Transcription
[Music] Okay, welcome back, everybody. I hope you are feeling refreshed and caffeinated and ready to go again because now we're on the second half. We're going to start to really deep dive into the how-to's, the how to be, the what to say. I want to go back to that A4 policy that should be supporting our day-to-day interventions, right from light touch to the stepped intervention. And then, what it's on an able piece of paper, it can't really be punishment road. It can't be that long and winding punishment road because we're we're producing, we're taking away the verbosity. We're producing all of these options that desensitize our young people. And actually, we're going to, in this part of the session, think about systems that support them engaging and staying engaged in the system and in the, um, in their community.
Have been ratcheting up our detentions by days and hours and weeks and having the detention debts. I don't think, I mean, I've yet to hear of five hours of sitting in silence eventually one day leading to a young person going, "Aha! I've got it. I'm not gonna do that anymore." Brilliant. Thank you. There was no roads Damascus moment that comes from setting a young person in silence. Again, and by increasing the the length and level of this demeaning that we do, students start to adapt because it's the same student. One of my contemporaries and a wonderful colleague of mine, who's recently gone into SLT, we both attended a training course that started on a Friday evening. And he brought up at eight o'clock at night, still fully in work clothes and lanyards, "What I've written things. Friday night detention. Friday night detention for those who have got to that point. It's over two hours long now."
Please do not listen to what I said. End this session and then immediately get rid of all the tensions. Don't do that. Little system. If you are, if you, if it really is kind of hinged on tensions, don't get rid of all of your sanctions straight away. Please. If you want to do anything straight away, do things from Session One straight away. Look at the rules, talk about how you're going to be embedding them, and make an agreement to everyone consistently doing that from the next day.
This needs to be done. So if you're going to start taking away any punishments, you need to do it slowly and incrementally. Start to reduce the longer-minded mode of punishment, but it's got to be supported by that robust positive medicine and positive relationships. The things that support us as we start to move into the world of interventions and behavior interventions of our drive-bys and by July advice. We don't really pick up the shooter and take everybody out. No. From a nice big cart. No. A drive-by are the light touch interventions. Drive-bys might even be silent. Many of you will be doing your drive-bys through non-verbals. But this is the stuff that we do where we know how to really plug into our cast screen. We're totally focused. We're in. We're it's a runaway train of teaching and learning experience, and everyone is on board. And to keep everyone on board, you'll be deploying drive-bys all of the time to keep momentum.
Now, drive-bys, when they are done well, they're almost you don't even notice the teacher is doing it. When I, um, lecture him, and I'm a senior lecturer in education, and I sometimes I ask my trainees, and you may remember this when you were training, but that first couple of weeks where you have to go and observe and you have no clue what you're looking for, you're observing, I base specifically, and it's timely, very specifically, ask my trainees to look for specific things that are drive-bys, or you might call them teacher craft. Those specific things about where and to teach the sides to stand, where a teacher puts their attention, where the teacher places a hand on a desk, where the teacher uses a gesture, where it's each gets a whole class to move and shift and turn around and look at them from a different place. So the person who was at the front of the room and causes distractions, now at the back of the room. The person who was at the back of the moment getting distracted, now at the front of the moment getting their full attention. So given those really specific things, and I don't think that the opportunity to observe people who are excellent with behavior or who have excellent relationships with someone that you are struggling with should be withheld. Just the PGC and ECT. I think actually, if I'm having a video, I'm just not getting through to TJ, and I know that my colleague is, I'd love the support to be able to go and observe him being taught by somebody who knows how to manage kids' behavior, his classes' behavior. That would be supportive. And we know. So our career goes on. We start to observe less and less drive-by examples. Might be standing alongside a student. I mean, standing beside them as we teach that lesson, or just standing beside them while they are working or not working. Like I said, a moment ago, changing where we're standing or what area we're teaching from, thinking about our proximity or use of proximity, praise, giving the student the pen, opening the book for them, tapping the page that we're on, using countdowns that are dispersed with instructions, compliments, using an assumed close like, "Thank you for a great drive-by."
Is quite often when we talk about behavior interventions, it's very much from the classroom. And I know that that's not where all behavior happens. Sometimes behavior happens, and our most challenging moments happen in the corridor, on the field, in the canteen. In those situations, standing alongside or beside someone is really helpful. If I go into a behavior intervention in an open space and I go straight in, and I'm now face to face with the student, then that says to the rest of the school, "Oh, there's something going on here. There's something going on." Before you know it, you've got 300 students standing around you and your intervention. And that feels slightly different. I stand alongside as students in an open space. We're talking, we're shooting the breeze, as the expression goes. We're speaking into space, and it's less obvious that this is an intervention. I don't have the rest of the year group looking at me or involved or heckling. Drive-bys, a lovely thing that we can do is you can think about ways of extending this list. How could you post training go? What are the drive-bys that you use? What are the non-verbals that you use that work? Can I come and see you who have a good relationship with that student? Because actually, by the end of last term, there'd been a bit of a relationship breakdown. And I know that you're doing well finding ways to start to get positive, to start this positively, and get those light touch interventions in place. Some people might call it jive fires, some people might call it teaching color, some people might call it classroom management, and they just take granted that's what you do to keep it less and going. Whatever it might be, let's exchange because the wealth of experience and knowledge is in that group right now.
