You've met the Cups. Maybe in a keynote, maybe on a poster in someone's staff room, maybe as a passing mention inside a bigger presentation. Five Cups, five human needs. Easy to remember, easy to explain to a parent at the door.
So when your team needs something more advanced, trauma-informed practice or current neuroscience, say, it makes sense to ask us to skip the Cups and get straight to it. Here's why we don't, and why we'd like you to trust us on it.
What you're looking at when you look at five Cups
The Cups are the front end of work that goes back to 1998, when Sandi Phoenix began studying psychological science alongside her work as an educator. Sitting underneath them is a long list of thinkers and evidence. Some of it: William Glasser's Choice Theory, which shaped the earliest Cup labels; Self-Determination Theory (Ryan and Deci), which shaped the current ones; Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and the humanistic movement that grew up in reaction to behaviourism; positive psychology; the guidance approach (Dr Louise Porter, Dan Gartrell, Alfie Kohn); Ross Greene's position that children will do well when they can; Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion; and allostatic load theory (McEwen), which sits underneath all five Cups, because every need going unmet carries a physiological cost.
That's a reading list spanning psychological science, philosophy, affective neuroscience and education. Compressing it into five Cups took years, and the compression is the achievement. It's also the reason the Cups are easy to underestimate.
Think about musical notation. Five lines and some dots, learnable in an afternoon, and it carries a nursery rhyme and a symphony equally well. Notation is what lets a room full of musicians play the same piece together.
Something we notice when teams get in touch
The teams who have worked with us longest, the qualified, experienced educators and leaders with the deepest grasp of this material, are the ones who ring and ask for their annual Phoenix Cups in-service training. They ask for the Cups and the current neuroscience in the same breath. They've worked out that the Cups are where the shared language lives, and that the shared language is what makes the complex conversations possible.
The framework doesn't sit still
Two recent examples. We've retired 'behaviour is communication', because it implies an intentional message that often isn't there, particularly for very young children and children with developmental differences. We now frame behaviour as information, and as a person's best attempt in the moment with the skills, experiences and capacity they have. We've also moved away from describing Cup size as genetically fixed, because the epigenetics literature points to something relatively stable rather than set.
Both of those shifts landed after the most recent edition of the Educator Toolkit for Behaviour. Between keynotes, workshops, courses, blogs and the podcast, there are hundreds of hours of content behind those five Cups, and it grows every year, most recently through affective neuroscience and the neurobiological motivators the Cups can be used to demonstrate. Even a day with us every year brings your team up to where the thinking is that year. The field is enormous and it moves, which is exactly what professional development is for.
What happens when we skip it
We run a training needs analysis with you at the enquiry stage, and your facilitator runs it again when they arrive, asking your team about their knowledge, practice and confidence. That second pass is there to check we got it right, and it's usually where the shared language shows up as the missing piece: different educators using the word 'mastery' in different ways, a team who can name an unmet need but have no way to check whether their hypothesis is right, a program still running on rewards and consequences that nobody has flagged.
The facilitator then has two options: build the shared language on the fly and spend the time you'd set aside for the deeper work, or push on into the advanced content and watch it land on nothing. After that, they have to come back to you and raise it, which is an awkward conversation for everybody. We'd rather have it with you now, while we're still planning, so the day goes where you want it to go.
A self-check for your leadership team
Some teams are ready to start further along, and we'd love to work with you there. Sit with these questions before you decide.
- What are the five motivators behind children's behaviour, and what's the evidence base underneath that idea?
- How does your team explain the difference between a need and a behaviour to a family, in a two-minute conversation at the door?
- Where do emotions come from? And what does your team understand about the relationship between an emotion and a need, and the difference between the two?
- What does the size of a Cup describe, and what does the current science say about where that size comes from?
- What's the difference between an empty Cup and a big Cup?
- When an educator forms a hypothesis about an unmet need, what do they do next to check whether they're right?
- What's the difference between Will to Fill™ and Skill to Fill™, and which one is your program building?
- Where is behaviourism still sitting in your everyday practice, and does your team know why that matters?
If your team can answer these with confidence, tell us, and we'll scope a program that starts where you are. If a few are shaky, you're in good company, including teams with decades of experience between them.
Ask us for the advanced work: trauma-informed practice, the current neuroscience, inclusion and complex needs. We'll take you there, and we'll move as fast as your team can go. We want everyone in the room holding the same language by the time we reach the hard part, because that's what makes the hard part possible.
You know your team. We know the framework. Let's build the program together.
Meet the author
Our clever facilitation team all write about their areas of interests that they present about in our workshops. Click through to read more about the author and see which of our professional development sessions they facilitate.
Sandi Phoenix
BPsychSc, GradCertProfSt, GradCertHM&Neuro, CertIVTAE
Managing Director at Phoenix Support for Educators.
Beginning in 1998, Sandi has spent her whole career blending psychological science and education. Her tranlsational work merging theoretical knowledge with practical application led to the creation of The Phoenix Cups framework.