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Reflecting on your professional development
Reflecting on your professional development
JANE WINTER: Hello, everyone. I’m Jane Winter and I’m here with my colleague, Yeasmin Mortuza, and we’re here to record our video diary. And we’ve really enjoyed working on the “Managing Behaviour” course and reading your comments, and this is our chance to talk about them. So let’s get started. So first comment, a lovely one from Simon. Thank you very much for this, Simon. And I love this. Let’s put ourselves in the learners’ shoes by considering how we would feel if our boss spoke to us like that. And how would do we feel if they looked at me like that? If they didn’t listen to me in the way that I might not be listening to my learners?
If they only looked at me to see if I was doing what they wanted me to, rather than noticing anything else about me that was important? And I think once we start to realise how we would feel, if that was our boss treating us like that, we can have more empathy for our learners. And that can really, really help to foster those strong relationships, which we know we’re at the heart of good learning relationships. So thank you for that, Simon. The next comment comes from Zara, and I think a lot of teachers will really, really empathise with this comment. And Zara asks, but what if learners get overconfident? And this is a very interesting comment.
And in a way, you think, can you be overconfident? And I think I do know where you’re coming from, Zara, because we don’t want learners that going to become overfamiliar, that are going to overstep the mark and ignore the boundaries. But we do want confident learners. We want confident learners that are confident in their learning, they’re confident to take risks, they’re confident that you will accept them for who they are, but they know where the boundaries are. And they comply because of mutual trusting relationships, not because of fear. If they’re complying because they lack confidence and because they’re fearful, that is not the sort of learning environment we want.
We want learners to understand the reasons for the rules and follow them for that reason. And they’ll know that if they don’t, there will be consequences. But that’s rarely, rarely going to happen. Yeah, we want really confident learners that understand the boundaries. But thank you so much for raising that important comment, Zara. And I’m going to pass you on to Yeasmin now.
YEASMIN MORTUZA: Thanks Jane. So the next comment comes from Kelly. And Kelly was commenting about one of the videos on the course where we look at teacher dealing with a boy and there were lots of strategies that were unpicked from the video as to why the teacher was successful that time around. And Kelly’s question is something that I think a lot of teachers fear, and that is, what if after having applied these strategies, they still don’t work? Their young students still misbehaving. Where do we go from there on in? OK. There’s no one answer as to what to do. It’s rather a combination of things.
The most important thing is that we stay calm because all of the strategies work on the assumption that we’re going to approach them in an assertive but very calm, and calming way as well.
The first thing we can do is think about well, OK, as a strategy, does the strategy that apply, does that need to be repeated? Do I need to walk away and give the student a bit of time– take up time, we call it –to respond to the strategy that I’ve just applied? Do I need to come back, do I need to repeat the instruction or anything like that? So we can repeat the strategy is the first suggestion. The next suggestion is, on this course, of course, you’ve all seen there’s so many strategies. Even if you look on things like diversions and diffusion. Just there alone, on that page alone, there are so many strategies.
With Behaviour management, I think a lot of it is about– it’s the cumulative effect of having applied a lot of these strategies, both prevention and cure, which lead to an environment where things are less likely to happen. But also once they do happen, we do need more than one strategy available to try. Don’t be afraid to diversify your strategy portfolio. So, yeah. Try different strategies side by side. And the last solution is, when all of these fail, we still have the option of escalating. And just bearing in mind that the point of escalating is to increase the severity and intensity of the intervention.
We’re not talking about escalation for punishment per se, but rather so that we intervene at a higher level. So hopefully between the three of those things, I would say it’s very rare that after having gone through all three of those steps that the students are still– there’s still no impact on the student after having done all of those. And a lot of it is about the confidence that comes with having tried these strategies and knowing that they do actually work. Not having the fear that things won’t work. So Kelly, thank you very much for your comment. On the next slide, we’ve got two lovely comments from Zahabiya and Louise.
These comments relate to creating a positive environment. And Jane and I decided to end on these comments because actually, all of the strategies on this course sit on a bed of assumptions that we have created a really positive environment in which the students can thrive. Because that positive environment actually reduces the chances of misbehaviors popping up to begin with. So simple things like eye contact and smiling. Lots of eye contact and lots of smiling, creating that positive vibe. Giving the students a genuine and sincere feeling that we care about them, that we care about their education. We respect them. And then we encourage them to respect us as well. But that they are being listened to.
And so all of these things make the students feel comfortable and safe in their learning environment. And that really, really helps to reduce the chances of things going wrong to begin with. But also, if things do go wrong, if we’ve already got that positive environment there, then it makes it much more likely that the interventions that we apply will land softly but effectively in the right place. So thank you so much to Zahabiya and Louise for those comments. So that brings us on to the last slide for this video diary. Thank you so much for all of your comments all the way through the course.
Jane and I always learn lots of new things from reading what you all have to say. And this course does run more than once a year, and I have to tell you that a lot of our learners go on repeat rounds of the course. This course runs again for free in the not too distant future– 26th of April, which is not too far away. Lots of you were worried that the learning you made on this course is a bit out of sync with schools reopening et cetera, and so you may want to go again on the 26th of April.
We do, as I say, we do see a lot of our learners returning, so hopefully we will see some of you back then as well. And also many of you put a question up for Q&A by our experts. So one set of Q&As have been addressed by our expert, John Bailey, so do go and have a look on step 3.1 for an excellent video where many of your very specific queries have been addressed by our expert. So thank you very much again, and hopefully look forward to seeing some of you on the 26th of April. Otherwise, the best of luck for applying these strategies going forward.
Remember, repeat and stay calm, and give the strategy some space to flower and develop. So thank you very much. Thank you.
Well done for reaching the final part of the course, where you’ll review your learning and record your professional development. Your course mentors will record their reflections of the course discussions and will upload their video above. We’ll let you know by email when it’s available. Do take a look as if they’ve asked for your consent, your comments might be included!
This step focuses on your reflection grids and revisits your self-audit tasks. In the next step you’ll be able to ask any outstanding questions directly to the course authors (or if you are joining us later, watch their responses to other learners). The next and final step of the course helps you plan for next steps of your professional development, and how to claim your STEM Certificate.
Final reflection grid
Take a moment now to complete your final weekly reflection grid for this course.Your reflecting grids and your self-audit provide useful evidence to record and show your professional development. You can take any remaining questions from your reflection grids to the Q&A on the next step.
Learning outcomes
Now you have completed the course, you should be able to:
- Assess how your own behaviour influences the behaviour of your students.
- Apply rules and routines to achieve consistency.
- Apply recognition intelligently to motivate students.
- Demonstrate how to reduce friction when students behave badly.
- Develop reparation and restorative practice.
If you haven’t focused on all these outcomes, we welcome you to take the course again in the future. The self-audit task below will help you assess your progress against these outcomes.
How has your practice changed?
Re-visit the self-audit task from the start of the course. The post-course self-audit will help you consider how your practice and thinking about Managing Behaviour for Learning have changed.
Self-audit
- Access the self-audit task and complete it.
- At the end of the survey, click My responses.
- Click Download as PDF.
- Save the PDF where you will be able to retrieve it as evidence of your development on this course.
Based upon your responses, you may have identified where you wish to focus your professional development next. We’ll help you to find your next CPD activity in the next and final step of the course.
Review
After completing the reflection tasks above, identify one aspect of your practice you have developed the most and one aspect you wish to further develop.Share these in the comments below.
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