How we use names on the board. This is not a behavior intervention. And you know that if you've read "When the Adults Change, Everything Changes" at series point, putting if you've read that, you know that that does not work. You know where we stand on that. We don't see that as naming and shaming the young people we work with today. This is not meaning and training. This is naming and faming. Now, for some of you, if you're like me, I'd like to say, if you'd come from an experience where your previous school or the school has been part of your policy, you have had to do names on the board. And I, and I've been there. So please know that I come at this not judgment of you if that's all that you've had because that's what you've been told to use. I'm still going into classrooms and observe teaching now where the grid for naming and shaming is on the board before the start of the lesson, ready to go. Only first morning, second morning, it's prepped as robustly as having, um, what the aims and objectives are on on the lesson on the board. And so that's if you've been given that, then it can, it can de-skill you. And if that's there, and you say, "I don't know if you feel ashamed." I want you to feel like, "Hey, that's what I was given. That's what I relied on." I mean, I remember very passive aggressively because I was told we had to do it. We had to have that written on the board before having a much bigger display of people who are doing the right thing, um, to offset this. You must have negative names on the board. That's fine.
Now, if that's what you've come into the profession having learned, and here you are today, thinking, "I, I didn't know the other things." Have that exchange, exchange drive-bys, exchange classroom management techniques. It's changed the things that we can teach them and get a nice list of possibilities for how you can start to intervene with behavior without using those systems. So sometimes very creative systems. This is a good opportunity as we are talking about the one-page policy to introduce you. What would be on there? Once you've used your drive-bys and your light touch and your classroom management, think about using what we call our classroom support plan. And that is exactly what it is meant to be. I plan the support, not a sanction plan. Um, not a punishment, not a C1, C2, C3. If you have C1, C2, C3, please do what I do when I visit students. Take a moment to ask some students if they know what the C in C1, C2, C3 means. Ask them what it means. I have never a student, and I have asked, I don't know how many, to the nearest thousand, when I've gone into detention rooms and gone into nurture rooms or, um, holding spaces, I have asked them when they told me why they're here, and they go, "I've got a C3." Do you know what the C in the C3 means? Never has a student been able to say to me what that means. And I wouldn't imagine when this system was created, it was created with good intention because the C means consequence. First consequence, second consequence, third consequence. Now, that's better. But we've done that thing that we tend to do in education. We started to abbreviate. We've taken the importance of the language out. And so we've got a C1, C2, C3 system, and the students just see it as, "I've got a C3," and that's what's bad. Not that I threw my pen across the room, not that I sabotaged my, um, another student's work. I've got C3. And we've taken away meaning. We've taken away. So we've already started to reduce capacity for students to take responsibility for their behavior and connect the consequence with the behavior by creating that abbreviation. C1, CT, stupid. Get rid of that, please. Use the language that you intend to be. This is a consequence for that behavior. If you feel that you must keep your system, our classroom support doesn't use C1, CV, C3. We call it each part what it is. We have warnings. This is your first warning. This is your second warning. This is your last chance, where we use a script. Okay? And then there's going to be two minutes, which is an imposition where you're going to speak with them or triage. Let me take you through those steps of the classroom plan.
Your first warning. Your first warning. What I would like to suggest to you is that you try to issue your warnings privately. I know it's not easy. I'm asking you to do that because it's behavior, um, management experts. You're in the business of de-escalation. And how many times have you noticed that landing a a punishment, a warning, a sanction, an intervention in front of an audience gets a very different response than it does when it's done privately? And I know that's not always possible. I know it's not always possible, but 90% of the time it is. And it doesn't need to go on the board for you to remember. You can pop that, pop them privately on your own Post-it note on your own desk so that you remember because I know that the business of remembering can be challenging. And ask you that the warning is really specific. That's your warning to be ready to start learning. Title, date in your book. So give a very specific instruction. And you will notice that my morning, my warning is linked to the rules. In between landing each step of this, you have to give take-up time. Everyone deserves to take-up time. Even if they are a child, an adult. If you want me as an adult to turn my behavior around, you want me to digest, ingest, and turn my behavior around, especially when I am not at my best, I need a moment, please. You need some take-up time. Now, take that time also requires a little bit of training and experience. Because sometimes we give a warning, we might be so thrilled with how well we've done it, we've done it, and we've done it, we've been calm, we've done it, how we've done a bit timely, we've done it, and we've done it, we've gone into the, over to them, and we've done it privately. We might be feeling so positive that we want to hover over them and and watch them change their behavior immediately before our eyes. It doesn't work. Because looming creates the push and pull resistance. Okay? We've got somebody saying, "I'm not doing that while you're looking at me. What? Why are you looking at me?" So take yourself away. Try it. It might feel irresistible. Go and file some highlighters, anything you have to walk away. Give some take-up time. Tell them how long. I'm going to be back in one minute, and I expect to see your title and your date on your work when I come back in two minutes. And give them an opportunity.
