Offers a detailed insight into how children's emotions affect their learning - and delivers key lessons on how we can better connect with both the head and the heart during the teaching and learning process. How are we to think of the disruptive or destructive child? Drawing on over 25 years of working with children with challenging behaviour, Peter Nelmes argues that such children are members of a community who are possibly the least recognised, understood and accepted in society - whose problems are often met with condemnation rather than understanding and support. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies, he sets out to answer the question as to why emotional difficulties - grief, trauma and abuse - very often diminish a child's capacity for learning. By explaining this phenomenon he gives anyone who works with such children a framework for understanding how emotions play out in the classroom and a way of thinking about how the heart and the brain relate to each other in practice. If you have ever struggled to teach - or even just connect with - a troubled child, then this book is for you.