How often do we closely examine our own emotions and how challenging student behaviour affects us? Some call this ‘teacher mindfulness’. Whatever you want to call it, an awareness of our emotions is crucial to good teaching. Our job demands that we be at our best to help students perform at their best – no small task!

This highly engaging and interactive staff workshop is aimed at helping school staff reduce some of their anxieties (feel more relaxed) about tricky student behaviour by better understanding the emotions, beliefs and inner thoughts that drive it!

As you can see by the above image of the flip board that greeted participants at a recent workshop, the goals of this professional learning day are clear:

1. Experiencing Interest and Enjoyment is mandatory! This is where we learn best and are more able to face and deal with what worries us about our work with kids.

    

2. Looking closely at the shame family of emotions (After Affect-Script Psychology, the theory of emotion behind Restorative Practices) and how shame can either spur us on to positive behaviour change, or send us spiralling into behaviours that diminish our human performance and risk our connections with others (Nathanson’s Compass of Shame)

    

3. Studying Adler and Driekur’s 4 Goals of Misbehaviour (after Individual Psychology) and how we are all motivated for social recognition – belonging. We look at attention-seeking, power-seeking, revenge-seeking and ‘I’m not good enough’ behaviours and how we can help kids re-script through our responses to their behaviours.