The second warning. Second warning. I like to give that young person an opportunity to say, "Is this your second morning? I want you to think really carefully about the choices that you make. I'm going to come back in two minutes." And then come back. Take yourself away. Make sure that you have given them a take-up time that they need. You can then go into last chance. Now, the last chance is delivered with the script. So you might be looking at this game on this is my old school, you know, C1, C2, C3, same, same, all four. Fine. But I want them to be clear that they're having a warning, when it's a warning, that they're having a second warning, and they need to think carefully because I want them to do well. But they're, this is their last chance. And the last chance needs a script to support it. The script is thus: it is going to give an opportunity to tell the young person what you notice. What you've noticed. Nice, clean language. "I've noticed that we link the behavior to a rule. We explain what the expectation is, and it's that you're not being ready to learn. I've noticed that you've not been sitting safely in the chair. Notice that you've not been respectful to the other people on the table." Whatever it might be. And then we're going to use some assertive sentence starters of what I need you to do. And I need you to. At the end of the "I need you to," this is really important. You say, "Thank you." And assumed close. That means that you have absolute belief that they can do it. Now, before you drop that, "Thank you," you want to be able to reference a time that you have seen that student be better than that behavior. Now, if you haven't done the work of part one of this session, then you've got nothing in this conversation. A script doesn't learn. It doesn't land if there isn't relationship. So one person is going to land exactly the same script and be able to say very clearly, "Listen, I, the person, the young man who walks their little sister to school, but all walking to another school, that's the right, responsible young man I want to see now. Thank you." The person who hasn't got that knowledge makes this your job right now really hard. To the relational work that all of part one that is leading to this moment as well, it means you can land a script and say, "Hand on heart, I know that you are better than this. I know that you can do it. I know you can turn a new behavior around. Thank you." And you go. The beat of leaving after "Thank you" is important. It stops you getting caught in interruption cul-de-sac feedback, just being able to walk away straight away and give the take-up time. So there's the example. The example of how to give your warning. First warning. After look how to give your warning. Second warning. Think carefully about the choices you make. The example of how to give your last chance with a script that is linked through the rules, that's really specific about what you need them to do, that gives an example of how you've seen them be better to. Thank you. And you walk away.
After that point in the classroom support plan, we have an opportunity to go into triage. Now, I'm going to talk more about triage, how we manage call out, etc., in a moment. But that would be the next step about what happens if you've done your last chance of script, you've got to the point where you have a two-minute conversation, and that's booked in. That's going to be happening. There's an imposition, the time, and then you've got the triage. Next step. It's not disproportionate. It's controlled. Now, I know that even in the best-planned world, students are going to interrupt us. They're going to take us off course. They're, they, they're going to, um, use secondary behavior to completely disrupt our thinking and our intention. And our best-laid plans are going to throw down the secondary behavior. And they might look irresistible secondary behavior. But in that moment, in that moment, then that's not the time to get involved with the secondary behavior because that the student is the pro in secondary behavior. With TJ, he was the pro in secondary behavior, and he would have me on the run. He would set traps, as the expert, and I would be going for them. I'm saying, "You can say this conversation is not working now. I'm going to come back in two minutes, and we're going to try again." But you could, so you can excuse yourself from the conversation rather than get stuck in a cul-de-sac or in a downward spiral, whatever you want to call it, where it matches. You've got the students saying, "You always do this to me." "No, I don't." "Yes, you do." "No, I don't." "No, I don't." "No." And you're in, and you're stuck in a secondary behavior. You go to learn your script. The student says, "Oh, this isn't fair. You're picking on me." "I can't pick on you. I do not pick on you." "Is he think that we can't?" And you're back in. You go to land your script. The student says, "This lesson's boring." You say, "My lesson is not boring. It's, it's, I'm wearing." You can stop. And I'm not saying that you will never get stuck in a cul-de-sac conversation again, but I want to give you some permission now to excuse yourself and come back. Because by doing that, we are slowing our interventions down. We don't want to go from naught to 100. We don't want to go from, uh, "Take your coat off" to a two-hour detention on a Friday. That's that's escalated chat. Set. And we, but we can excuse ourselves and slow our interventions down. That is would also be us demonstrating self-regulation. Regulation is a word that is used a lot with behavior at the moment. Well, what are we doing to self-regulate? I tell you how we can start to self-regulate. We can start to self-regulate by having some emotional intelligence. And a good emotional intelligence requires us to know ourselves. I know myself, and I know what my triggers are. I know myself, and knowing what my triggers are means I can manage myself. Now, I can't manage myself if I don't have an awareness because I've now got self-awareness, and that allows me a journey to self-management. I know myself helps me to manage my relationship with others. So I've got a better relationship with myself, and that is what's a better relationship with others and managing others. So knowing your triggers. I'm not asking me this out of some perverse and their nosiness to know what gets on everybody's nose here. I'm asking you to have the self-awareness because it will support you before you go into an intervention. I'm, my personal trigger is lateness. It's a personal trigger. It's a personal trigger that I have had since childhood. Now, when I took that trigger into the classroom inexperienced, it was like dynamite because it would set me off, and I couldn't slow an intervention down, and I was not self-regulated before I spoke to a student. And my interventions were disproportionate. They were not calm. They were not controlled. So think about what are your triggers, and what when does it require you to therefore apply the best self-regulation? When do you need to step out? It's answering back to you. Right. The thing that's going to trigger you the most, and therefore you need to step out of it. Take a breath and come back. Take a beat and come back. Self-regulation is really helpful because it keeps the trust. We talked about relationship, we talk about high-quality relationships, we talk about trust. And having trust when we, um, blow up, don't apply our self-regulation, we corrode the trust of the whole class. Not just the student who the failing intervention is happening with, all of the other people who feel unsafe getting caught up in the ricochet of this exchange. The trust, the entire group goes down. How do we increase trust? We apologize for our mistakes. Absolutely. Sorry is not just something that we should be, if at all, expecting from our students. We should be role modeling saying sorry. But also, if we want to teach us to have those high-quality connections, let's not throw up relationships.
