Another classroom intervention is being critiqued. Again. LinkedIn is filling up with think pieces about Zones of Regulation. Teachers are questioning whether we’re teaching children to regulate or just to mask. The creator herself has raised concerns about how it is implemented in schools. Parents are noticing their children holding it together at school only to unravel at home. The concerns are valid: when “green zone” becomes synonymous with “good,” we’ve turned emotional literacy into another performance of compliance.

But I find myself unable to drum up excitement for this takedown. Not because the critiques are wrong. They’re not. It’s because throughout my teaching career I’ve seen this play out. The enthusiastic rollout. The initial promise. The slow realization that something well-intentioned has become something else entirely. The think pieces. The quiet abandonment. Then the search for the next solution.

We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. And that cycle itself; that exhausting, resource-draining, perpetual motion, is what I want to talk about.

The Pattern

Here’s how it goes: A new intervention emerges, marketed to schools as addressing a real problem. And often, these classroom interventions do have genuine merit as ideas, strategies, ways of thinking. They boom. They get recommended. Schools invest in training, resources, implementation. They get rolled out widely. People start to see the positive effects of using them.

Then a couple of years down the road, we see that they are a problem. They’re being used as a tool of domination. They harm young people. Think pieces get written. All those books get put back in cupboards, all those resources get thrown away. And off we are back to the market asking again: what should I be doing with my young people?

Consider the examples: Zones of Regulation was intended to increase emotional literacy, to help children identify and name what they were experiencing. Quickly it became pressure to always be “in the green zone.” To always be good, fine, happy, ready to learn. The child’s experience of their body, their feelings, became reframed as a problem to be managed, something to be regulated to get them back on the teacher’s agenda.

Class Dojo and marbles in a jar gamified compliance so transparently that the control mechanism was visible from the start. Calming zones, designed for genuine self-regulation, become tools for removal and internal exclusion. Different tools, same trajectory. This cycle keeps us busy. It’s a tedious cycle that takes enormous resources. Money from school budgets, teacher time spent on training and creating materials and teaching children how to use these systems, policy-level discussions about what’s compulsory and what’s non-negotiable. Then all that energy comes to nothing when the system is thrown away and we start again.

The Real Problem

I’ve been thinking about this pattern, and I keep coming back to something simple: if my positioning is that I wish to cause you harm, you can put a knife in my hand or a pencil in my hand. I can make that harm happen with whatever tool you give me. If I wish to do good, the same principle applies. Any tool becomes an instrument of the wielder’s underlying orientation.

The Zones becoming coercive isn’t really about the Zones themselves. It’s about teachers and systems who were already oriented toward control finding a new vocabulary for it. You can’t solve that problem by swapping out the vocabulary. The emphasis we place on the tool as the thing that will save us is misplaced.

If we take the stated aims of Zones seriously (to equip children with skills to know themselves, connect with themselves, form community with others, and think deeply about what is happening to them and around them) then we can see the problem clearly. Put those aims into the hands of someone skilled at doing those things, you can use Zones to achieve them. But put them into the hands of someone who has not developed critical thinking around the systems which prevent us from doing that work, and they will continue not to be able to do it.

If we actually want to meet the aims of that project, we need to develop in our teaching professionals an understanding and a critical consciousness of the barriers to our students thriving in our schools. That is way harder than printing out four colours and sticking them on the wall and asking children to point to them so that you can fix the problem you believe lies inside them.

What the Cycle Does

This cycle consumes resources in the form of money from school budgets. Resources in the form of teacher time: training, reading, learning, creating resources, teaching children how to use these new systems. There are long SLT meetings where we hash out the timeframes for implementation and monitoring. Then all that energy comes to nothing when eventually the system is thrown in the bin. There’s a layer of capitalism at play here. These things are marketed to us.

But more importantly, this cycle keeps us busy. That busyness keeps us from addressing root causes. One of the things this cycle keeps us from doing is placing our emphasis, our attention, our energy and resources on the thing that will really make the shift: the people. The teachers and the school leadership who work every day in that system and who we have seen manage to pick up these well-intentioned tools and continue to do harm with them.

What would it mean to actually stop and confront the ways in which schools harm young people? What would it mean to acknowledge our own participation in that harm? The cycle protects us from having to sit with those questions.

What Gets Lost

In the moment, when a tool like Zones gets co-opted into a control mechanism, there’s an opportunity lost to be in genuine relationship and community with the young person. We lose the opportunity for them to express and fully connect with their emotions gets replaced with pressure to perform regulation for the teacher’s benefit.

But there is something more pernicious that lies in the co-opting of therapeutic language. A kind of gaslighting. The colonisation of the child’s internal experience. When “dysregulated” becomes a label applied to reframe a child’s emotional state as a problem for the teacher’s agenda rather than information about the child’s experience, we’ve done something deeply harmful. When therapeutic language gets poisoned this way, children learn to distrust it. There’s a longer-term loss of this way of thinking and connecting to your own experience.

For teachers, the cycle creates burnout from repeating the same pattern, cynicism when each promised solution fails, energy invested in systems that get abandoned. They miss the opportunity to develop what would actually help: the critical consciousness and relational skills that can’t be packaged and sold.

For the system, financial resources get wasted. The most othered children continue to be harmed while we stay busy cycling through classroom interventions. And we never build the capacity that would actually create change.

What This Means for Us

The problem was never finding the right intervention. The problem is that we keep asking classroom  interventions to do work that can only be done by people.

If we actually wanted children to develop self-knowledge, community, and critical thinking, we’d need to develop those capacities in teachers first. We’d need teachers with critical consciousness about systemic barriers to student thriving. We’d need teachers who understand that a child’s “behaviour” is information about relationships and systems, not a character flaw to be managed.

That’s slower and messier than buying a new programme. It can’t be packaged and sold. But it’s also the only thing that actually works.

And here’s the hopeful part: this work is already happening. Teachers are building communities of practice. They’re questioning the systems they’re part of. They are developing the critical consciousness to recognise when a well-intentioned tool is being co-opted for control. They’re asking better questions.

The next time a new classroom intervention is launched, the question doesn’t have to be “Does this work?” It can be: “Who is wielding it, and what is their orientation? Are they oriented toward control or connection? Toward fixing children or understanding systems? What support do they need to wield this tool in ways that genuinely serve children?”

We don’t have to keep cycling. We can choose to invest in people instead of programmes. Choose to build capacity for critical consciousness instead of buying the next behavioral management system. We can choose to support teachers in becoming practitioners who can take any tool and use it in service of children’s genuine flourishing.

That’s harder than waiting for the next intervention to save us. But it’s possible. And it’s already beginning.