15 Effective Ways to Manage Dysregulated Students

If you listen carefully to early childhood teachers—if you really put your ear to the ground—you can almost hear the sound of nerves fraying.

In a popular teacher forum on reddit, by way of example, one frustrated elementary school teacher, at the end of her proverbial rope, confided that in recent years more and more kindergarten students are arriving in classrooms still wearing diapers. “Our poor [kindergarten] teachers,” she lamented, “are trying to teach 22 students to read AND clean up wet or poopy children.” 

That’s not the way it’s always been. Today, nearly 8 in 10 public schools report significant developmental delays among K-12 students, and a 2024 EdWeek survey of over 1,500 pre-K-3 teachers echos that claim and raises the stakes: many more of their students, educators say, are struggling with basic social and emotional skills such as listening, following directions, sharing, and taking turns than a mere five years ago. 

While many experts cite the pandemic's role in creating skill deficiencies, it's only a part of the story. Educators also point to major changes in the culture around child rearing, pointing to issues like rising screen time, less play, and fewer opportunities for face-to-face interaction—“developmental needs that no digital program, however sophisticated, can fully replicate,” writes elementary school teacher Cara Zelas. 

Serious behavioral issues and developmental concerns require broad support from administrators, specialists, and families. But for everyday moments that derail lessons—a child melting down, refusing directions, or struggling to rejoin the group—many teachers find that simple practices, consistently applied, can help turn big feelings into moments of growth instead of lost instructional time.

Expand Kids’ Emotional Vocabulary: Before kids can regulate their emotions, they need the words to describe them. Educator and author Kathryn Fishman-Weaver says kids need to be explicitly taught that emotions aren’t “good or bad” but actually convey important information. A “limited emotional vocabulary” can make it harder for children to understand the signals their body is sending. 

To help kids learn the subtle differences between emotions, Fishman-Weaver and other early childhood educators suggest:

• Feeling Brainstorms: Challenge students to think of 3–5 words for simple emotions such as “happy” or “sad” to help them move beyond broad categories and build a more nuanced understanding of what they’re feeling.
• Emotion Anchor Charts: Create anchor charts illuminating various emotional states, adding new words and definitions as they come up in class discussions or read-alouds. For pre-readers, try to pair each word with an image, emoji, or student-friendly example to make sure they understand.
• Map Feelings Over Time: Once students have developed a healthy emotional vocabulary, use tools like emotion wheels and mood scales to help them become more aware of how their emotions fluctuate over time. 

Create Agreements Students Own: To establish behavioral norms, Zelas recommends co-creating child-friendly community agreements at the start of the year. During discussion, students can generate simple norms like “we keep our hands to ourselves” or “we are nice to each other”; teachers can make the agreed-upon norms clearer through illustrations, drawings, or photos of children modeling each behavior. 

Role-playing with student actors or puppets can help explicitly show kids what these norms look like in real time, while praising the behavior when students practice it correctly can help make the expectation stick.

Create a Space for Calm: When young students become dysregulated, they often need time to calm their bodies before addressing what happened. “When a child is overwhelmed, reasoning doesn’t work,” writes elementary school teacher Hema Khatri. “First they need help settling their bodies.” 

Calm-down corners—or “peace corners” as teachers at Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Nashville call them—provide a dedicated, comfortable space for students to reset. At Fall-Hamilton, each classroom has a corner with bean bag chairs, sensory toys, and charts showing breathing exercises students can try. Students are proactively encouraged to take five minutes and go to the space on their own when they need to engage in self-regulation. “I’ve seen a lot of my kids this year—instead of just exploding or getting really upset—say ‘OK, I need to go to the peace corner,’” says fourth-grade teacher Whitney Holland. 

Let Books Do the Talking: Picture books can help kids explore emotions and abstract concepts like kindness, fairness, and respect—opening the door to “meaningful conversations in ways that feel natural and familiar,” says Zelas.

Educator Kristin Rydholm recommends books like Big Feelings, which “identifies and addresses the intense emotions that children sometimes experience when attempting to work collaboratively,” while Zelas points to books like What If Everybody Did That?, by Ellen Javernick to help kids see how small choices “can add up to big problems.” 

After reading with her students, teacher Cecilia Cabrera Martirena writes that she reads a second time to help students “notice reactions and feelings” expressed by characters, pausing to ask: “How do you know [insert character] is scared at this moment?” or bridging the story to students’ lives with questions like: “Have you ever felt like this when you tried to do something hard?” and “What helped you do it?” Exercises like these, Martirena writes, ground emotions “in lived experience.”

Use Brain Breaks: Well-timed brain breaks can stave off the fatigue, boredom, and distraction that often leads to dysregulation, writes neurologist and teacher Judy Willis. She recommends a 3-5 minute break for students for every 15 minutes of concentrated academic work in elementary school. “You don’t have to overthink it, or add to your workload by planning entertaining activities,” Willis says. Try simple routines like these instead: 

• Circles of Sameness: Students get up and take positions around the room as the teacher reads a statement. Those who agree move to the center; others stay put. Educator Jocelyn Greene suggests playful prompts like “Unicorns are superior to dragons” or text-based ones like “Wilbur is brave” after students read Charlotte’s Web.
• Laugh Like a…: Brainstorm animals, creatures, or characters, then cue students: “Drop everything and laugh like a ___.” Try a few in quick succession—monkey, whale, giraffe—to help students release tension and reset.
• Statue Freeze: Ask students to move around the room—walking, hopping, skipping, or tiptoeing—then call out a pose: “Be a statue of a lion!” Students freeze, then “un-freeze” and repeat.

• One-Minute Dance Party: Sometimes kids just need to move. For a quick, unstructured reset that works out pent-up energy, play a lively song and let students dance for one minute before returning to the lesson.

Teach Repair Rituals: When rules are inevitably broken, Zelas recommends creating a routine that helps students repair harm they may have caused. That might mean teaching young children how to offer a verbal apology, asking them to draw a picture of something the other child might like, or write a short note of contrition. “The point is not to force an apology,” Zelas explains, “but to scaffold the process of reflection and responsibility.” 

After a pushing incident, for example, a teacher might focus less on “Why did you do that?” and more on what happened, how the other child may have felt, and what the student can do to help—turning a difficult moment “into a moment of learning and connection.” 

Build in Open-Ended Play: Even the days of our youngest students are highly structured, says first grade teacher Cynthia Michelini, leaving less time for open-ended play and self-exploration. Michelini finds that integrating 10-minute outdoor breaks into her instruction helps her students reset. The key, she says, is to give little directions beyond staying safe and taking a break. 

Michelini’s students walk around the schoolyard, play in the trees, run games, or simply lie in the grass for a few minutes. “When we come back inside, their attention span is longer, they participate more, they ask more questions, and there’s less need for them to ask to leave the room to use the restroom,” she wrote. 

If going outside isn’t possible, try a similar 10-minute period of open-ended play after big transitions, such as returning from lunch, “to help children regulate before the afternoon,” Zelas says.