When a class feels like a rogue train, pull the emergency lever.
A rapid-response, psychologically grounded intervention that shifts a dysregulated classroom from fragmentation to cooperation — in under two weeks. Teachers can run it inside a week.
"The strategies that work with individual students often fail with a dysregulated class — because the problem is not individual."
When a class has slipped past standard behaviour management, the system needs a different kind of intervention. One that addresses the social architecture of the room, not just the behaviour of the individuals within it.
Classrooms don't just contain behaviour.
They generate it socially.
A hard class is not a collection of difficult individuals. It is a dysregulated social system — a social nervous system. Intervene at that level and behaviour begins to follow.
A five-stage sequence that is also a circle — after the final stage, you rerun the loop with a higher-order goal.
Name what is happening in the social system, not the individual.
Set up the visible collective container, goal and reward.
Introduce the reset with deliberate, scripted language.
Absorb resistance and stay regulated through the pushback.
Fade the system so the room owns the change.
After Transfer, the loop restarts with a higher-order goal — each cycle builds on the last.
~90 minutes. Six modules. One action every Monday morning. Get instant access today.
Enrol Now — Get Instant Access →Lessons under 12 minutes. Every module ends with one action you can take Monday morning.
A hard class is a dysregulated social system, not a set of difficult kids.
Sherif, Deci & Ryan, collective efficacy. The credibility layer.
The mechanical core: container, goal, reward, reinforcement cadence.
Verbatim teacher language for the moments that decide whether it takes.
Extinction bursts, sabotage, reward fatigue — named, with a response for each.
Fading the system so class identity, not marbles, holds the change.
The hardest day is often day three. This course names the forms pushback takes — extinction bursts, the swinging minority, sabotage, reward fatigue — and gives you a response for each. Then it teaches you to fade the intervention so the room owns the change, not the system.
"This is who we are now."
Competition fractures groups; a shared superordinate goal repairs them. Most hard classes lack a goal they share. The reset installs one.
Punitive systems starve relatedness, competence and autonomy at once. The reset feeds all three — deliberately, structurally, and in sequence.
The shift from "I can't" to "we can" is the actual mechanism of change. The Reset Loop is designed to engineer that shift, not hope for it.
Consultant Psychologist · Former Teacher · Lead School Psychologist
Behaviour Intelligence / RSO Consulting
Stuart McKenzie is a consultant psychologist with a career spanning classroom teaching, school psychology, and whole-school behaviour systems. As lead school psychologist and founder of Behaviour Intelligence and RSO Consulting, he has worked with schools across Australia on psychosocial hazard management, resilience, and staff wellbeing.
His work sits at the intersection of applied psychology and practical classroom reality — grounded in evidence, designed to be used on a Monday morning.
~90 minutes across six short modules. Every lesson under 12 minutes. Every module ends with one action you can take Monday morning. Includes the Hard Class Triage Tool, Staff Briefing Pack, and the full Reset Toolkit.
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No — the marble jar is the medium, not the mechanism. The mechanism is collective efficacy: the shift from a fragmented group to one that shares a goal, experiences collective wins, and begins to regulate as a unit. The psychology draws on Sherif's superordinate goals research, Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory, and the collective efficacy literature. The container is simple by design; the psychology underneath it is not.
Classroom teachers with a class that has slipped past standard behaviour management. It is not a first-line resource for general classroom management — it is an emergency protocol for a class that is already dysregulated as a social system.
Teachers can launch inside a week. Early collective wins are engineered into the first 48 hours — the system is designed to produce visible momentum quickly, because momentum is what sustains teacher effort through the harder middle days.
The reset rewards collective progress; it does not punish collective failure. That distinction matters, and it is addressed directly in the course. The system is designed so that the class experiences wins together — not so that one student's behaviour costs the group.
Approximately 90 minutes across six short modules, plus a downloadable toolkit. Fully self-paced. Lessons are under 12 minutes each, and every module ends with one action you can take on Monday morning.
