Nowadays in Italy there is an increase of children with social, emotional and behavioral difficulties (SEBD) and teachers, in their daily practice, have to cope with them. Creating learning opportunities for all children, dealing with their off-task learning behavior, maximizing the participation of pupils in mainstream classrooms and involving and engaging with parents and communities are some of the strategies used by teachers to support their learning and development. What are the effective ways of supporting children in their difficulties? What are the strategies used by teachers in their daily work? And which of them are considered (by the teachers) successful one? The type of research presented has been referred to a ‘storytelling’ case study – an analytical account of narrative stories and descriptive accounts of educational events, projects, programmes, institutions or systems which deserve to be told to interested audiences, after careful analysis. (Bassey, 1999: 2). The Project aims to develop comprehensive case study through the collection of narratives about the teachers’ experience of children’s SEBD in the school context. The focus of the narratives was the cases of successful in coping children’s SEBD by teachers’ and each case explores the details and meanings of teacher’s experience, and from their narratives the researchers work in order to: - explore significant features of the case, in particular which elements make a teacher’s story a successful one; - construct a worthwhile argument or story, that is significant for teachers. The research aims to find out what are the best-practices created and managed by teachers to deal with pupil’s SEBD, in order to construct exemplar-cases, because as Stake (1994: 238) argued the best way to teach some professional skills is by the case method.

Our work represents a collective case study (Stake, 1995) and the guiding principle of the data gathering process was to create a case study database (Yin, 1994). The tools we used to collect data were two: an exploratory-schedule and interviews. The exploratory-schedules were distributed through the school administration to all the teachers of the local school-system (n. 1553) and the goal of these instruments were to collect and screen teachers’ experiences of children’s SEBD in school. The analysis of the exploratory-schedules reached the following: - a broad database of effectives strategies used by teachers to cope with children’s SEBD; - to choose relevant and significant cases to analyze deeply, in order to meet the richness of the cases. The cases chosen were re-analyzed and from each of them were construct a semi-structured interview. Now we are conducting the interviews with the teachers (about 100) and we are analyzing them.

In multiple case studies, each case may represent a different type of children’s difficult, teachers’ strategies or programs and school’s context but each of them portrays as a clustering of properties of teachers’ strategies. At the end of the analysis process it will be possible to indicate some features of teacher’s strategies, which make them able to successfully cope with children’s SEBD and raise their attainments. The paper presents part of the results of our work that will end in 2010. The analysis of the data came from interviews is in progress and the findings will be ready for the conference.