Workshops for Teachers, Paraprofessionals, Early Child Care Staff and Administrators
Respectful Discipline
Motivating the Unmotivated
Dealing with Difficult Parents
Classroom Management – Back to Basics
Life Space Crisis Intervention
Dealing With Angry Feelings
Dealing With Conflict And Difficult People
Workshops for Parents
Developing Healthy Self-Esteem in Children
Respectful Discipline for Parents
Constructive Criticism…Is there such a thing?
Homework Without Tears
Dealing With Angry Feelings
Student Assemblies
Check Up From The Neck Up
How to Handle Teasing
Own Your Anger
RESPECTFUL DISCIPLINE
This seminar provides teachers with tools, insights and encouragement which will empower them to create a safe learning environment. It is filled with concrete, proven-effective techniques and ready-to-use tools for managing all classroom behavior. Teachers will learn specific and realistic strategies for setting up a prevention-based discipline system that is designed to head off most challenging discipline problems before they develop.
Respectful Discipline is for classroom teachers of all grade levels. It is organized and contains many practical examples. The goal is to maximize teaching time and minimize time spent disciplining. Society has changed and so have the youth we work with in schools. Our jobs as teachers have become increasingly more difficult as students’ behaviors are more demanding than ever. There is not any one approach that will work for all students all the time. Therefore, the goal of this workshop is to provide teachers with a variety of tools so they are equipped to handle a variety of different students with different behaviors. My goal is to help teachers become proactive in the classroom rather than reactive. Educators will leave this workshop with new tools, sharpened old tools, and renewed enthusiasm for teaching. Spend more time teaching, less time disciplining.
TOPICS COVERED:
- Practical approaches to help students become accountable and responsible for their own behavior
- Proactive ideas to avoid potential discipline problems
- Practical strategies to create a calm, respectful classroom atmosphere
- Staying calm, cool and collected while working with a disrespectful student
- Learn the four needs behind student misbehavior
- Identify your response style
- Skills to avoid turning conversations into arguments
- Alternatives to yelling
- Techniques to address attention seekers and power students
- Using encouragement to motivate students
- Learn to handle students’ manipulation techniques
- Understand the difference between interventions and consequences
- Implementing consequences
- Framing choices
- Dealing with, “It’s not fair!”
Motivating the Unmotivated
Are you tired of disrespectful, irresponsible behaviors from your students? Are you seeing an increase of apathetic, unresponsive acts? Are you noticing too many bored expressions and a lack of initiative, motivation and follow-through? Are you fed up with students acting, talking and thinking like victims without taking responsibility for their own behaviors? If so, this seminar is for you!
THERE IS HOPE AND THERE ARE SOLUTIONS! You will learn how to move your most challenging students from defiance and noncompliance to productive and engaged learners. You’ll learn strategies to help your students increase their respectful, responsible behaviors and you’ll come away with strategies to successfully deal with the negative behavior you wish to eliminate when it does occur.
MaryAnn will share successful techniques and teaching strategies to utilize with hard‑to‑reach students to motivate them to succeed in school. You will learn a wide variety of proven strategies to prevent power struggles, increase self-motivation and help students build positive and productive relationships.
Topics include:
- Help students own their behaviors rather than disown them with excuses and blaming
- Ways to develop a desire for achievement
- How to deal with a student who says, “I don’t care”
- Techniques for eliminating learned helplessness
- Respond effectively to “I can’t” language and actions
- What to say and what not to say to unmotivated, underachieving students
- Strategies for building connectedness and feelings of belonging in your classroom
- How to build a trusting relationship with challenging students
- How to step out of the conflict cycle
- Identify the underlying issues
- How to deal with insults from students
- Learn to hear the real meaning behind the words/behavior
- Discover how self-talk helps and hurts us and our students
- How to keep a positive attitude while working with defiant students
DEALING WITH DIFFICULT PARENTS
Classroom teachers have discovered that not only do they need classroom management skills, they also need parent management skills to survive in teaching. A majority of parents are supportive, helpful and realistic, but there are a few that can be unreasonably demanding and even threatening toward teachers.
No single strategy will work for all situations. Turn Parents into Partners will provide you with an array of strategies that are proven to be successful; it will help you work with the challenging parents in challenging situations. It will provide you skills to disarm parents’ emotionally charged behavior.
This seminar is designed to provide you with a wealth of strategies for working with difficult parents in challenging situations. The focus will be on improving your ability to get your message across to passive, defensive and angry parents. MaryAnn will give you tried and true techniques for dealing with confrontational, explosive parents in ways that diffuse conflict and move parents to more cooperative relationships. You will also receive dozens of practical tips for conducting effective parent conferences with challenging parents.
