Teacher Workshops
We offer five valuable workshops for Early Childhood and Primary School Teachers:
1. The Challenging Child:
Some children’s behaviour can really drain your energy! As teachers you know that one child’s misbehaviour can take more of your energy than all the other children combined. And it’s really frustrating when your normal techniques don’t seem to work. Why are some children so challenging? We have developed a workshop that provides important insights and skills for making it easier to live with these children. Based on the latest research, this professional workshop will be an important upgrade of your counselling skills as a teacher.
Why are some children more difficult than others?
Theories over the years have ranged from: it’s all the parent’s fault (nurture), to “it’s all the child’s fault” (temperament or nature). While both nurture and nature are very important for the healthy development of a child, recent research indicates there is a better approach for understanding why children behave the way they do. Children can change and become more pleasant and flexible! And that’s good news for a teacher who might easily feel frustrated, confused and even overwhelmed when confronted with a challenging child.
This learning experience will give you the awareness and skills for changing challenging children’s behaviour. This workshop isn’t for every teacher – only those who want to develop their counselling skills.
This is a two session, 4 hour workshop. Participants will receive a certificate of learning upon completion.
2. Emotionally Connected TEAMS
Creating a team involves many factors:
Knowing how to work together
Having a common purpose for working together
Having clear roles about where I fit into the team
Having a leader who keeps us on track and motivated
Knowing the right steps to get the work done
Resolving differences
Successfully facing challenges
While all these factors or ingredients are important for building a great team, they do lack the most important thing: HEART. Without heart people simply become machines who are programmed to perform tasks. Like a computer program (software) is designed to do a specific task we often try to program people in a similar manner. This is done by taking information from one source (usually a learning curriculum or policy guideline) and hope it will ‘program’ a person’s mind. There is then the expectation that the organisation will get lucky and the person will use the learning in their role within the organisation. But people aren’t machines that can be programmed. People are more than key boards, computer screens and mouses to do tasks. They have brains and emotions that interact to cause life. To ignore, within a team context, the thinking and feeling aspect of being human is to really set the team up for frustration and manipulation. That’s because if your brain and emotions are not acknowledged, honoured and respect, you’ll quickly become part of some other person’s plans and personal goals. And then you’ll go home feeling frustrated, irritable, angry and de-motivated. People are organic; they are living systems, not static, lifeless machines. When a team simply becomes a task driven operation it results in a significant loss in morale, personal involvement and a sense of meaningful contribution. That’s why people leave organisations, or run on one or two cylinders, when they could run on 6 or 8! Our workshop then is about how to humanise teams. How to tap into the soul and spirit of each individual team member so their life and vitality can flow unhindered into the life of the team. It’s only then that teams really achieve successful goals and purposes. When people emotionally connect they work together in harmonious and creative ways.
This is a two hour interactive workshop.
3. What creates teachability in children?
Rediscover the power of teacher-child relationships. The word ‘educate’ means to draw out. Pedagogy has historically been relational. Could the contemporary educational focus on action plans, processes, strategies, learning objectives, desirable outcomes, results, distracted teachers from the core essence of learning? True education is not simply a transference of information. it is best defined as an experience between teacher and student. Teaching only has meaning in relationship. A failure to understand relationship will produce a deficient teaching environment where neither teacher nor student are optimised. The understanding of relationship is what creates great teaching.
Workshop participants will learn:
1) The problem: Identifying the ‘stuck’ student
2) The insight: Why do some students get ‘stuck’? A psychological perspective.
3) The medicine: Knowing how to turn the desire to be bad into the impulse to be good.
4) Understanding: what enhances student teachability and realising that this same process helps teachers avoid burnout, maintain teacher satisfaction and optimise their student’s learning and personal potential.
This is a 3 hour interactive or 60 minute lecture style workshop.
4. Teacher-Parent Partnerships
The art of building close relationships with parents.
How can a teacher build meaningful relationships with parents when all too often the parents are in a hurry, and as a teacher your energy is low because you have been giving out so much all day? It’s real easy to find your communication with parents becomes superficial and cliche: “Hello, how are you? Good . . . How was Johnny today? . . . Good”
Parent-Teacher Partnerships is about creating a close teacher-parent relationship, because that’s one of the most important aspects of being a teacher. Lone rangers either burn out or rust out. Both are bad for teacher and child. Partnership is about becoming aware of what it takes to create and maintain a strong relationship with your children’s parents. It’s knowing how to use your energy and ideas to build meaningful connections with parents.
At this workshop you’ll gain:
Insight: recognise the art of building a bond with your children’s parents
Awareness: of how you can increase your energy resources
Confidence: learn how to tune into and respond to your parent’s needs
Ideas: how to give parents feedback so your conversation goes beyond the superficial
Understanding: learn how your communication with parents builds strong bonds
This is a one and a half hour workshop. It will be practical and experiential.
5. The Angry Child
Teachers are experiencing an explosion in the number of angry, hostile and aggressive children they encounter on a day to day basis. Time out, quiet chairs and reward charts just don’t work. In fact, they seem to make things worse.
There are very real reasons why a child behaves in this way. Anger doesn’t just appear from nowhere, and a behavioural approach to change their aggression will almost never work. This workshop will give you a new and unique understanding about what is causing a child to behave this way and will provide interventions and solutions to help this child become calm, emotionally responsive and self controlled. Based on the latest neuro-scientific findings and incorporating a thorough understanding of a child’s attachment needs, this workshop will give you fresh insights, ideas and techniques and will empower you in your teaching.
This is a two hour workshop.
To book a workshop contact us via the contacts page on this web site. All workshop participants receive a certificate of learning upon completion.