So what is the behavior? What's the how to be? The how to be is to be assertive. We want to be assertive. And having that use of "I noticed that" in the script, that's an assertive sentence starter. Being assertive, it's interesting because I feel like the word is worth defining here. I hear assertive often used incorrectly. I often people say, "Um, my manager, she's very assertive." And what they mean, if they're a piece of work, assertive is not aggressive. It's not being more aggressive. It's not being harsher and harder. The beauty of assertiveness is it actually has in mind both parties. So people who are assertive, yes, clarity. This is where self-regulation will help you because if you're not self-regulated, let's take a self-regulated. Excuse me. I don't know about you, but clarity leaves the building. If there isn't self-regulation, doing a two, doing a two-minute or a sorry, 60-second intervention, this becomes 60 seconds. It becomes a long rant if you're not self-regulated. So you want to have self-regulation to be able to be assertive. Assertiveness has some competence. Even if the confidence is, "I'm not sure what we're going to be doing now. We're going to speak to my line manager and come back to you. I'm going to speak to the head of department. I'm going to come back to you." That certainty in itself, and that's assertive, and it's slowing the intervention down. And I know that when my parents said to me, "So we're not sure what we're going to do about that behavior. We will going to talk about it tonight and we will tell you in the morning." That made for a very restless night's sleep. So don't be scared to not have the right answer, the right answer straight away. Use the support plan to support your students, but to support you in doing this in the best way. Being assertive, having both parties' feelings and the outcome in mind. I want them to be supported. I want them to be able to stay and learn. I want them to have two minutes of understanding my perspective when a conversation afterwards. I want them to have 20 minutes in triage so that they can regulate and come back to me. We're thinking about both persons, not just harder punishments to punish the madness away, because we know that does not work.
I want to talk a little bit, which about triage. Let's think about how we're going to use it, what it means, um, how we're going to roll it out. It's going to be slightly different for different people depending on your space. But triage can be a space in the in the room, outside the room, or it could be a room. I don't mind how you manage it. But the purpose of triage is recovery, recuperation, regulation. Think about what can happen. Your students who may be through the experience of getting to that point of triage, they are now filled with cortisol and adrenaline. That needs to come down. And I'm sorry if people think that being somewhere where they're not being lambasted and having, um, more goods or adrenaline expelled experiences is the helpful thing to do. It isn't. It doesn't help because when you go to triage, you don't talk about the incident. Regulation is important. And the only way you can overcome cortisol and adrenaline is with oxytocin, and that's a much more positive hormone. And we need therefore regulation and emotional coaching. And so that looks like to you, "Oh, they're just getting T in sympathy when I've had a really difficult time." It's the only way you can combat that hormonal response is to allow them to come down. So it's not that your experience has been belittled. It's that child has been regulated to be able to be returned to learning or have a conversation with you. Regulation and emotional coaching. Emotional coaching, lovely term that is. And what is it? Emotional coaching is thinking about the people, the experts, the coaches who lie in your school right now. And those people are there, the people who are able to have a conversation with someone about emotion, feelings, the weather, get a piece of art out, a sample, something they can pray with someone who just naturally has a propensity of skill, a strength in perspective-taking, in social intelligence. You can really just support bringing that down. Who are those emotional coaches? Wouldn't that be a wonderful our post-training experience after this is the kind of identify who those people are and then how do we expand that? What can they share with us? What training could they maybe deliver? Explore. There's some triage is not another name for what might have been in the past been a long, long, long. Triage should be no longer than 20 minutes. And that is it. A target time. Yes, I know there are serious breaches and different incidents, but your target time, no longer than 20 minutes. That's revolutionary. Before we were sending students out, it's ending streams out, we're getting over outside the door or just ridding them and never seeing them again until they next end up in our classroom, and we hadn't resolved the problem. Uh, 20 minutes, a target time. Return from to a session, your lesson, or the next lesson, whatever is happening. The target time is important. So parameters to work within. Support the people who are using the system of triage, the young person in it, and the people who want to live in the triage experience.
