Author of

 "Good Kids, Difficult Behavior"

and "Discipline That Works: 5 Simple Steps"

 NOTES FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Educators and Friends,

After a very busy summer school is back in session, in fact many of our schools in Georgia reopened on the 7th of August.  Many of the students and parents feel that is too early to start back, especially in light of the temperatures (not to mention traffic and air pollution) we experience in the month of August.  Many of the schools have had to adjust and limit recess, band and sport activities due to the temperatures.

Joyce had a great time at the High Schools That Work Conference that was held in Orlando the middle of July.  As many of you may know, Joyce was very pleased with the attendance to all her conferences, with some seminars providing standing room only.  Read more from Joyce in her section.

Please be sure to read the special ARTICLE taken from the USA Today which offers medical proof of the E-T-A™ Concept that Joyce developed and has been applying for years.

The Editor

 ASK JOYCE

As Joyce travels and works with educators all over the country, she is constantly being asked---

"What do you do when...?" questions.  She has the greatest respect for "what do you do when questions" because usually the questioner is genuinely seeking new information and the teacher is willing to be a student.  Each month, Joyce will answer one or more of the most common "what do you do questions".  You are welcome to send one of yours.  She'll do her best to answer it.  Keep in mind, her answers may be different from the customary response but they are tried and true strategies for getting students to do what you are asking them to do.  Give yourself permission to try something new! Email Joyce at joyce@thehumanconnection.net  with any questions or situations you would like input on.  Let us know if we can show the question in a future newsletter or if you prefer to keep it private. We are hoping Joyce can help address situations you encounter and by sharing these questions/answers others can benefit as well.

From Joyce...

Welcome back.  I hope that your summer break provided you with plenty of time to rest and rejuvenate.  I also hope that this will be your best school year ever.   I am going to do my best to support you throughout the school year by providing monthly behavior management suggestions which will make your work easier and more successful.  Personal energy saving tips will also be coming your way with each edition of this newsletter. Why not commit yourself to taking five minutes a month to read our messages.  They will give you a boost and remind, you that first obligation as a leader of children and youth is to take good care of you.

BUILDING POSITIVE RELATIONSHIPS WITH NEGATIVE STUDENTS

This year’s High Schools That Work Conference which was held the second week of July in Orlando, Florida drew over 8,000 educators from all over the United States.  This was my 7^th year to present at the HSTW conference and as usual I enjoyed the enthusiasm of the fine educators who come to the conference seeking new ideas and strategies for helping students improve their performance and achieve success.

I presented a new program this year entitled Building Positive Relationships With Negative Kids I was amazed to find that a room which seated 1,500 people was almost filled to capacity. The tremendous interest in this subject has prompted me to begin this school year with a series on this subject.  Feel free to respond with questions and comments.

Many students come to school today with negative or angry attitudes.  The reasons for this are many and complicated.  The lack of parental support, poverty, depression, the culture of negativity and violence in which they are growing up are a few.  Whatever the reasons, the reality is that they are not entering the classroom with an enthusiasm for learning nor a desire to achieve.

The following five suggestions will help you get off to the right start with aggravating, angry, frustrated or discouraged students.

Getting Off to the Right Start

1) Plan a Response.  Prevent a Reaction:

Make a decision to stay in a response mode with these students. A negative reaction from an adult will almost certainly prompt the student to act out even more.   Reactions happen automatically, but responses are thoughtful decisions about what will be said or done the next time the student displays a negative attitude or behavior.  As soon as a student knows that he/she cannot “push your buttons” they will begin to trust you.

2) Build Trust with Negative Students:

Students with negative attitudes and issues are reluctant to trust adults.  The foundation of any positive relationship is trust.  The key to trust building with difficult kids is predictability.  These students must be able to predict how you will respond to whatever goes on in your classroom.

Be predictable.  Tell students how you will respond to certain behaviors and then do exactly that everyday, no matter what mood you’re in or what mood they are in.  Once they know that you are as good as your word and that they can depend on you to do what you say you will do, trust will begin to grow.  Not only that, they aren’t as likely to act out just to see how you will react.

3) Be the Leader in the Room: 

Difficult students respect adults who treat them respectfully, even when they act disrespectfully themselves.  They don’t often meet adults who are able to do this but when they do, they are impressed.   Let your student’s know that you are in charge of the room and that you will not permit them to take charge.  Explain that you are responsible for teaching them and in order to do that you need them to cooperate with you.  Let them know what will not be tolerated, but do all of this with a positive attitude.  Never act like you a just waiting for them to screw up.

