Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

travel in both directions. Although there are more links going up from the amygdala than coming down to it, it still means that not only do our emotions have a direct input on our thoughts, but also our thoughts can have direct input into our emotions.
    What does all this mean for you in your classroom when little Darren is standing with a face like thunder and a pot of red paint in his hand and you know he is just about to lose it completely? It means that you have to do what you can do to give Darren the space, time and especially the strategies to allow him to use his developing pre-frontal cortex to take back over the neurological reins from his currently highly activated amygdalae, something you can help them learn to do by way of a simple acronym – STAR:
    Stop
Think
Act
Reflect
    This four-step process starts to teach the brain to buy itself time before acting (although in the situation above, it could well be a little late for Darren as his finger is already on the proverbial trigger). The key here, and this is another critical element in the development of emotional intelligence, is to learn to spot when the amygdala is starting to kick in and do something then before it’s too late. In my experience, children can do this, even quite young children. The important thing is to teach them the strategies about what to do next. Again, in my experience in classrooms, children usually have two options at this stage – either (1) lose it completely, throw stuff about, hit someone or swear at the teacher and get thrown out of the lesson and onto the slippery slope or (2) suppress these feelings, thus sending a message to their growing sense of self-worth and self-esteem that says, my feelings don’t count. STAR offers a third way. One primary school we worked with has a ‘STAR corner’ where childrenwho know they are about to lose it can go in order to move away from whatever or whoever it was giving them so much trouble, regain control over their neurochemistry and then, when they feel they are ready, rejoin the lesson as if nothing had happened.
    What do they do in that critical period between stopping and acting? There are a number of things, but simple visualization and breathing techniques can help. Teaching children simple meditative strategies has been shown to have beneficial effects on stress levels. As the Independent Educational Consultant Association conference that we met in the previous chapter was told:
    Certain meditation techniques have been documented to improve emotional regulation and sleep, and reduce blood pressure as effectively as medication.
    ( www.strugglingteens.com/news/executivefunctioning.html )
    I mentioned this STAR process to a group of teachers from a secondary school recently and one of the deputies spoke to me during the break to thank me for explaining why something he did instinctively worked so well. He was known as ‘The Jailer’ as he used to be a prison warden and in his inner-city school he was the one who was called on when things were getting out of hand in a particular classroom. One of the things he did was to take the stroppy or threatening student and rather than whisk them away to some exclusion base for a period of solitary confinement in a scholastic version of extraordinary rendition, he would take them for a walk around the school quad. And he would talk to them. And walk. And talk. And let them talk. He said it was not very long before they were able to talk rationally and maturely about what they had done and why it may not have been appropriate and what they maybe could have done differently.
    This is STAR in action.
    The state they were in which prompted the class teacher to hit the panic button was one of obvious high amygdala arousal. How they got there we can think about in a minute. If ‘The Jailer’ had entered the classroom all guns blazing as I have seen other members of senior management teams do on occasions (often because they think this is what the teacher who called them expects them to do) then it would be seen by the student as simply another form of attack to go with the one he or she is already experiencing. The amygdala and all associated ‘fight or flight’ mechanisms will be even more active than before. Even if the deputy had come in and tried to reason with the student at this stage it would still not be particularly effective, as you will know if you have ever tried to persuade a lizard anything. You are trying to reason with a