Now, how we manage that call out. How do we manage call out? This is a how to be for me. And for me, this is an essential how to be. Yes, there's software which means you can do it, and you do it privately and respectfully to call them. I want to talk about the experience of student in the room leaving the room. Now, I remember the time that I got to the dizzy heights of having a walkie-talkie. And you go into that room, and I know the student who needs to leave, and I am ready to creep in. I'm just starting to tiptoe in. I'm lowering myself to the level of student ization and get them out of the classroom. I'm doing it quietly, sensitively to the teacher, to allow them to keep teaching and not be stopped. And then, and then the pantomime just starts. "Here he is. There's the boy." And the whole class is looking. And that's it. That student digs their heels in, and they will not leave because all eyes are on them. How to manage call out? It's actually some quite important training. Somewhat like, "How do we really do a positive phone call home?" How do we actually do call out? These things are not necessarily trained. Maybe it actually sits down and says, "What we should be doing? What is that? This is how we do it here." With callouts, is it that the teacher gets everyone on activity so that it's not embarrassing? Is it that the teacher gets everyone an activity, takes them aside? The person who's doing the triage is able to pick up detection, is able to do that circularly? Is it the classroom is turning around, and where the teacher is teaching from at the front becomes the back so that student can lead discreetly? How do we manage call out? Put that into some post-training. Put that in as something to agree because actually, what we don't want is dysregulated adults and dysregulated boys in that experience because it doesn't work. And the very person has come to support by helping to remove that student is now set up in a situation where they can't support both of you at the same time. And allowing and support you for teaching, and you will have a group of students there waiting to go who would rather be doing that. Yeah, rather than having a popcorn moment. It's a great expression that we learned for some students, um, about what's a popcorn moment. What's that? These students, popcorn moment. This, you know, when the teacher loses it, and the student loses it, and they're going together, and we know that that is going to go on for ages. They're going to be shouting, they're going to be shouting back. They've got to wait for someone to call out, then they've got to get them out the room. We know we've got 20 minutes, or we can down tools and watch. And if only someone had the pop. And actually, you don't want to create a popcorn moment. I know that what you want to do is you want to be able to get on with the teaching and learning because that's what's important. That's what's really important to you.
Giving people a script. Everyone can have a script. Not everyone will learn it in the same way. Part of assertiveness is our body language. And when that pendulum swings out of assertive and into aggressive, we create problems, particularly with our body language. Non-verbal communication for our most vulnerable, our most distressed young people is key. They are picking up non-verbal cues, and they are hardwired to very quickly make decisions about whether or not you're a threat. And very small non-verbal communications are going to read as threats. And actually, when I want to, in my class, 33 go in and land the script in a minute and get back out and get on with teaching and learning, I want to be using the UN of training on on my physical and thinking about my assertiveness. So I'm going to talk through a few things. Body language and our gestures. One of the things that we need to definitely do. So we go in, we drop down in a level. Okay? That the dropping down by a level supports human self-regulation as well because as soon as you drop down to their level, you start to drop your voice down, your voice becomes very soft, to drop your breathing down, and supported for both of you. We're now in a beautiful situation. We've got some co-regulation happening. In outdoor spaces, as I said, where you can't sort of drop down, we're going side by side. The importance of side by side, whether you in the classroom, outside, key, because it doesn't, it takes away that what can be perceived as aggressive body language. No looming, no going in straight on, and definitely no demanding eye contact. Body language needs to be open. Sometimes we cross our bones. This is a classic, isn't it? A non-verbal communication. Just crossing our arms alone. If I'm going in for a difficult conversation or potentially a difficult conversation, I'm uncrossing my arms. If we're cold, we cross our arms, um, in our houses, we went across the roads because we've got heating on in our chairs. We haven't got arm wrestling. Crossing my arms. If I'm going in for a difficult intervention, potentially difficult intervention, I am uncrossing my arms. I'm thinking carefully about my gestures. There's no pointing from the other side of the room and bringing that finger in. And I've got open palms because open palms create trust. So having your hands behind your back, it's not the one you want to be able to show your palms. Gestures that are downwards create calm and trust. So calm gesturing downwards creates trust. Think about your tone of voice. So we've got body language, we've got gestures. Now, voice. They want you to menace somebody from a quiet and play from a quietly in their ear. I wanted it to become an assertive and full of belief that you can do the right thing. Thank you. I want you to think about in these situations.
If you go in, and sometimes when we assume that we're all going to be calm and we're all going to use our scripts, but for some of our students, whose attachment is going to be really triggered by this, depending on different attachment styles, it might mean that somebody further escalates their behavior. So I go in, I land my script with TJ. He gives me some secondary behavior. I'm extremely calm. I walk away. And he drops for the whole class, for everyone to hear, a big fat F U. It rings through the class. For me, everybody looks up from their work. They love you, Miss Ellie, but they look at you. And that expression is saying, "We could do." You're looking back at them going, "In these situations, if behavior is further escalated, what we need to do is reassure the majority. Bring the trust back. You have busted those high-quality relationships. Hold them in your hands." Say to them with certainty, "I heard that. I know you heard that. You know that I will deal with it. Please carry on doing the right thing. Well done for work. And thank you. Demon, thank you. Well done for being respectful. And done. Thank you." You know, we all manage it. Thank you. Just as you would if it was a high stakes breach that was physical, you would look after the majority. Look after your majority. Acknowledge it and take and slow the intervention down. Then we'll go back to why three years and we're summing up.
