Q: Can being bored and having poor emotional literacy skills lead to poor behaviour?
Q: Dear Jenny,(one of my Gurus) I agree it can be bored behaviour but also children displaying poor emotional literacy. Our school has many challenging pupils who seem to react to their feelings very inappropriately - we call it making wrong choices. Through having masses of strategies in hand we seem to manage this behaviour providing a caring safe open environment for all...staff included. When I reflect with my Behaviour Manager on a Friday as to how our focused children have coped with the week themselves we always find positives but we feel that the level of turmoil that comes to school inside our pupils is growing yearly. Do you have experience of this? Also poor oracy skills make life difficult for our pupils. Emotional Literacy has now had to become a huge element of our curriculum with us all in school taking the first 2 weeks of the school year to purely focus on relationship building processes in their new classes. - the results are fantastic! Do you know of any other schools doing this type of focused work knocking the NC on the head in favour of attempting to understand their emotions? I'd like to network with anyone out there. I must recommend to others your whole school training days..fab!!!Your team launched our new school and we still feel aim to feel golden!
Jenny: What a lovely warm positive paragraph ; it lifted my spirits which were feeling a bit chilled in the shadows with the sunlight sparkling outside!!. I agree - I also believe that every year pupils are displaying more and more inner levels of chaos and tension. You probably have read the Big Picture, which reports that 1 in 5 children have mental health problems. It was a few years ago, and I believe the ratio will now be higher. I think there is a myriad of reasons for the growing dysfunction in children and families. A book in itself. One of my homespun theories is that so many children spend such a vast time on computers, game- boys, and TV that, coupled with the fact that families have so little time, they are unable to learn the skills of relationships. If they encounter a problem in a computer game - they just turn it off. If another child winds them up in the playground they can't turn them off, and they panic. Many of the skills you and I have, I feel sure come from the fact we used to play board games like snakes and ladders. We learnt to take turns and, because we wanted another go, we controlled our anger if we lost. I am not being flippant, I truly believe that some children are stuck at certain emotional ages (see the Marion Bennathon and Marjorie Boxhalls work on Nurture Groups). In many of our schools we have to set up Circles of Support to help children beyond the usual motivational strategies. Here we give them an intensive programme of social skills and self-esteem building. I have met quite a few heads like yourself who have taken the sound decision to commit the first few weeks of term entirely to a PSHE programme. You can't teach a child anything if the class team is not working respectfully together. Focus on relationships at the beginning of the year and you will see huge benefits later on. My problem is that I meet so many fantastic teachers, but I can't remember their names!!. Some of the schools that I refer to who have taken this decision were in Newham .. I hope they are out there reading this and they come back to you to describe their experiences. I would love to make your policy statutory for all schools. Keep being golden and positive ... Energy is the key to all school improvements, so having a life outside is the most important thing you can achieve. I am going to take tomorrow off and go cycling. I hope you are having some treats too!!. Thanks for the lovely words.
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