A wise teacher leads a happy class.
Before the beginning of the semester, the school invited an experienced positive discipline coach – Ms Jin Junhong, who gave two full days of positive discipline training for the homeroom teachers, so that the teachers could lead classes with a more positive focus.
During the ice-breaker activity, teachers gathered in a sharing group. In Ms Jin’s sharing session, teachers learned that education that is gentle but firm could provide children with a supportive environment. Children are able to explore positively and grow continuously if teachers guide them to understand the needs revealed by their behaviors, and when teachers adopt heuristic language to stimulate children’s driven force and encourage students to find out that they are actually making progress little by little.
Facing children’s unhappier emotions, the teachers shared skills to pacify them one by one: First accept the children’s emotions, and then teach them some reasonable ways to express their emotions; take the children to look in the mirror, so that they can quickly calm down when they examine themselves; give the children a chance to calm down alone; distract their attention; let them learn to take deep breaths; help them write down their feelings by themselves; have a “Calm Corner” in classrooms; let them express their feelings and needs with the “I” sentence pattern.
From the perspective of positive discipline, Ms. Jin vividly explained the mechanism of emotion generation with the analogy of “brain in the palm”, so that teachers could better understand the meaning of “positive pause”, as well as perceive and accept students’ feelings in the way of “mirror neurons”. Teachers also learn how to guide students to find reasonable methods to regulate their emotion on the basis of the principle of ensuring that they do not hurt objects, themselves and others.
Then, teachers got the chance to put the theory intro practice through a flipped classroom model. Using role-play, teachers used the sentence patterns like “You feel (your feeling instead of your thoughts)… because (facts instead of judgement); You hope (solutions or children’s hope) …” to express their empathy with others. After that they used sentence patterns like “I feel (your feeling instead of your thoughts) … because (facts instead of judgement); I hope (solutions) … ” to communicate and make agreements with students.
Finally, Ms. Jin shared with us how to establish and implement class conventions with students through class meetings with students. How to help students get along with classmates and encourage cooperation between students as soon as possible. How to establish a class atmosphere of mutual encouragement and mutual respect.
We firmly believe that with these positive discipline tools, our teachers will be more sensible of the challenges posed by education, in order to help every child become a better person!