Mindful Minute

How "Active" are you in the classroom? I don't mean just showing up and teaching, I mean are you ACTIVE! Let's dive deeper....

Active Supervision is: …a process for monitoring the classroom, or any school setting, that incorporates

Moving: Continuous, random teacher movement throughout all parts of classroom

Scanning: Frequent and intentional visual sweep of all parts of classroom

Interacting: Frequent and positive communication to encourage, reinforce, and correct

What does Active Supervision do?

• Allows for the provision of immediate learning assistance to students
  
• Increases student engagement
  
• Reduces inappropriate behavior; increases appropriate
  
• Provides knowledge on whether students are using expectations
  
• Allows for frequent use of encouragement
  
• Allows for timely correction of behavioral errors
  
• Builds positive adult-student relationships
  

How is it a trauma informed strategy?

• Provides a sense of safety for students
  
• More likely to identify trigger and prevent problem behavior
  
• Creates frequent opportunities to interact with students for relationship development
  
• 15 seconds is long enough to have a meaningful connection with a student
  

Adult Behaviors that Make a Difference:

• Proximity
  
• Listening
  
• Eye Contact
  
• Smiles
  
• Pleasant Voice Tone
  
• Use of Student’s Name

Good Examples:

• While students are working independently or in small groups/centers, scan and move around the classroom, checking in with students.
  
• While monitoring students on the playground, move around, interact with students, and observe behaviors of individuals and the group. Scan the entire area as you move around all corners of the area.

Non-Examples:

• Sitting or standing where you cannot see the entire room/space, such as with your back to the group or behind your desk.
  
• Walking the same, predictable route the entire period of time, such as walking the rows of desks in your classroom in the same manner every period
  
• Stopping and talking with a student or students for several minutes
  
• Interacting with the same student or groups of students every day
  

Want to know your level of Active Supervision? Have a colleague observe you or self reflect during your next lesson with the rubric below.

Whenever someone is having a bad day you will sometimes hear the phrase "Give them a little grace". What is grace? How do we relate grace to outright blame? How can these two things impact our classrooms?

How many of you feel the weight of impending deadlines? Deadlines with testing, grades, pacing guides, lesson plans and meetings. Do you feel like your feet are being held to the fire? Do we sometimes inadvertently do that to our students when they aren't getting something within OUR timeframe? When it's time to move on to the next lesson, and they are still behind are we showing them grace? or are we placing blame?

When we think of giving a consequence the goal is to shift the behavior. However, offering grace instead of the consequence, or proving their mistake, will have a better result. Let's look at an example?

A student is on his way to class in the morning. He is laughing and talking very loudly and at one point runs down the hallway.

How would you hand this situation?

Grace:

By pulling the student aside and redirecting them to desired behavior, such as asking the student to go back to the beginning of the hallway and show you their desired behavior, or asking the student to take a breath and to say what they should have done instead.

OR

Blame:

By pulling the student asie and reprimanding them by removing them from class, writing their name on the board, making the clip down, sending them to the office or docking points from their dojo or participation grade.

In this section I will be sharing tips and strategies about staying calm and dealing with anger in positive ways. You will see ideas for cooling off, practicing calming methods, and others will be suggestions for ways to talk through situations with students.

What Would you Do?

Have students respond to the following scenario: "You're walking down the hallway talking with a friend when someone trips you. you go flying to the floor and everyone around you laughs - even your friend" What Would YOU Do?

Tips!: Talk it out.

One of the best ways to handle feelings of anger is to talk about them with someone you trust. Maybe this ia friend, someone at home, or an adult at school.

Brain Break, Calming Corning or Morning Meeting Mindfulness idea:

Riverview Elementary, Assistant Principal

Email: abradford@marion.k12.in.us
Website: http://riverview.marion.k12.in.us/
Location: 531 West Buckingham Drive, Marion, IN, USA
Phone: 765-662-2427
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MCSRiverviewElementarySchool/
Twitter: @RiverviewMCS_AP