Teaching strategies

Having explored some of the underpinning causes of emotional difficulties and challenging behaviors and some principles that might underpin practice, it is now appropriate to consider how educators can use a curriculum to impact on the personal and social development of these learners. It is important to recognize, however, that unlike learners with obvious disabilities or learning difficulties, those with social and emotional difficulties do not fit into a category or syndrome. There is no set of symptoms, no particular recognizable features of an individual. In fact, they are as diverse as the general population and different from each other. They are categorized therefore solely by the effect they have in the classroom, on others in the classroom and on the traditional school system of managing learning.

Many learners with SEBD are socially immature and have not had the opportunity to reflect on their personal development. Understandably this leads to a lack of knowledge, skills and understanding in the social and inter-personal domain. Access to the curriculum means making the broad national curriculum meaningful and relevant to learners who are either socially immature, may have differential abilities, who are disaffected or who are experiencing emotional difficulties in their lives.