Workshop 6 - Setting up for Success

This one day workshop is based on Mark's highly popular book Cognitive Behavioural Training: a How-to Guide for Successful Behaviour, and his latest book Teaching Tough Kids.

Teachers make the difference. It is what they know, what they say, what they do and how they show care. That's what's powerful. Educators really do possess the capacity to fill students with inspiration, confidence and dreams or feelings of failure, resentment and despair. The influence every teacher has on every student who comes their way is utterly enabling or disabling to them, and clinical research validates this very fact.

Dr. Pamela Snow's recent Australian studies highlight the dynamic influence educators have on the young people they interact with. Snow's research strongly suggests that the longer educators engage students in learning, the longer teachers can sustain vibrant emotional connections with students and the longer students remain at school with a willingness to learn the healthier and wealthier their life expectancy will be. Teachers are the 'Gate Keepers' for each generation's future emotional, economic, mental and physical well being.

Similarly, New Zealand researcher John Hattie (2009) tells us that teachers make the difference. Teachers may have little control over what kids bring to school because so much is contributed to by genetics, personality and background. Our role can seem impotent because it is to teach them all, whether they happen to be large or small, eager or reluctant, tough or easy, red or blue, challenging or otherwise. Hattie's research should be empowering to teachers because it reveals teacher influence accounts for no less than 30% of student variance in achievement. They have a big impact on students, on families, on the climate of a classroom and the perception the local community holds of a school.

This workshop promotes practical ideas to enhance the life chances of the students we teach; the promotion of self-awareness, the creation of dreams or goals and options to track progress, ideas to underpin pro-active attitudes and ways to optimise organisational capabilities, perseverance and the emotional resilience of students.

The most powerful asset a teacher can bring to school is to truly understand their attitudes and the depth of their very own personal resources. A periodic stock take helps us to resist the temptation to blame students for their clumsiness, poor behaviour or under performance. Without this awareness, the constructive influences we may be able to generate are likely to be erratic at best. So let's indulge ourselves, and explore a few essential direction-finding ideas that will strengthen our resolve to help students stay connected to school, to learning, to their dreams and to a healthier future.

Mark will especially play with the idea of student misbehaviour, and our responses to it, through the lens of two paradigms; the Relational Window and the Four Goals of Misbehaviour. Both models remind us that it is too easy to instinctively react to poor student behaviours in unhelpful ways. Teachers can manage student behaviours differently and more successfully, and in the process, initiate growth in themselves and their students.

A reoccurring theme in Mark's books, and in this presentation, is the unique role teachers hold. They are part of an influential profession who understand the kinds of structures and messages kids need to receive. Educators are indeed powerful agents of optimism and change for kids, playing a potent part in deciding the trajectory they are likely to take.

Please click the link below for the workshop notes.
Workshop notes - Teaching Tough Kids.pdf