The Success Zone

Are you a leader of some sort? Perhaps a middle manager, a school principal or even a CEO… Thing is, most of you are leaders: if you are a parent or a teacher you are a leader. The key question for you is do you lead from a position of expertise? Do you think or [...]

This is the third in a series of 10 posts on common behaviour management mistakes. If you can’t wait for all ten, and you want this as a single article, add your email address and name to the box at the right and I’ll shoot you through a full copy. 3. “I am the expert… [...]

Image by kodama (home) via Flickr 2. Investing your emotional budget in misbehaviour Take a moment to reflect on how we tend to respond to behaviour in general. As parents and as teachers, the generality is to respond to unwanted behaviour with significant emotional energy (for example, yelling, strong facial emotions and aggressive body language), [...]

Teaching is a complex social activity, and while teacher training prepares teachers well around content expertise and delivery, very little is done to skill teachers in behaviour management. Behaviour management, in what is already a high-stress profession, remains one of the most significant stressors for teachers, yet little has been done systematically to solve the [...]

Image via Wikipedia I am at the world conference for the Alliance of International Education in Melbourne, a gathering of some of the sharpest and most engaging minds in international education. Yet even here, I’ve heard the call to action: “we need to teach our students more respect”. Think about this for a moment… when [...]

A workshop to help you use knowledge of the brain to shape an engagement climate in your classroom, as an alternative to behaviour management.

Image by Orange_Beard via Flickr Listen. That’s it… just listen. Think of two to three people who you know listen to you really well. People who do not interrupt, that just listen. It is more than likely that these people are amongst those that you hold as influential. When we listen to others, more often [...]

Image by “lapolab” via Flickr With more about the brain being discovered all of the time, it is critical that teachers create the best conditions for new synapses – connections between nerves in the brain – to grow. No new synapses, no new learning. Indeed, teaching anyone without even a rudimentary understanding of how learning [...]

Image by homer4k via Flickr Think about wearing your most favourite, comfortable shoes. No effort to put them on, and, one they are on, it is almost like they are a part of you. Your habits are like this: they have become comfortable and easy to ‘wear’, having shaped themselves to your apparent needs perfectly. [...]

For years the pastoral care structure in schools has been predicated and structured on the term ‘behaviour management’. As a term, it has helped focus attention more on negative classroom behaviour, and has assisted in the transfer of the responsibility of engaging a student from the teacher to the middle-level management in a school. I [...]