LEARN WAYS TO:
- Establish and maintain positive communication with parents
- Identify parent and teacher road blocks
- Make phone calls that stop problems before they get worse
- Plan and conduct effective parent conferences
- Diffuse opposition through listening
- Disarm criticism
- Use accurate documentation
- Diffuse confrontational situations
CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT
BACK TO BASICS
The goal of the seminar is to demonstrate how to set up a win-win classroom environment where both students and teachers can get their needs met. This seminar provides realistic suggestions for effectively managing a classroom, and is filled with a wealth of powerful tools for teachers to use immediately. This seminar is an enjoyable mixture of insights, humor, stories and strategies. Perfect for new teachers!
TOPICS COVERED:
- How to start the first day
- Teambuilding activities
- Procedures and directions
- How to design and teach classroom rules
- How to cut down on transition time
- Documentation
- Class wide rewards vs. individual rewards
- Interventions/behavior tracking systems
LIFE SPACE CRISIS INTERVENTION
Traditional means of addressing students’ inappropriate behavior often fail to have the desired effect of positively changing long term behavior. Developed by Dr. Nicholas Long and based on the work of Fritz Redl, LSCI is designed to help create lasting behavioral change.
- Diffuse the student’s emotional energy and de-escalate the crisis
- Help students stay in control of their emotions
- Guide the student to identify non-productive behavior patterns
- Assess the student’s motivation to change
- Teach/reinforce effective social skills
- A student in crisis is an opportunity for staff to teach and for the student to learn
This is a 40-hour course in which you may receive graduate credit, in-service credit, or CEU.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
School Counselors, Psychologists, Regular and Special Education teachers, mental health staff, Administrators and Crisis Support Staff
DEALING WITH ANGRY FEELINGS
It is difficult to learn when you are feeling angry. When students are unable to appropriately deal with their anger and the circumstances that caused it, they become victims and are controlled by the people or situations that made them angry. They do not take responsibility for their actions and never really discover what is truly under their angry feelings. The goal of this workshop is to empower students to manage their anger and resolve conflicts so they can succeed in school.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- How self-esteem and stress affect the way you deal with anger
- Facts about anger
- What is under feelings the anger?
- Your bodies reaction to anger
- How to deal with your angry feelings
- The cycle of anger communication
- How to listen to your student’s angry feelings
DEALING WITH CONFLICT AND DIFFICULT PEOPLE
How do you talk to someone when you are angry, hurt, frustrated or insulted? What you say to people can produce defensiveness or trust, increase resistance or cooperation, and promote conflict or understanding. Essential communication skills turn conflict into cooperation. Once you understand the forces that compel people to be difficult, you are less inclined to personalize the difficult behavior.
TOPICS COVERED:
- Primary reasons conflicts occur (and how to see them coming)
- How to break the cycles that lead to hostilities
- How to stop a conflict from escalating
- How to address conflict in a way that minimizes defensiveness and hostility
- Giving and receiving criticism
- Conflict resolution strategies
- When two people want to be heard, no one listens and conflict is inevitable
DEVELOPING HEALTHY SELF-ESTEEM IN CHILDREN
Most people can think of things they’d like to change about the way they were raised. You can change them now, for yourself and your children. Children are a reflection of their parents and low self-esteem can be unintentionally passed down to children. When parents learn to value themselves, they will be better able to value their children and give them the strength to cope with challenges of life.
Healthy self-esteem refers to realistic and accurate appraisal of oneself across a variety of interpersonal situations, including the ability to cope with negative feedback. Unhealthy self-esteem, as in narcissism, refers to insensitivity to others with excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own image in the eyes of others. What we want is for children to achieve optimum self-esteem.
We want our children to grow up be independent, productive, caring, contributing members of society. This takes more than gratuitous praise to accomplish. Your child’s inner picture is the framework that determines how he/she treats himself/herself and others. How does your child see himself/herself? This seminar will help you become aware of the subtle and not so subtle ways adults can influence a child’s self esteem.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- Respecting and accepting yourself and others
- What is self-esteem and why is it important?
- How is self-esteem developed?
- Concrete ways to explain self-esteem to children
- The effects of joking and labeling
- Teaching/giving children responsibility
RESPECTFUL DISCIPLINE FOR PARENTS
Misbehavior has a natural place in a child’s life. It is the way he/she learns about the world. Once parents realize that their child’s misbehavior is healthy and purposeful, they can approach discipline as a teaching process rather than a punishing one.
Are your children’s arguments and fights driving you crazy? Do you have a strong-willed child? Are you feeling exhausted, frustrated, or angry with problem behaviors such as teasing, tattling, back-talk, sassy talk, temper tantrums, or refusal to do chores?