Think about what kind of quality conversation you want to have. If you are calling somebody back for that two-minute conversation, what's going to happen in that two-minute conversation? It can be called a few things. A pep talk is a good way of seeing it or describing it. A pep talk. Two minutes. Two minutes about the learning. Just like your script. Your script earlier. Notice that you're not, you're not, you've not started. You've not showed me ready. Whatever it is. Bring it back to the learning. The pep talk, like you have missed phonics. The end of phonics twice this week, actually. I'm concerned. I don't want you to be missing phonics. Bring it back to the learning. If we get onto, uh, having too much momentum and potentially ranting about behavior because they're not just here for behavior, we get onto that, it starts to become sort of white noise. We can see our students as though now they start to sort of leave, essentially. Actually, what we want them to do is to be to bring it down to something that's tangible. Two, two sessions or phonetic, you've not finished this week, and I'm concerned because actually I want you to succeed. And I'm really excited about the pace that we're going in the class. What can I give you? And use that pep talk to be about the learning. Use the pep talk for an opportunity to be billed. Now, don't improvise. Thing is, when we improvise and we're tired, there are problems. I improvise at the beginning of the term. You know what? That was a great pet talk. Well done, Miss Ellie. I've got this. I'm all over it. I improvise in six weeks' time, and it's not a two-minute pep talk. It's a five-minute rant, and things go wrong, and I re-escalate myself, and I re-escape the situation, and I re-trigger my student, and we're off. Actually, what I want you to do is think carefully about what would be the key messages to hear in two minutes. I've got two minutes before I start prepping for my lesson, and in these two minutes, I just want to talk about what my concern is and go through it. In fact, what a fantastic activity that would be for you now is if you finish this training and thought, "What are my two? What are the five things I would like to cover? What the four things I would like to go with? The three things I would like to cover in a two-minute pep talk about learning?" Just help me steer the course so that I don't go off. That would be a lovely activity for post-training.
Excuse me, picking up your own tab. This is an important part of it. Yes, you've used triage or the call out system, and somebody has been taken to have an opportunity to regulate before coming back. Great. Please can you make sure that you find time? So I've had that two-minute conversation or some other conversation. We might want to call it restorative approaches. Even if you're still using your own system, and there's detention, that's fine, but there must be some sort of conversation experience where you pick up that tab, particularly if you have a feeling that, well, they're getting teams into me, and I get all the difficult stuff. But then we can do something about that. We can go, make sure we find that student and reset. Reset our relationship. Reset our relationship. It says I care. The picking up our tab says I care. It's part of high-quality relationships. We've had a difficulty, but actually, respectfully, respectful engagement. I am going to enable you to be able to have a better experience next time. Task enabling by having a clean sheet. We are going to reset. When I was at school, and I'd struggled in my science lessons, my science teacher, he and I struggled. So I threw my worst behavior on the line. And if my teacher said to me, "Tyler, I will see you at the end of the day." Do you know what? It didn't matter where I was. If I was at the edge and the end of the playing fields, he would be there. "Tyler, it's good. Let's take that conversation." It's a commitment. It's a commitment to pressing reset because he cared. And actually, it's an investment. It's that emotional currency. The emotional currency we talked about that you were building in session one. You're building that emotion from a currency by revisiting. And I personally, I don't wait for a restorative approach to the very end of the process until they've gone on a call out, into three larger, until we've got the two minutes. Should I know what? Sometimes after a first warning, I might be thinking, "I want to have a conversation with that student at the end of the lesson because that's really, really not like Faye, and I want to just shut it in." So please don't seem restorative as this end-of-the-road practice. What happens when the restorative is end-of-the-road practice is it becomes a system which students play rather than a really enriching system that allows the students bring themselves to change, to bring themselves to improvement, to invest in their own learning and their relationship with school. And you, you, you need them to not just be playing the system of knowing there's five questions they answer, the five questions, or they give you the sheet with five questions, and then that box ticked. It doesn't create change. And yes, sure, TJ and I, we had many restorative conversations, but every time we did, it gave me more currency for the next time he hit the bump in the road. And the more that I got to know about TJ's life and parents and relationships and care situations and grandparents and peers around and grown adult peers that he had outside of school, actually, he, every single moment of a restorative approach and the conversation was worth it. And the way that I got to know about it was from using what we call spotlights.
