for One-to-One Behaviour Change


 


Visit Peter Pappas' wonderful blog and invest three minutes in watching the video.

He is dedicated to relinquishing responsibility for learning to the student!

The author of the following, states: I am proud of my life-long career in public education - especially the 25 years I spent as a teacher. For over 20 years, I have worked with school districts, state DOEs, leading educational organizations and companies to improve the quality of teaching and learning. I provide training and consulting services across the United States and internationally.

More about my career and presentations. More about my showcase of projects and publications. Send me an email for information on one of my workshops

Forget About Remembering,
It's Focus That's the New Literacy

The cost of information is rapidly approaching zero. Normally as price of a commodity drops, we consume more of it. But unlike all the other cheap stuff we buy, and then later discard, cheap information demands our attention. Despite all the claims of multi-tasking, we are stuck with a finite attention span. Thus the ability to selectively filter out unwanted information and stay focussed on a task is emerging as a new literacy.

Students are adrift in a sea of text without context.  As the barriers to content creation have dropped, old media (for all its flaws) has been replaced by pointless mashups, self-promoting pundits, and manufactured celebrity. Educators must help students make more effective use of the information that fills their lives - how to better access it, critically evaluate it, store it, analyze, share it, and maintain their focus. For more on how we need to redefine the information flow in school see my post "What Happens in Schools When Life Has become an Open-book Test?"

Recently David Dalrymple, a researcher at the MIT Mind Machine Project, made an insightful contribution to the The Edge Annual Question — 2010 "How is the internet changing the way you think?" He wrote, 

"Filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill for those who use the Internet. ... Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends' doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally."

If you need a visual reminder of the swamp of information that your students are wading through take a look at this video "InfoWhelm and Information Fluency" from the

21st Century Fluency Project

 ...it is certainly possible for children to learn to use Clean Language questions very effectively. A twelve-year-old, Amanda Stanton-Nelson, recently became a Certified Clean Facilitator. She had trained alongside adults, practised with adults as clients, and was assessed to the same standards as her adult colleagues. Now her ambition is to become a Clean Language trainer and teach other children to use Clean Language to enhance their own lives.
                 Clean Language in Education
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Crafty Classroom workshops and presentations offer tips and techniques that can make a profound, positive and lasting impact on the quality, process and outcome of any communication in almost any  learning environment, with one student or a room full.

These workshops can be presented over one, two or three days.

They can also be booked as Insets or twilight sessions and will be of interest and benefit to teachers, sencos, learning mentors, home tutors, classroom assistants, and others who work with small groups, individuals, whole classrooms - and maybe even in the staffroom

Teachers, Sencos, TA's, Learning Mentors, school counsellors, home tutors will be better able to motivate and inspire pupils, students - and maybe each other - to understand the systemic nature of thoughts, feelings, actions and emotions.

People attending Clean and Crafty events are sometimes shocked by an approach that is different to any previous experience in a training environment. Some find the difference uplifting, even liberating. Others - fortunately a very small minority - find it uncomfortable precisely because it is so unfamiliar.

For more details on the difference, click here

If you are interested in attending open-courses or arranging inset or twilight sessions, contact 

craftylistening@gmail.com or call 07973 210 830

 

Some of the ideas, theories and techniques from the workbook.

Emotional Intelligence
starting with self-awareness

Crafty Listening
Curiosity, respect, assertiveness, focus, thoughtfulness, YES!

Metaphors for Caring Connections
When you’re teaching at your best, that’s like what?

Logical Levels
Remedial, generative and evolutionary changes

Games People Play
Drama Triangles, Game plans and winning strategies

Power Plays
Letting go of your end is a winning move!

Well Formed Outcomes
Future oriented, solution-focused thinking

Linguistic Icebergs
Exquisite listening and questioning skills

Reversal Theory
Explaining inexplicable changes of mood and motivation

New Learning Patterns
for Nurturing Learning Potential

Representational Systems
Strategies based on learner’ unique maps of the world

Clean Language
Gathering VERY High Value Information

Circles of Influence
“I stand as the possibility of…”
Aligning beliefs and values with a positive sense of self

Action Learning Questions
There is no failure – only feedback!

Caring Confrontation
Where the Caring bit is more important than ever

Descriptive Praise
Encouraging praise-worthy behaviour

Multiple Intelligences
We can’t treat people equally if we treat them all the same

Tapping into Potential
Emotional Intelligence for self-validation

Celebrating Diversity
As a source of abundance and a cause for celebration

NB The range and number of topics used will depend on the time available,

the numbers attending and any specific issues delegates want to focus on.