This Self-Reg tool designed to use for adolescent students, provides questions that help you start a conversation to find a student’s stressors. When trying to understand troubling behaviour it’s always a good idea to start with the question WHY? Why is the student behaving like this? Why is it happening now, but not at other times? Sometimes we latch on to standard answers.
”It’s because they’re seeking attention.”
“They just doesn’t care about school at all.”
“They have always been a bully.”
But if we really want to understand behaviour and respond to it in effective and supportive ways we need to develop a good understanding of what’s going on with the whole child. The best way to do that is to do a sort of five domain assessment.
Looking at stress and dysregulation in all five domain is crucial, because people have a tendency to focus on the domain where the problem is most apparent. For example, we may observe that a child often seems very irritable:—emotion domain. But we also need to look at what’s going on in other domains: Is the child often tired or hungry? (Biological). Do they have difficulty seeing and understanding patterns (cognitive). Do they have trouble picking up on social cues (social). Is she hypersensitive to other peoples’ distress (prosocial).
This 10-page tool, designed for use with adolescents, provides a series of questions that help you start a conversation (with yourself, or colleagues, or parents) that will help you collect a more complete picture of what is going on with the adolescent in all five domains of self-regulation, including their strengths as well as weaknesses. That will help you understand the whole adolescent and help you see the unique and hidden stressors that may be affecting their behaviour, mood and learning.
Additional Learning:
Examples of Stressors in the Five Domains