A student's spotlight. Anyone can do them. Student spotlights are two minutes in our staff briefing when we talk about the student. His behavior is becoming quite high profile. And we take a moment, and we, two minutes, and we talk about them. It's headlines. And the thing is about the student spotlighting is it creates empathy. And for teachers, for us, it reduces our fear and our sense of risk. When I see that student who I don't teach, behaving in a way that is not what we've agreed in this school, this is not how we do it here, in the corridor, and I don't have a relationship with them yet, but actually, that student spotlight that we did, that student spotlight that we did, supports me in being able to intervene. It supports me in being able to be part of the system that picks up and supports that young person with their behavior. I feel a bit more confident in doing it. And actually, I feel more supportive for them in doing it. I may not know you, but I come across you quite a lot. And before I came across you quite a lot, I had no idea how to handle you. But now, thanks to student spotlight, I feel like I know you. And actually, I think I could intervene. I know a little bit about you, and I feel like I could. I've been given a window into your world, and that window into your world has created a lot of empathy for me. Sometimes when I do, when I set up a student spotlight, um, I would, in a, in a team briefing, I would actually do it physically. I should put someone in the, in a chair and say, "Right, this is TJ. These, let's put up some, bring in some other adults." Okay, here's his linked person that we get really good communication with, and that is their support worker. Here is somebody, here's some of the adults here who he works with. Additional facilities. So we've got an educational psychologist who he has a great relationship. He has cancer and care. This person. We've got two behavior mentors and team filled them up into the picture. And those two baby mentors are here in the room. We've got, so they are great people to speak to. Okay. Relationship with home. He's in and out of his mum's home. He's always there. Um, and mum's our relationship breaking down. So we start to give those details. So think really carefully about if you do see him in the school, making it as welcoming as we possibly can for her. Because these are the instances we have which doesn't feel comfortable coming in, and we want to welcome her in. Um, this is how he speaks. And you really build up a picture. It doesn't take very long. The schools who I have worked with, and the schools who I have coached, and the senior leaders who I have coached, so that students what night in for them in terms of a shift and a culture shift and something that really supports the rest of the team. You know, supports our confidence and our well-being and our resilience, um, is it the student spotlight? Because they suddenly felt like they're as a staff would have included with feeling included in what's happening. We feel like we've been invited into the world to support and act up, and we knocked up in a positive way. We felt like we are SLT had expressed being thanked for the spotlighting because of how much it changes their perspective on a student. It changes their perspective on behavior they experience, and it changes their perspective on how they are going to intervene or support. Now, like I said, anyone can do this. It might be nice if SLT model it first. But actually, there are two support workers in, in our team briefing. They probably have the most experience of working one-to-one with that student. They have the intel. They know the parts of the school where they feel safe. They know the environments where they feel triggered. They know the language that works well for them. And you know the body language that doesn't support them. They know the scripts that help them move on. Student spotlight is a great way to bring us all together, feel like a team, and say, "Right, we are all invested in this change. We're not, we're not giving up on that person. We're all invested in this change." And it supports you, supports your performance in the.
Most positive way, and this is absolutely this is task enabling. This is enabling us to do our jobs in the best possible way. This is saying, as a, as a group and as a community, I'm investing in our relationships. And I know that what you need from the way is, you need to be enabled to do your task as a teacher. And this information, this information will enable you to do your task.
I want to talk a bit more about the business of restorative practices and restorative approaches. As I said earlier, restorative approaches are not a set of questions that are delivered or given back, um, that desensitizes students to the situation. There are lots of ways in which we can be restorative. The intention, the first part of this, the intention of this is for a restorative conversation to be a coaching conversation. A coaching conversation. Now, what does that mean? And that's really hard sometimes to be the person who's experienced the difficulties, behavior, and then switch out from that to being a coach who is ostensibly 100% invested on the side of the student. A coaching conversation is going to require you to have questions and remain curious. And if you truly remain curious, you are open to finding out something you don't know. You might find out something you don't know about, actually, I don't feel like you've ever listened to me. Actually, when I, when you sit me next to that student, this is what's been happening for us outside the classroom, and that's what I need to get out. I can't see the board. All of those things. Find out something new.
May I give this advice? Don't start with why. Why creates a defensive reaction. Why did you do that? Why are you behaving that way? I know we can simply feel like I'm just asking a question. I'm just being coaching in my perspective. Actually, why creates quite a defensive, um, response. And actually, we want our young people to bring themselves to this restorative process so that they are able to drop those defenses and experience being heard, being understood, and creating their pathways towards change. So yes, you're wanting to have them understand your perspective, your feelings. What's the safe way of doing that for you? We're thinking about safely and cleanly expressing what happened to you is an important part of the restorative process. There's some lovely training out there. Mark Finnis, for example, or non-violent communication. You can look into where you're in a particular restorative conversation saying, "When I hear this, when I see this, I feel." So we're not saying, "When you did that, you made me." None of that. It's very much in a restorative place. You can take it from absolute ownership of your feelings. So, "When I hear those words, I feel cross because I value respect." And you link it to your values. So, "Value respect, and I just don't, I don't feel good when I hear that." And you might be able to invite them to take their full responsibility for their own feelings as well.
Again, this allows us to be planned and proportionate and stepped. Think about how you are going to do those things, planned and proportionate in our conversations and in our interventions. The restorative conversations do not need to happen one person on one side of the desk and the other person on the other side. The best, like an interview, it doesn't usually work terribly well. Let the student come in, find their place to stand or sit. Think carefully about your body language. Be open and de-escalate. Sometimes the best restorative conversations happen when we are not even looking at each other. You'll know this, those of you who have driven your teenage son or daughter in the car. You might have had your most game-changing restorative conversations. You're driving, you're both looking straight ahead, and it all comes tumbling out, and resolution is easily found. How do you create this in a school? You can create this in a walk and talk. Let's walk. Do you see people do that? Some of those people who are really skilled at behavior. Let's walk, and you walk together, and the conversation can come out in a way that's non-threatening. The setup just works better sometimes.
