How can midday supervisors help to banish a negative lunchtime culture?
Q: We do everything we can to help make our playtimes stimulating for children and have had training from Jenny Mosely's team and picked up good ideas and we have Circle Time as a regular feature of the time-table. But despite training our mid-day supervisors in positive behaviour, mutual respect, not shouting or accusing pupils and having regular half termly meetings with the Deputy or myself, we still find that the way that most supervisors work with children has not improved and so the issues of play ground behaviour are still happening at lunch time! What else can we do? How can we get our dear ladies to listen and take note because at the moment I feel they are helping to create the negative culture that exists at lunch-time?
Jenny: My heart goes out to you and your staff team!!! You clearly have a wonderful approach and attitude to firming up a really exciting lunchtime policy. You deserve to have peaceful, productive and respectful lunchtimes; but its still not happening for you all. It’s a very strange phenomena and puzzles us all that sometimes there appears to be no personal growth or sharing of the school vision. One of my theories hinges on self-esteem. If an adult has low self-esteem, personal change is extraordinary difficult. People with low self-esteem often ride rough shod over other people's feelings. As I have said elsewhere - if you felt good about yourself you would not need to talk disrespectfully to other people.
Despite feeling let down, you have to keep looking for the tiny markers of success that have been achieved. Feeding these back to the staff in verbal praise or written notes, ending your lunchtime meetings with "one positive thing I have noticed about lunchtimes" might go a little way towards softening attitudes. Sometimes, when I work on my own with midday supervisors they have a list of moans to do with the fact they don’t feel communicated with properly. Some, who are not parents, don’t get the letters about what's going on in the school. Sometimes the teachers let them down by not picking the kids up from the playground on time. Sometimes the dining hall system goes wrong because teachers don’t let them out quick enough (I was the worst culprit at this!!). There are quite often a series of small events which have added to their perception of not being valued. It becomes a vicious circle; people can withhold their warmth and valuing response and become emotionally colder and we all feel less a part of the whole ethos. Have you asked midday supervisors to class circle -times? Quite often when they are not locked in the interaction, and can observe or take part in a circle-time on 'how we can make lunchtimes better', they are amazed at the gentleness and wisdom of children. They never usually have a chance to see them in that role. When we do these circle time sessions we often ask the children, in front of the midday supervisors, 'what does a midday supervisor do that makes you feel good and safe'. By keeping the dialogue very safe midday supervisors feel praised and valued. We also provide supervisors with 'gold dust notes' where they can write positive comments about the individual progress of difficult children and the good behaviour of the majority of children and pop them into the classes 'golden good news' post box. Another strategy they like is to be given raffle tickets. At every opportunity, whenever they see any good behaviour (and you need to identify a list of good behaviours, e.g. lining up calmly, good manners etc.) they hand the child a raffle ticket with the words "good choice". (See All Year Round Mosley J and Thorpe G, LDA 2002). The pupils then put their raffle tickets into a big drum, which, on a Friday assembly is bought onto the stage as the weekly midday supervisor's celebration of 'great lunchtime behaviour'. A child then does a loud drum roll, a hand plunges into the raffle tickets, draws one out and hush goes over the crowd, a prize is awarded, a huge cheer erupts…. And the midday supervisors self-esteem is lifted a little.
There are lots of other ideas in the above book…but you may have tried them all. The learning I still find the hardest to swallow is that, despite the fact I have been as warm and positive as I can (or at least I think I have!) I still cannot win all people over. Sometimes you may have to go down a more radical route. Some schools will tell you they have raised money through PTA and bought in paid play leaders. Some schools have bought in trained sixth formers…its an ongoing long-term task and, as I said at the beginning, you all deserve to succeed - but we don’t all get what we deserve!!!
Related Tags »
Tell a friend
Enter yours and a friends name to send them this page.
