Educators engage in professional learning.
Professional Development Day (ProD)
Recently I had a day off school and was allowed the opportunity to sign up for a Professional Development Day that was being offered through SD57. The course I decided to sign up for was Non-Violent Crisis Intervention training. I found this training so incredibly valuable I recall saying to my classmate who took the course with me, “I am shocked that this training is not mandatory for all teachers”, that is how much I learned in just a days long course. While the title says a lot about what we are learning in this course as far as strategies to deal with big behaviours from students in a non-violent way… so much more goes into the information we got to take away from this day. One big highlight was actually the self care that we need to take as educators, because if we cant be our best for our students how can we expect them to be their best for us. Such a mind blowing and yet completely logical and simple idea. Another thing we discussed that really stuck out to me was to constantly ask questions and stay curious. Staying curious with our students seems to be a strategy that can work for almost all students in some sort of way. While the diversity of issues that students face, resulting in behaviours they have can range on such a massive scale, a common and effective approach to the problems is to stay curious and stay invested. I think often we can get flustered with students who are being disrespectful, or not wanting to participate in a lesson, and rather then get frustrated with them and let them see us get frustrated with them, we need to investigate. Ask ourselves and then ask them why are they showing the behaviour that they are, most often there will be a reason, and the reason could be completely unrelated to the lesson or activity, it could be totally related and the lesson could be triggering the students. Regardless of what the why is, there always is a why. If we can stay curious and be patient with students not showing our frustration we can figure out the why, and then remedying the behavior can take a much more appropriate course of action.
These were my biggest take a way’s from such an informative course, to expect the best from our students we need to be able to give our best as well, and to always stay curious with students with whatever behaviour they are exemplifying. Behaviours always have a back story to them, whether it is related to the task at hand or something else has triggered it. This training was invaluable, I highly recommend it to anyone that has the opportunity to attend, it taught me so many valuable strategies and information.