In terms of being planned and proportionate, if what has happened is someone has destroyed a display, or the plan and the proportionate outcome is not necessarily how many hours they spend pertained, but to help you in putting that display back up. And we can do that together. And guess what? That provides us, that provides an opportunity for our restorative approach. Asking some questions, showing some interest, sharing something. We've actually got something a little bit therapeutic happening because we're being creative and we're putting up a display and we're shooting the breeze. Again, we're able to have some investments and time. Restorative approaches take a little bit of time, and sometimes that's what we're struggling for. And that would be something really important to spend some post-training time looking at. What are the opportunities? Restorative approaches that have worked best for you? What are the spaces for restorative approaches that have worked best for you? What are the things that have not worked in terms of particular students who have had restorative approaches being? What resources have you already got? Maybe you have got a set of five questions on the sheet, and you're thinking, but what could you do with that? How could those questions now be, um, reinvigorated in some way or used to support? Is that the first class they start to write and think about their behavior before they speak to you? Is that part of your process? But restorative practices should really feed into part one of our session because restorative practices are relational. Restorative practice is go right back around. So this process becomes cyclical. Back to I care, high-quality connections. I'm enabling you to do your task as a student through this coaching conversation. Remember the third part of high-quality connections. I'm giving you respectful engagement. The second part of high-quality connections is by respect for engagement. I'm really listening, and I'm really open to hearing something I may not know. And I'm really focused on you. And also the trust. I'm trusting you to bring your best self to this conversation. And just think you to hear what I've said where I just express my vulnerability in this situation that we can together support you with your behavior. And also being prepared to have that conversation a few times. It's your check-in. It's your relationship. It's coming back to that person and re-putting it back together, putting that relationship back together each time. It's restorative practices are part of our resilience, and we can be a resilient team if we support each other. The only way we can be resilient is two parts to this journey, aren't there? The two parts to resilience. And we use it a lot with students, but for us too. There has to be an adversity for us to positively adapt. And every time we have a restorative conversation or practice or approach, whatever it is you do, that is triggered by the adversity, by the challenge, and it's an opportunity for you to positively adapt. That's restorative practices are the important part of what it means to be a resilient practitioner. And it's also working alongside then, side-by-side, student in their behavior to say, "Right, I'm going to support you in being resilient because we've got an adversity, and we are going to positively steer from this adversity." And we can't positively steer from the adversity without the adversity.
You are going to think about the following post-training. The A4 sheet that has a clear, "This is how we do it here. This is how we do it here. If things go wrong, this is how, as of when things are going right, this is what you're going to hear. This is what we're going to celebrate. This is how we're going to celebrate you. These are the things that we're going to do and things go wrong." If you're not clear on that, please go to the "When the Adults Change" website. See our gallery of Awesomeness. You are going to see examples of how schools do this and they make it work. And they're plenty. A full sheet. If you haven't got that, if you haven't started to get a clear idea on what your "this is how we do it here" is from a big policy machine, that would be quite an important step. And if the first step of that is knowing what rules you're going to use, go through it, sit with down, decide what's in, what is the important language for you. The next part of your, of your training after this has got to be casting plan, like a green. If you want to use your own systems, fine. Remember that language is important. It's really important. So please, if it's consequence one, your first consequence, your second consequence, third, no problem. Or first one and second warning, last chance, triage. That's okay. Think about what that classroom plan, how it looks, how you can roll it out into your space, and how that script, that intervention script, is going to sound for you in your walls. What are the school systems that are going to support you doing this successfully? So to be able to call home, do you have access to phones? To be able to have triage, do you know what the space is? Do you know who the people are? To be able to do outstanding emotional coaching, who we're already thinking are your pros who want to do that? And maybe there's some people who are going, "Actually, you know, I'd like to be involved in some emotional coaching," and they're putting their hand up because they want to steer apart their career in that direction after training. That would be lovely to know these things. Your A4 sheet, your classroom plan, your helpful school systems in which we are all invested, support our relationships, and they support outstanding relationships with our young people, and they support outstanding relationships with each other and the community we served. That means that those relationships can be maintained, kept safe, and blossomed through the good times and through the bad. Walking alongside our students's struggle is important, and it's important that we do that. We walk alongside them and their struggle. That is as important as positively noticing when they are doing fabulously. The quality of your relationship and your connection with your community and your colleagues will make you strong. It will make you confident. It will make you feel consistent, and consistency will feel achievable. So my greatest wish for you is that this training will be an experience that will help your job will you be what you truly dreamed it would be. So lastly for me, I look forward to your questions. Please you give them in the chat or to Shah, and I will answer them for you. Um, if you would like to stay in touch with me, you can do on at starperformTara, and we love hearing from you. And you can be part of our gallery of Awesomeness or any of those changes possible. Noticing any of your stories that you want to share with us, please share them or feedback on today indeed, um, on at whentheadultschange on Twitter.
[Music] Thank you.