There are mornings in early childhood classrooms when everything seems to happen at once. One child is biting. Another is screaming through every transition. Someone keeps running from the group. Two children are fighting over the same toy. A family arrives with a concern at the worst possible moment.
By lunchtime, the teacher may have spent hours helping children regulate emotions, solve conflicts, follow routines, and stay safe. When a director steps into the room, it can be tempting to immediately focus on the behavior: What happened? What strategy have you tried? What can we change?
Those are important questions. But there may be another question that needs to come first:
What does this teacher need right now?
Supporting challenging behavior is demanding work. Before educators can thoughtfully respond to children, they sometimes need someone to help them pause, reset, and feel supported themselves.
The Adult Needs a Reset, Too
In Trust First: Turn Behaviors that Challenge Us into Opportunities to Learn, Deborah Bergeron, PhD, and Rhonda Conn-Parent begin their approach to challenging behavior with the P.I.T. Stop: Pause, Inhale, and Think. The authors explain that people move in and out of stressful situations throughout the day and sometimes need an opportunity to refuel before responding. Their P.I.T. Stop is designed as a brief reset for both children and adults.
That matters because teachers are not simply observers of classroom behavior. They are participants in the emotional environment.
A teacher who has spent the morning preventing one child from hurting another, calming repeated meltdowns, or redirecting a child who continually runs away from the group may be frustrated, worried, overstimulated, or exhausted. Asking that teacher to immediately analyze the situation and implement another strategy may not be the most helpful first step.
Sometimes the most useful intervention is five minutes of coverage. A drink of water. A quiet conversation. Someone saying, “I can see that was a hard morning. Tell me what happened.”
The same P.I.T. Stop we offer children can apply to the adults caring for them.
Look Beneath the Behavior
Once everyone has had a chance to reset, leaders can help teachers look beneath the behavior rather than simply trying to stop it.
Adam Holland, PhD, challenges traditional approaches to behavior management in Thinking Outside the Prize Box. He examines the limitations of relying heavily on rewards, punishments, and external control and instead emphasizes the importance of supporting children’s autonomy, competence, relationships, and internal motivation.
That shift can completely change a coaching conversation.
Instead of asking, “How do we make him stop doing this?” a director and teacher might ask: What skill is still developing? Is the child seeking connection? Does the child have meaningful choices? Is the task beyond what the child can currently manage? Have we actually taught the behavior we expect?
Holland’s framework encourages educators to think of behavior as something children can learn, just like any other skill. That moves the conversation away from control and toward teaching.
And that kind of reflection is much easier when a teacher feels supported rather than judged.
Listen Before You Coach
Supporting educators after a difficult day does not mean ignoring ineffective practice or avoiding necessary coaching.
In It’s Fine! Everything’s Fine! (And You’re in Charge), Jill Jacobi-Vessels, PhD, and Amy Kay Powell, PhD, emphasize that directors play an important role in creating a workplace where staff feel included, valued, and respected. Their guidance repeatedly returns to communication, connection, relationships, and the importance of maintaining good people.
That means coaching should not begin with correction alone.
A supportive director can still say, “We need a different plan for this behavior.” But that conversation feels very different when it begins with listening.
Sometimes a teacher needs help thinking through what happened. Sometimes they need a second set of eyes in the classroom. Sometimes they need reassurance that a difficult morning does not mean they are failing. And sometimes they need a director to notice that the problem is not only the child’s behavior, but also the environment, staffing pattern, schedule, transition, or classroom setup surrounding it.
Listening first makes it easier to figure out which kind of support is actually needed.
Support Is More Than Encouragement
“Hang in there” can be kind. It is not always enough.
Real support may look practical.
It may mean covering a classroom for five minutes so a teacher can reset. It may mean stepping in during a particularly difficult transition. It may mean observing the classroom and helping the teacher notice patterns they cannot see while they are in the middle of managing them.
It may also mean helping the teacher rethink the environment, adjust expectations, identify an unmet need, or practice different language to use the next time the behavior occurs.
Bergeron and Conn-Parent consistently frame challenging behavior as an opportunity to teach, reflect, and respond in a more solution-focused way. Trust First emphasizes trust, needs, mistakes, and teaching the behavior you want to see rather than simply reacting to the behavior you do not want.
Directors can apply that same mindset to staff support.
The goal is not just to reassure teachers. It is to help them feel capable of taking the next step.
Ask the Question That Comes First
There is no single perfect response after a difficult morning.
The teacher may need coaching. Or coverage. Or reassurance. Or another adult to observe what is happening. They may need help thinking through a child’s needs, a classroom routine, or their own response to repeated stress.
What they probably do not need is to feel as though the entire problem rests on their shoulders.
Early childhood educators are asked to create calm, responsive, relationship-rich environments where young children can learn to regulate emotions, navigate conflict, build social skills, and make mistakes safely. That is demanding work, especially when challenging behavior happens repeatedly.
If we want teachers to respond to children with patience, curiosity, and care, then leaders have to make space for teachers to receive those things, too.
Supporting children means supporting the adults who spend their days supporting children.
So when a teacher comes out of a classroom after the kind of morning that leaves everyone drained, the first question does not always have to be, “How are we going to fix this behavior?”
Sometimes the better place to begin is:
“What do you need from me right now?”
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