This videoclip can help how to explain bad behaviour can occur and how effective use of praise can make a big difference.
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| Art Costa, who developed Habits of Mind said: § Value: Choosing to employ a pattern of intellectual behaviors rather than other, less productive patterns. § Inclination: Feeling the tendency toward employing a pattern of intellectual behaviours. § Sensitivity: Perceiving opportunities for, and appropriateness of employing the pattern of behaviour. § Capability: Possessing the basic skills and capacities to carry through with the behaviours. § Commitment: Constantly striving to reflect on and improve performance of the pattern of intellectual
The following strategies can help you plan different activities knowing what you are activating in your students’minds. Direct Attention Thinking Tools - developed by Edward de Bono.
Simplification & Clarification - SF & CF (Simplification & Clarification)
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(I have used these concepts or categories to create cards games, for example)
Thinking CardThe three little pigs want to build another house. Suggest three new materials they could use and why.
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Thinking Card
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Thinking Card
Who would you choose and why? | ||
Thinking CardYou can invite three book or nursery rhyme characters for tea. Who would you choose and why?
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Well, I hope you liked this post. I enjoyed sharing it with you. Remember. There are infinite possibilities! and I’m not talking to you as a teacher now, but as a friend. These strategies also apply to those moments when we find we need a change in our life.
Be brave and dare to let go of the known path, and start exploring. Who knows what you might find! Maybe a new you.
Keep in touch!
Lara
Negative criticism can cause immense damage to the child's tender mind. Children suffer in many ways when they are subjected to negative criticism. Negative criticism causes more harm than physical abuse. It hurts the child psychologically and damages its self-esteem.
Children consider their parents to be gods. Unfortunately parents are human beings. They are ignorant of the damage they inflict on their child when they criticize, belittle, put down, ridicule and humiliate it. Some parents say that they do all this to motivate the child. Unfortunately it has the opposite effect. Negative criticism demotivates and discourages the child.
Children believe whatever their parents (or teachers) say. When the parent tells the child that it is useless, the child believes it to be true. The child begins to believe that it is stupid and useless. It stops trying new things. This impacts its mental growth immensely.
The child feels alienated from its parents. It feels unloved, undeserving, angry, frustrated, stupid and worthless. This leads to lack of self worth and confidence. Parents need to be more concious and understand that their words have a powerful and long-lasting effect on their children. Fortunately it works both ways. Words of love and encouragement can do wonders for the child.
Parents are responsible for their children and it is true that they cannot keep quiet when their child is misbehaving. It is their job to correct the child's unacceptable behavior. However, they need to adapt the right approach. Never label your child.
Criticism should be constructive. The message has to be clear and concise. The focus should be on the behavior and on the possible outcomes of that particular behavior. The child should be trained to avoid committing the same mistake again. Whenever possible it is advisable to give the child an opportunity to rectify the mistake. The parent, teacher or care taker should encourage the child while it is working on rectifying the mistake.
It is not difficult to correct a child's behavior without causing psychological havoc. All it takes is patience. We adults need to think before we act. It is always advisable to focus on the good in the child. They need to avoid finding faults.
Children need encouragement, support and appreciation from their parents and teachers. Their love nourishes the child's mind and promotes good mental health and a sense of well-being.
(adapted from article by Srikanth Radhakrishna)
This video presents Justen Beer, a 12 –year- old, talented break dancer. He finds dancing as a way of getting peace, and in doing so he shows as another face of human strength. Even in the darkest times, we have enough energy to transform a dead end into a field open to imagination. This boy’s pain transformed into art: there’s no better metaphor of the “non-reducible”human spirit.
I am usually a very motivated person, always ready for adventure, so it is very interesting that I have chosen this special moment in my life to write about it, when I find myself going through a low period. At the beginning I felt it was tragic and disastrous. Now I know that eventually I will surely come to understand that this actually is the best time to reflect about motivation, and the lack of it.
To start with, I have realized that the personal life of a teacher is more important than I’ve ever thought. Second, I have learned through experience that teaching and life in the classroom is a cooperative moment in which everyone brings something to help the others bloom.
I was very lucky this year to have a special bunch of year 4 students, and I like to believe despite the ups and downs, they did motivate me during difficult moments as I did for them as the year unfolded itself. I didn’t need to share my problems or express my moods when I was with them. Students responded from within the atmosphere I built for them ; they reacted in a similar way to what they were surrounded by. They didn’t have to tell me “I had a bad day”. I knew.
In the same way, they also knew when I was having a rough time, the feeling of walking empty-handed into the classroom – no ideas, no enthusiasm,, and seeing no way out of this situation. Yet, I always came to my students with love, understanding and trust. I trusted ( and still do) in their power to motivate me. They approached, shared more about themselves and told me what a good teacher I was and how much they loved me and enjoyed my classes.
Did I build that in them? Yes, I’d like to believe that I did.
Now after 26 years of teaching activity and due to a series of unfortunate events in my life, I am on leave. to treat myself. I try to concentrate on what is here and now. I do what I have advised my close ones so many times. For the first time in a looooong time, I am reading books not at all related to teaching. I notice and enjoy the world around me , the everyday simple pleasures– the sky, my pets, sipping a cup of tea in a cozy corner while reading an enlightening story, or watching the birds that are starting to appear more often in my garden as the spring approaches here in Patagonia.I do all of that because I think that whatever it is that took my motivation away will vanish sooner or later. Until then, there is no use spending too much energy, time and thought on worrying over it, making my anguish take control. It’s time to recharge, time to walk off the worn paths that lead nowhere anymore, time to re-evaluate my priorities again.
