If you’ve worked with children for any length of time, then you’ll be familiar with the unsettling feeling of a session unravelling before your very eyes. The thing you had lovingly planned and thought would be amazing isn’t going as you hoped. It seems to be getting worse and worse and you seem to have less and less control over it.
Sometimes it’s sudden and unexpected, like the time I was leading a session in a school hall and I turned around to discover the teacher had left the room, I was on my own and ten kids were shouting at me from the top of the monkey bars (you know those wooden climbing thing they have in school halls for PE).
More often it’s more like ‘death by a thousand cuts’ as a whole series of things don’t quite go as planned and they all have knock on effects to other things, especially behaviour, and before you know it you feel like you’ve lost control.
So what do you do? One option is of course to run from the room screaming, pausing only to trigger the fire alarm and then never return again. There are better options, however, and we should probably explore them first, as it would be good to have a group to go back to next week when things will most likely be much better than this. So what to do?
1. Try and find the space to think clearly
You need a plan, you can’t just keep reacting to things as they happen – you need to get some control back. This is the hardest part but thinking clearly now will save the day.
2. Establish a ‘fall-back’ position
You know that game that all the kids love for no obvious reason and you’re really bored with? Play it now! That will get you back in control and I guess that as you’ve run it loads of times you won’t need to give it your full attention. So you’ve now got that space to think about what comes next.
3. Remember your behaviour management
Make sure you start reinforcing good behaviour by praising the children who are behaving well and communicating positive expectations. Don’t fall back on being dictatorial with the kids as that will make it worse!
4. Don’t flog dead horses
If the session you’ve planned isn’t working then you might need to give up and try something else. You’ve got the game going so now you have time to think about the rest of the session. Are there any other faithful standbys you can fall back on? This might involve you as leader knocking something on the head that another team member has invested a lot in. That will be harsh and you will need to go out of your way to smooth the situation afterwards but sometimes it will be the only way of getting back on track.
5. Proceed with caution
We’ve got the session back now but it’s probably still fragile so keep a careful lid on things through to the end of the session, don’t let it fall back into the mess.
6. Review at the end
Make sure at the end you have time to talk and try and piece together what happened here. Were there factors beyond your control (why do under 7s go mad on a windy day) that you couldn’t have predicted and were there mistakes you made that you can learn from. My guess is that both will be true and you just need to make sure you learn from this.
Sam Donoghue is Head of Children’s and Youth Support at the Diocese of London and an experienced children’s worker.