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Berry Street Education Model (BSEM) helps students to meet their bodily needs and to regulate in times of heightened stress.

Our first learning domain and accompanying course materials are called Body, and remind us that everybody benefits from consistent, predictable routines and co-regulatory environments that nurture students’ capabilities to self-regulate in their own bodies.

Self-regulation as a life skill helps students to navigate everyday difficulties and more challenging life experiences, both within the classroom and beyond.

The Body domain supports students to be Ready to Learn through strategies that build self-regulation for learning.

The Body domain includes four focus areas:

  • The first focus area is the impact of adversity on learning. It empowers educators to deeply understand the needs of students who have experienced early adversity, and the complex ways they may feel, think, and behave in the classroom.
  • The second focus area of consistent, predictable routines provides students with a sense of safety and predictability and prevents chaotic classroom environments that can escalate student stress.
  • The third focus area, body awareness, focuses on noticing early warning signs of escalation and stress in the body.
  • Regulation and de-escalation, the fourth focus area, nurtures students’ self-regulatory capacities, and provides strategies for de-escalating in times of heightened stress.

Students who have experienced early adversity may have highly reactive stress response systems (Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 2023).

We suspect that all educators know students who can be highly reactive, those who may become distressed or dysregulated and behave in ways that impact both their own learning and their learning community.

We are also mindful of students whose stress is more challenging to spot in the classroom, such as those who mask their struggles by internalising their dysregulation or behaving in rigidly compliant ways to hide their significant anxiety or distress.

The Body domain provides all students with strategies that soothe their stress response and support them to be Ready to Learn.

Here, we focus on a priority strategy that is essential to students’ regulation: Ready to Learn Plans.

Ready to Learn Plans

Ready to Learn Plans are structured and compassionate plans for times when a student is feeling dysregulated or escalated. Ready to Learn Plans are created by students with educator support and guidance. The objective is for all students within our educational communities to have a Ready to Learn Plan, and to be able to access their plans across all classes and contexts.

While there is flexibility in the content of Ready to Learn Plans, they cover similar topics. For example, students may be asked to reflect on the following prompts:

  • Sometimes at school, I get escalated or frustrated when this happens ...
  • When I get escalated or frustrated, my behaviour can look like ...
  • The physical response in my body is ...
  • Some things I can do to support myself to de-escalate are ...
  • An adult can help me to de-escalate by ...

To start with, educators may need to suggest to students that they may benefit from using their Ready to Learn Plans. Over time, students often develop their capabilities to recognise that they are starting to feel overwhelmed or dysregulated and will ask to use their plans themselves. In this way, Ready to Learn Plans become a consistent, predictable routine shared across the educational community.

Benefits of Ready to Learn Plans

Ready to Learn Plans list pre-prepared strategies for students to use when they are feeling escalated, dysregulated, or overwhelmed. Importantly, the strategies are decided by the students themselves with educators' guidance and support.

These de-escalation strategies may include regulatory movement, using sensory supports, practising mindfulness activities, or talking with a trusted adult for nurturing co-regulatory support.

Students will then have constructive pathways for use when they are feeling distressed or heightened, always knowing that their educators are there to support them.

Ready to Learn Plans are a highly co-regulatory strategy.

They communicate to students: “We know you will sometimes become distressed or escalated, and that is OK. We will be here to support you.”

They are invaluable in communicating unconditional positive regard for students Unconditional positive regard is genuinely valuing students, and demonstrating that our warmth and empathy are not conditional on their behaviour (Rogers, 1961; Testa, 2022).

Ready to Learn Plans communicate that students are accepted, valued, and supported, independently of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Ready to Learn Plans help students to develop insight and self-awareness into their own stress responses.

This includes reflecting on times in the school day that may be more difficult for them, such as moments when they find learning challenging, navigating a change in routine, dealing with a loud or chaotic environment, or having conflict with a peer.

Reflecting on different experiences through the school day normalises that everyone feels stress sometimes.

Ready to Learn Plans are a long term strategy.

As a long-term strategy, Ready to Learn Plans help students develop personal awareness and regulatory skills that are useful both during their time at school and beyond. Having a well-developed toolkit for regulating stress is an invaluable resource that prepares students for challenging situations throughout their lives.

Ready to Learn Plans ask students to identify their signs of escalation, including reflecting on their behaviour in difficult moments and noticing what is happening in their bodies. Ready to Learn Plans both rely on and build students’ interoceptive capacities.

Interoception is an internal sensory system that attends to bodily cues (Goodall & McAuley, 2019). It is an essential skill in self-regulation (Neal, 2021).

Educators may be familiar with students who appear to go from 0 to 100 quickly.

These students are often unaware of the stages in between, missing the early warning signs of stress in their bodies. Students may not notice their hearts starting to race, or their fists becoming clenched until they throw a punch.

They may be unaware of their throat starting to tighten or their breath starting to quicken, until they are crying uncontrollably. Students’ escalated stress and behaviour can also significantly disrupt the learning community, and they may also feel embarrassment, shame, or low self-worth after these difficult moments.