Perhaps the most painful lesson I am learning is that we cannot give our children what we don’t have. Where we are on our journey of living and loving with our whole hearts is a much stronger indicator of teaching success than anything we can learn at university.
So I stepped out of that way a bit, hoping no one would notice and at the same time hoping for a spark, Yes we all struggle with shame and fear of not being enough.And, yes, many of us are afraid to let our true selves be seen and known. I reached out and revealed what I was going through to my family first; they supported me with their loving compassion and understanding, then I told my boss , and through her, my colleagues found out too. I got a tight hug from the owner of the school I work at, and a “don’t worry Lara. The important thing now is that you feel whole again”, wholeheartedly said by my boss. Is this how we motivate ourselves?
I’m learning to believe that it is.
Lara
PS Here is the link to watch an excellent talk called MOTIVATING THE UNMOTIVATED by Jeremy Harmer
The experience of choosing in itself boosts motivation. In addition, offering choice makes it more likely that every reader will be matched to a text that he or she can read well. If students initially have trouble choosing texts that match their ability level and interest, teachers can provide limited choices to guide them toward successful reading experiences. By giving students these opportunities, we help them develop the ability to choose appropriate texts for themselves—a skill that dramatically increases the likelihood they will read outside school (Ivey & Broaddus, 2001, Reis et al., 2007).
When students read accurately, they solidify their word-recognition, decoding, and word-analysis skills. Perhaps more important, they are likely to understand what they read—and, as a result, to enjoy reading.
In contrast, struggling students who spend the same amount of time reading texts that they can't read accurately are at a disadvantage in several important ways. First, they read less text; it's slow going when you encounter many words you don't recognize instantly. Second, struggling readers are less likely to understand (and therefore enjoy) what they read. They are likely to become frustrated when reading these difficult texts and therefore to lose confidence in their word-attack, decoding, or word-recognition skills. Thus, a struggling reader and a successful reader who engage in the same 15-minute independent reading session do not necessarily receive equivalent practice, and they are likely to experience different outcomes.
Sadly, struggling readers typically encounter a steady diet of too-challenging texts throughout the school day as they make their way through classes that present grade-level material hour after hour. In essence, traditional instructional practices widen the gap between readers.
Understanding what you've read is the goal of reading. But too often, struggling readers get interventions that focus on basic skills in isolation, rather than on reading connected text for meaning. This common misuse of intervention time often arises from a grave misinterpretation of what we know about reading difficulties.
The findings from brain research align well with what we've learned from studies of reading interventions. Regardless of their focus, target population, or publisher, interventions that accelerate reading development routinely devote at least two-thirds of their time to reading and rereading rather than isolated or contrived skill practice (Allington, 2011). These findings have been consistent for the last 50 years—yet the typical reading intervention used in schools today has struggling readers spending the bulk of their time on tasks other than reading and rereading actual texts.
Students in more-effective teachers' classrooms spent a larger percentage of reading instructional time actually reading; students in less-effective teachers' classrooms spent more time using worksheets, answering low-level, literal questions, or completing before-and-after reading activities. In addition, exemplary teachers were more likely to differentiate instruction so that all readers had books they could actually read accurately, fluently, and with understanding.
As adults, we rarely if ever write to a prompt, and we almost never write about something we don't know about. Writing is called composition for a good reason: We actually compose (construct something unique) when we write. The opportunity to compose continuous text about something meaningful is not just something nice to have when there's free time after a test or at the end of the school year. Writing provides a different modality within which to practice the skills and strategies of reading for an authentic purpose.
When students write about something they care about, they use conventions of spelling and grammar because it matters to them that their ideas are communicated, not because they will lose points or see red ink if they don't (Cunningham & Cunningham, 2010). They have to think about what words will best convey their ideas to their readers. They have to encode these words using letter patterns others will recognize. They have to make sure they use punctuation in a way that will help their readers understand which words go together, where a thought starts and ends, and what emotion goes with it. They have to think about what they know about the structure of similar texts to set up their page and organize their ideas. This process is especially important for struggling readers because it produces a comprehensible text that the student can read, reread, and analyze.
Time for students to talk about their reading and writing is perhaps one of the most underused, yet easy-to-implement, elements of instruction. It doesn't require any special materials, special training, or even large amounts of time. Yet it provides measurable benefits in comprehension, motivation, and even language competence. The task of switching between writing, speaking, reading, and listening helps students make connections between, and thus solidify, the skills they use in each. This makes peer conversation especially important for English language learners.
Listening to an adult model fluent reading increases students' own fluency and comprehension skills (Trelease, 2001), as well as expanding their vocabulary, background knowledge, sense of story, awareness of genre and text structure, and comprehension of the texts read (Wu & Samuels, 2004).
Yet few teachers above 1st grade read aloud to their students every day (Jacobs, Morrison, & Swinyard, 2000). This high-impact, low-input strategy is another underused component of the kind of instruction that supports readers. We categorize it as low-input because, once again, it does not require special materials or training; it simply requires a decision to use class time more effectively. Rather than conducting whole-class reading of a single text that fits few readers, teachers should choose to spend a few minutes a day reading to their students.
It's time for the elements of effective instruction described here to be offered more consistently to every child, every day. Remember, adults have the power to make these decisions; kids don't.
School skills mentoring can help pupils in their learning by identifying and removing specific barriers to achievment through the coaching of specific skill sets. It can also help pupils in coping with emotional or/and social pressures by identifying and challenging problematic thought and behavioural patterns through reflection and conversation. In this way, both the pupil and those near him/her, remain OK.
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Adapted from “Skills for School Mentor’s Start up Kit”
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