The last MMSEL course was my group presentation about “Communicating Effectively with Parents and Intervening when Misbehaviour Occurs”. It consisted some materials.
First, it was about what does parent engagement in school mean, why it is important, and how to increase it. Parent engagement in school means parent and school work together to improve or enhance student’s development. It’s important because they can control student’s positive behaviour. Some ways to increase it is by providing activities that can meet the parents, teachers, and the students frequently.
Second, it was about “Cognitive Intervention”. There were three kinds of cognitive Intervention:
1. Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication
When someone talks, s/he must be combined the spoken things with the non-verbal message. In every case, verbal and non-verbal communication can be congruent or incongruent. When that-two-thing is congruent, our listeners tend to believe us, or at least they understand what are we talking about.
However, if that-two-thing is not congruent, our listener will doubt about what we are talking about. For example, if we say something about good news with smiles, it means our verbal and non-verbal communication is congruent.
2. I-Message
I-message is a way to express our feeling, beliefs, and value to someone without blaming him/her. Thomas Gordon created this term "I message" in 1960 when he did therapy with the children. He added the concept in his book for parent, PET; Parents Effectiveness Training (1970).
For example, the use of I-Message to a student who does misbehavior is: “Hey, I’m so sad to know you did it. I always hope all of my students behave well, none exception. I also always hope you to have improvement during this lesson.” We should use word “I” rather than blaming him/her by word “you”.
3. Logical Consequences
Logical consequences are not punishment. They help the students to see the effect of their actions, repair the situation, and learn to be better for the next time. There are three kinds of logical Consequences:
a) Take a break
If a student loses self-control, s/he must go to a room in the corner to get cool her/himself. This break is just in a short time, s/he may go back after re-gain his/her control.
b) Loss of Privilege
If a student misuses a material or does action out of the activity when learning, so s/he should be stopped to use that material or stopped to join the learning activity in a short period. The privilege will be restored when the student and the teacher talk in depth about the things to prevent the similar problem occurs in the next time.
c) You break it, you fix it.
If a student breaks one thing or hurts someone’s feeling, so s/he must fix what thing that has been broken. In case of hurting someone’s feeling, s/he must do apologize, the teacher can guide the student to do it in many different ways. For example, writing the apologize-letter, or many other incredible ways.
There are still some materials that my group had presented. If you don’t mind, you can download the presentation files (click here), and the video (click here).