This workshop will teach you key principles that will help you control your reactions to your child’s behaviors. It will provide you with skills to be more effective in disciplining and teaching your child. The goal is to raise self-confident, well-behaved children.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- Why children misbehave
- How to be proactive rather than reactive
- Parents response styles (passive, hostile, calm)
- Kindness and firmness
- Positive time out
- Guidelines for consequences
- Common manipulations
- Importance of encouragement
CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM … IS THERE SUCH A THING?
Many of us grew up being told that we did wrong, not what we did right. We often treat our children the way we were treated, continuing a destructive pattern that breeds resentment and misbehavior. This seminar provides you with strategies to address your child’s behavior while keeping his/her confidence and self-esteem intact.
Do your words get the results you want? Without realizing it many adults destroy a child’s creativity and confidence through criticism. Their intent is to help or correct, but the result is resentment and failure. Criticism becomes so habitual that many adults are virtually unaware they are doing it. This seminar will give you more effective ways to criticize without shaming or blaming.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- The purpose of criticism
- The long term results of destructive criticism
- Three steps to handling destructive criticism from your parents
- Guidelines to giving constructive criticism
- How to listen to your child’s concerns
- Hearing the real meaning behind the message
- Expressing your concerns so they can be heard and acted upon
HOMEWORK WITHOUT TEARS
If you are exhausted from the long nightly battles with your child about doing homework then this workshop is for you. Learn how to get your child to spend less time arguing about homework and more time doing it. Homework Without Tears for parents offers simple, practical ideas so that parents can effectively improve their children’s motivation regarding homework.
TOPICS COVERED:
- How to stop the arguing over homework
- How to motivate your child to do their best work
- How to get homework completed on time
- Setting up a proper study area
- What to do with “speeders and forgetters”
- Long range assignments
DEALING WITH ANGRY FEELINGS
It is difficult to listen, learn or love when you are feeling angry. When children are unable to appropriately deal with their anger and the circumstances that caused it, they become victims and are controlled by the people or situation that made them angry. They do not take responsibility for their actions and never really discover what is truly under their angry feelings. The goal of this workshop is to empower children to manage their anger and resolve conflicts so they can succeed in personal relationships and in school.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- How self-esteem and stress affect the way you deal with anger
- Facts about anger
- What is under feeling the anger?
- Your bodies reaction to anger
- How to deal with your angry feelings
- The cycle of anger communication
- How to listen to your child’s angry feelings
- How to get you needs met without anger
A CHECK UP FROM THE NECK UP
With increasing self-esteem comes improvement in academic performance which, in turn, enhances self-esteem. Further, above-average levels of self-esteem are associated positively with better adjustment, more independence, less defensive and deviant behavior, and greater social effectiveness and acceptance of others. A healthy self-esteem motivates kids to be outgoing, and to act in their own best interest in school and with friends, while an unhealthy self-esteem often leads to self-destructive behavior, lower grades and loss of friendships.
How do you raise self-esteem?
Students can start by changing the negative self-talk in their head. This program will help students take control of that inner voice and learn realistic strategies for improving self-esteem.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- What is self-esteem? Why is it important?
- How big is your I.A.L.A.C.* sign?
- How does Stinkin’ Thinkin’ affect your:
- Energy Level
- School work
- Friendships
- Success
HOW TO HANDLE TEASING
Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will break my heart.
Parents and teachers spend a great deal of time dealing with the issue of teasing. Adults often tell children to just ignore the teasing. This is hard for a child to do because they do not feel that they stood up for themselves. This seminar will provide new ideas on how to handle teasing. The techniques taught will empower children to handle teasing on their own and be able to walk away with their self-esteem intact.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- How does Stinkin’Thinkin’ affect your response to teasing
- Why do kids tease?
- Who has your remote control? **
- “Comebacks” to teasing that are not hurtful
- Stay cool under fire
This assembly is the follow-up to Checkup from Neck Up. Remote control – represents the self-control we have over our emotions and not letting others “push our buttons”.
Time: 45 minutes
Grade: 2-8
OWN YOUR ANGER
My Life is in the hands of any fool who ‘makes’ me lose my temper. – J Hunter
Poorly handled anger can undermine self-esteem and lead to feeling powerless. This assembly helps students differentiate between angry feelings and angry behavior. Students realize that they are responsible for their own anger and how they choose to react is up to them. This workshop provides specific techniques for identifying the source of their anger and mastering anger-management skills that can lead to better relationships.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
- What is anger?
- Why you get angry
- Your body’s response to anger
- A variety of strategies to “cool off”
- How to control your anger
- Stinkin’ Thinkin’ and anger
- Displaced anger
- Discover what is really under your anger