Students who can notice escalation signals in their bodies and activate a regulation strategy from their Ready to Learn Plans are practising the best early intervention for a stressed or escalated response.

For example, a student may observe that they are starting to feel queasy in their stomach or feel their muscles starting to tense.

It takes time and practice for students to notice these early warning signs, and for educators to support them and intervene early.

Over time, students’ capacities build and it becomes easier to notice bodily signals and act early to self-regulate or ask for help.

With consistent use, Ready to Learn Plans empower students with the skills to recognise and meet their needs before they reach the point of meltdown or shutdown.

Tips for using Ready to Learn Plans

There are several things to keep in mind when implementing Ready to Learn Plans. First, it is important that Ready to Learn Plans are never used in a punitive or negative manner. For example, if a student engages in adverse behaviour and is then simply told to go and use their Ready to Learn Plan, the student may begin to associate their Ready to Learn Plan with their educator’s expression of frustration.

Ensuring Ready to Learn Plans are used in positive and empathetic ways often relies on the educator recognising micro-moments of escalation, both their students’ and their own. Educators can then take proactive action before students’ behaviour escalates to the point where they act in ways unaligned with their own values or when they disrupt the classroom community. Ensuring Ready to Learn Plan suggestions are communicated with unconditional positive regard also helps students to know that their educators are there to support and not punish them, even when they are struggling.

It is also important for educators to ensure that students are using their Ready to Learn Plans in ways that are aligned with classroom expectations. For example, if a student’s de-escalation strategy is to have 5 minutes in a sensory space and they are not back after 10 minutes, the plan will require revision with the student. In such cases, it is invaluable to revisit the plans and ensure expectations are clear and consistent and incorporate the student’s own views on both helpful and unhelpful strategies. We never want to take away the opportunity to use Ready to Learn Plans, knowing that the plans evolve and change as the student does too.

It is important for educators to keep in mind that some students may be highly dysregulated and do not yet feel a sense of safety and belonging at school. It might appear that these students use their Ready to Learn Plans too frequently or that their plans are insufficient to regulate their substantial distress and dysregulation. Similarly, a student can have great strategies on their Ready to Learn Plan but, if the adults and the environment are not co-regulating, the student may continue to struggle.

Effective Ready to Learn Plans rely on using all the strategies from Body and the other BSEM domains. This ensures that consistent, predictable routines are in place to communicate safety and belonging to students and soothe heightened stress responses. Importantly, we also need to provide co-regulatory supports and strong teacher-student relationships that communicate safety, acceptance, and warmth to students.

It is also important that Ready to Learn Plans are revisited on a regular basis and updated with new insights and de-escalation strategies when needed. When we do not give up on a student's Ready to Learn Plan, we are demonstrating that we will never give up on them, especially when they are struggling. For young people who may have received a lot of negative messages in their lives, this sentiment can be as important as the strategy itself.

Ready to Learn Plans and inclusion

Ready to Learn Plans are highly effective inclusion tools that support students with a diverse range of needs in the classroom. When working with students with disability, who are neurodivergent, or who have additional learning needs, one recommendation is to aspire for consistency between support and classroom settings.

For example, if a student is working with an occupational therapist on sensory tools and strategies, these can be integrated into their Ready to Learn Plans. This ensures strategies developed in therapeutic settings are accessible in the classroom, and also communicates to students that everyone is on the same team in supporting them.

It is beyond the scope of this article to fully explore how to adapt Ready to Learn Plans for students with diverse needs. However, BSEM offers specialised consultation services with our senior consultants with expertise and qualifications in this area to provide more detailed guidance on differentiating Ready to Learn Plans.

We also offer a masterclass in Disability and Inclusion which provides comprehensive information on this important area of our work.

Ready to Learn Plans as an ongoing priority

Ready to Learn Plans can feel new and unfamiliar to both students and educators at the beginning of the school year. However, we encourage all educators to have patience and persistence as they enact them as part of their consistent, predictable routines.

All students, particularly those who are managing highly reactive stress response systems, will have moments across the school day that will cause stress and escalation.

Without a clear plan of how to move forward in difficult moments, students’ stress may lead to overwhelm or adverse behaviors that affect other students and the classroom community. Providing students with clear pathways and plans to access help when they are struggling is a highly empathetic approach. It communicates high expectations for our students:

“We know this is hard, but we also know you can do this. We are here to support you every step of the way.”

References

Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (2023). A guide to toxic stress.https://developingchild.harvard.edu/guide/a-guide-to-toxic-stress

Goodall, E., & McAuley, M. (2019). Linking interoception to the Australian curriculum: General capabilities and embedding in classroom practices. Department of Education, South Australian Government. https://www.education.sa.gov.au/docs/curriculum/linking-interoception-to-the-australian-curriculum.pdf

Neal, A. M. (2021). Somatic interventions to improve self-regulation in children and adolescents. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, 34(3), 171–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcap.12315

Rogers, C. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.

Testa, D. (2022). Supporting vulnerable students: Staff and parents speak. Health Education Journal, 81(3), 280–292. https://doi.org/10.1177/00178969211073681