Workshop Topics

• Resilience: Personal capability
• Resilience: The Big Picture
• Adverse events in school
• "Things are neither good nor bad, but thinking makes them so
• Re-calibrating the badness of adverse events: The Catastrophe Scale
• Check-up from the "Neck-up Survey” - The battle between “positive” and “negative” Habits of the Mind Individual Action Plan for Building Resilience at Work (and Home)
  

  Step 1. Take Stock

  Step 2. Take Control

  Step 3. Take Action

Goals of the AB4L Professional Development Program

• To increase knowledge of the role students’ attitudes and social-emotional skills play in their engagement and learning.
• To learn about a group of attitudes and behaviours for learning that research indicates as having a significant influence on student engagement in their development and learning of literacy, numeracy and other academic skills.
• To learn how to integrate the AB4L program in the teaching of literacy, numeracy and other essential learning areas to increase student engagement and achievement.

Published research indicates that the AB4L teaching program strengthens students’ attitudes and social-emotional skills needed for engagement, cooperative learning, independent classwork and homework and leads to an improvement in reading comprehension of students in the lower 50% of achievement.

AB4L practices that teachers develop further

1. Develop the positive mindset of students.
2. Share with students the goals/targets of the lesson and have them set their own learning goals.
3. Identify behaviours for learning.
4. Discuss positive and negative self-talk for learning.
5. Communicate behaviour-specific feedback for learning.

AB4L enables a student to

1. Begin their lessons with a positive mindset.
2. Set a goal for what they want to learn during the class period.
3. Apply behaviours for learning throughout lessons and during homework, (e.g., staying calm when they don’t understand what the teacher is explaining, raising their hand to answer a difficult question; staying on task and not being distracted by others when working independently)
4. Employ positive rather than negative self-talk when faced with schoolwork that is hard or when making mistakes.

Topics include

1. Setting goals
2. The ABC’s of emotions
3. Confidence
4. Persistence
5. Self-acceptance
6. Positive self-regard
7. Managing time
8. How not to worry

In this talk, participants will learn:

1. How to stay calm and be resilient when facing adverse situations with their children.
2. To recognise a range of adverse situations that arise with their children that have the potential for pushing their emotional buttons.
3. About typical negative emotions, parents may experience when facing adverse situations with their children.
4. How their own thinking — and not their children’s behaviour — has a significant influence on how calm or stressed they are in the face of adversity.
5. To identify stress-creating thoughts and how to replace stress-creating thoughts with those that lead to greater control and calmness.
6. To keep adverse events with their children in perspective (not blow things out of proportion).
7. The importance of accepting themselves, and not putting themselves down, when things are not going well with their children or when faced with a negative aspect of their own parenting.
8. Be able to identify a variety of different things they can do to be resilient.

In this talk, parents will learn the importance of:

1. Being authoritative in their approach with their children rather than aggressive or passive.
2. Firmly communicating realistic, high, and clear expectations to their children concerning achievement and behaviour.
3. Setting home rules and consequences can help them help their children achieve high standards and make good behavioural choices.
4. Being consistent and persistent in enforcing rules.
5. Accepting their children when their children do not live up to ’parents’ expectations concerning achievement and behaviour.
6. Teaching children to not put themselves down when they have not achieved in their schoolwork or have behaved poorly.
7. Teaching their children to accept themselves, while working to improve their achievement and behaviour.

In this talk, parents will learn:

1. About four social and emotional learning skills children need to have developed to achieve to the best of their ability in their schoolwork and in other areas of their lives and experience social and emotional wellbeing.
2. To identify their children’s strengths and weaknesses in the development of these social and emotional learning skills.
3. Four basic ways to help their children’s strengthen their social-emotional skills:
   1. Define and have conversations with your child about each of the five social-emotional skill.
   2. Describe behaviours to practice you would like your child to practice.
   3. Discuss the different ways to think that strengthen each social-emotional skill.
   4. Provide behaviour-specific feedback when your child demonstrates one of the social-emotional skills.
4. About a variety of practical things they can do at home to support their children’s social-emotional skills.