Steve Francis

Good classroom management is essential. Here are some ideas for you to reflect on how you manage behaviour from US Principal, Lisa Brumfield on The Principal’s Desk. Be succinct in your instructions. Most students can follow two-step directions at best. With this in mind, limit multiple requests. For example, if you say…“ I need all of you to take out your book and put them on my desk, put your homework in the red tray, put your journal in the blue basket, place your excursion form on my desk, sign in your attendance, choose a book and sit at your desk” you will be lucky if you see any homework in that red tray. Keep redirections short. Good Example: “Jacob…

Parent-teacher meetings can be a stressful time as they often add to our existing workloads. Not only do they usually occur before or after a busy day of teaching, many teachers feel uncomfortable dealing with parents. Changing formats and modes brought about by COVID may be adding to the stress. Planning and preparation are essential to increase effectiveness and reduce stress. The need for social distancing (when we are actually meeting face-to-face with parents) make setting up the environment for the interviews even more challenging. You should have a clear space to meet with the parent/s. Ideally you should be seated alongside the parent so that you can discuss and look at examples together. This may not be possible with…

To feel satisfied and happy in our work in schools, we need to feel both competent AND confident. If these are unbalanced, we can become doubtful, frustrated, unmotivated and could end up mentally and emotionally drained. Being too confident without competence is delusional. However, people who are competent but don’t have confidence, are filled with self-doubt and are likely to be anxious. As we learn new skills, we gain competence and as we gain competence we are more confident to try more, which again grows our competence. You may have experienced this as COVID has forced us to rapidly take on new skills. Becoming aware of how competence and confidence are both impactful and interrelated, as well as learning how…

Time is precious. Schools are busy places. There is almost too much to do and not enough time. No matter what time of year it is, the problem is the same: our list of tasks is never-ending and our time available is never enough. How can we deal with this in a sane way? Realise That You Can’t Do It All Right Now You might have 20 things to do or 100….but you can’t do all of them right now. How many can you actually do right now? ONE! Realising that we can’t do everything right now is an important step in having realistic expectations about what we can achieve. Research shows that most people UNDER estimate how long tasks actually…