Delivering quality professional development & resources for teachers
Stress is a part of life, right? We all have to learn to deal with it. Teachers, however, report high levels of stress and the attrition rate of new teachers is between 30-40% in the first five years. While your employer has some responsibility for the health and safety, it is up to you to be accountable for your own wellbeing.
Teachers who adopt a positive approach to behaviour are more likely to have improved wellbeing through increased job satisfaction since they are not looking for a quick fix, but recognise that like all learning, we need long term solutions that take the needs of the student into account.
Planning does not just mean preparing your lesson content, but giving thought to how you want your students to behave before, during and after the lesson. Here are 5 simple yet highly powerful ways to create positive behaviour change with your students.
When you are giving instructions, think about the words and tone you use. There is often a more positive way to say most things which will provide a better learning opportunity for your students.
Student and teacher wellbeing are closely linked, and both impact student achievement and outcomes. Adopting some simple practices in the classroom can improve the quality of life for both your students and yourself.
Just as a young child learns to master their environment when they have appropriate levels of support and freedom, so our students learn to be independent, self-motivated learners when the environment is appropriately predictable and challenging. Here are 8 ways to help your students be independent learners
In schools where teachers don’t feel safe themselves, they are more likely to ignore poor student behaviour because they don’t feel supported or valued. Here are 7 ways that schools can work to change the culture of ignoring bad behaviour.
Social and emotional learning is a vital element of student development with clear research showing the positive impact on academic results. However, with all the curriculum content teachers need to cover, many teachers are asking how they can possibly add social and emotional learning to their load. Here are 8 easy ways.....
Focus on teaching the skill of listening (yes those acronyms do help). Break the skill into identifiable components for students and then practise, role play, make posters and dramatise scenarios. Use positive reinforcement to help with this and/or reward students for using the skill appropriately.
The beginning of the school year is undoubtedly exciting, but it can also be an overwhelming time for new teachers, or even for experienced teachers and if you are changing schools, teaching a new grade level or a new subject area or going back to teaching after a break, this time can be even more stressful. There are three things that will make a huge difference to your classroom, your sanity and your students’ success and they are not about curriculum, they are about behaviour.
How positive reinforcement can help students behave You can improve student behaviour 80% of the time if you use positive rather than negative feedback. Don’t believe me?
Many schools have a hierarchy of consequences that increase the level of punishment as the behaviour escalates. While that approach works with 75-80% of the population, a student with behaviour issues will not respond to increasingly negative penalties.
The way we are working isn’t working for teachers. ‘74% of employees are experiencing an energy crisis.’ Tony Schwarz ‘I have so much time to do all the things I need to do’ Said no teacher ever!! Time for all the marking and the lesson plans and the meetings, and creating resources and the parent meetings and time for that student who is falling behind, and the student who is miles ahead.
One of the key takeaways from the Teacher Wellbeing Workshop in 2017 to reduce workload, was prioritising tasks to use your time and energy more effectively. Deciding what tasks you need to do and what can be left undone can be very freeing. As can realising that you can say no: no to students, to colleagues, to parents, and (even!) no to your boss. Teachers are notorious for saying yes to far too many projects and then burning out. It’s a downward spiral.
Here is an outstanding list of Behaviour Management Resources for Teachers.
Put these 7 strategies in place to reduce parental anxiety (and your own) in meetings with parents.
Engagement is characterised by appropriate behaviour (behavioural engagement), positive feelings (emotional engagement), and, above all, student thinking (cognitive engagement).
The end of the year is fast approaching and if you are like any other teacher ever, you will be checking up on how much content you have taught this year, how much you didn’t get done and frantically trying to assess students for their learning so that you can write an accurate report for the end of the year.
When students don’t listen or follow directions, or they roll their eyes when you speak, or they talk while you are talking, it can seem as though they don’t care what you think of them. This is a misconception. Young people do care what adults e.g. parents and teachers think of them. They care very deeply even when they don’t show it. The more it seems they don’t care, the more they do care.
When I first started teaching (many years ago!) I was struck by the cookie cutter approach of the education system, that seemed to knock any individualism, originality and enthusiasm right out of young students. Any student who didn’t fit in was poked and prodded (figuratively) till they were made to fit.