4) Always Act and Speak As Though Expect Them to Do the Right Thing:

It is amazing how well kids respond to our expectations of them.  Make it abundantly clear from the first days of school that you believe that each one is able to master the subject you are teaching and that you fully expect that they will.  Tell them that it is your intention to treat them like ladies and gentlemen and that you expect that they will conduct themselves in the same manner.

5) Set Up the Structure for Your Classroom Immediately:

Structure is defined as detailed direction.  The difficult the behavior of a class, the more structure is needed.  In a less structured classroom the teacher can say get out your books and get ready to follow along.  In a more structured classroom, the teacher must say “Remove everything from the top of your desk but your history book. Put your things under your seats.  Open your book to page six and look at me when you are ready to go.”

Detailed directions help students know exactly what to do next and exactly when they are off the mark.  Many youngsters are totally unconscious of what is going on around them or even what is going on with them.  Tight structure (detailed directions) helps keep them on track.

Joyce

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Volume 38 - August 2006

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Medical Proof of the E-T-A™ Concept that Joyce developed and has been applying for years!

Article

USA Today, 8/7/06

Study: Ask With Care

Emotions rule brain’s decisions

By: Dan Vergano, USA Today

The evidence has been piling up throughout history, and now neuroscientist has proved it’s true: The brain’s wiring emphatically relies on emotion over intellect in decision-making.

A brain-imaging study reported in the current Science examines “framing”, a hot topic among psychologists, economists, and political hucksters.

Framing studies have shown that how a question is posed – think negative ads, for instance – skews decision-making. But no one showed exactly how this effect worked in the human brain until the brain-imaging study led by Benedetto De Martino of University College London.

De Martino and colleagues asked 20 men and women to undergo three 17-minute brain scans while being asked to gamble – or not – with an initial pot of English pounds worth about $95. When told they would “keep” 40% of their money if they didn’t gamble, the volunteers chose to gamble only 43% of the time. Told they could “lose” 60% of the money if they didn’t gamble, they rolled the dice 62% of the time.

Their chances of winning the money were carefully explained beforehand, and participants knew the odds were identical. But the framing effect still skewed their decisions significantly.

The brain images revealed the amygdala, a neural region that possessed strong negative emotions, such as fear, fired up vigorously in response to each two-second (on average) gambling decision. Where people resisted the framing effect, a brain region connected to positive emotions such as empathy, and another that activates whenever people face choices, lit up as well; seeming to duke it out over the decision.

“We found everyone showed emotional biases, more or less; no one was totally free of them”, Dr Martino says. Even among the four participants who were aware they were inconsistent in decision-making, “they said, ‘I know, I just couldn’t help myself’”, he says.

The study comes amid a burst of research into neuroeconomics, which studies the brain’s rode in buying and selling decisions. Economists have embraced the idea in recent years that irrational psychology, rather than cool calculation, plays as role in such decisions. The brain study goes further and suggests that emotions rule decisions almost completely.

“The study is a very mice application of recent knowledge we’ve acquired about healthy cognition and emotion”, says neuroscientist Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who was not part of the study.

“As a neuroethicist, I’d urge caution about over-interpreting this elegant study”, says Judy Illes of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. In real life, decision-making is “an extremely complex behavior with both rations and irrational components”, she says, and it’s hard to capture completely in a lab setting.

Still, Illes calls the study intriguing and predicts it will lead to more work in the neuroeconomics arena.

Dr Martino acknowledges the study’s limitations; the decisions described as rational in the study were simply consistent ones, not a measure of intelligence or correctness, he says. “I’m not sure you would really want someone like Mr. Spock making all your decisions”.

In fact, people who lack emotions because of brain injuries, often have difficult making decisions at all, notes Damasio. The brain stores emotional memories of past decisions, and those are what drive people’s choices in life, he suggests. “What makes you and me ‘rational’ is not suppressing our emotions, but tempering them in a positive way”, he says.

Though neuroecononmics is a hot field, with hundreds of researchers attending a recent meeting in Paris on the topic, Damasio says brain imaging’s biggest potential lies in teaching” “Our education system ignores the role of emotion in learning and decision-making”.

 INSPIRATION

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.
Patricia Neal

Taken from ~ http://www.inspirational-quotes.info/index.html

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