. Position yourself at or below the student's eye level to appear less threatening.
Build Connection: Empathize with the student and acknowledge their feelings ("I see you are angry") to help them regain control.
Provide Choices and Space: Offer simple, clear, positive choices instead of commands (e.g., "Would you like to draw or take a walk?"). Give them physical space.
Use Specific Strategies:
Distraction/Redirection: Draw attention away from the conflict.
Quiet Area: Utilize a designated "peace corner" or quiet area to cool off.
Prompting Routines: Suggest familiar calming strategies, such as deep breathing.
Removing Audience: Reduce peer pressure by handling situations privately, if possible.
Provide a safe space to express emotions
Breaks and calming techniques
AVOID: Trivializing student feelings and engaging in a power struggle
Respectful Communication: Keep language brief and direct. Avoid power struggles and public confrontation.
De-escalating the Brain, Not the Behavior
When students feel intense emotions, it’s important to meet them where they are and use strategies that guide them toward self-regulation.
By Sam Parmerlee, December 5, 2024
Next steps, when the student is ready:
Reflection through journalling, discussion, or drawing
Teach self-regulation techniques
Engage in Collaborative Problem Solving
Restore dignity using restorative justice techniques
Offer additional Emotion Supports
Teach vocabulary for discussing feelings
Teach affect modulation/Calming and ways to cope with arousal level.
Model and practice response examples for social situations
Identify trigger situations
Recognizing emotional cues in others.
Develop Student Self-Awareness: Recognizing bodily sensations as emotional indicators.
Provide the student with strategies and a plan that rewards using strategies
Debrief incidents as a learning tool
Clean Slate-When the structured/expected response to the student’s behavior is complete, the “Slate is wiped clean”; like hitting the reset button