5.4 Promote children and young person’s positive behaviour
Provide clear and considered feedback on the effectiveness of behaviour management strategies to inform policy review and development
In my placement at Holy Trinity school I do discuss what kind of behaviour strategies work well with the children and what ones I find don’t work so well. However it is only the teachers and qualified staff that can inform policy review and development within the school. I do understand that young children display unwanted behaviour due to their emotional needs not being met. Most people want attention, acceptance, comfort, security, encouragement, respect and affection no matter how old we are and when our needs are being met we feel happy and secure. If a child feels their needs are not being met then it can make them feel anxious, insecure and unhappy, which in return can make them behave badly. Young children often feel like we don’t understand them or that we don’t understand what they want now. The thing is some children don’t understand the concept of “later” or “not now” it’s like they hear what you’re saying, but they either just don’t want to listen to you or they may not yet have the knowledge or language skills to understand what you are saying and what this means.
Young children normally go through short times of challenging behaviour and as they grow older they grown out of their behavioural issues, although they are times where behavioural issues may continue which may be due to an undiagnosed need where further long term support will be required. At Holy Trinity school they focus on telling the children what to do rather than not what to do and their rules and procedures are kept to a necessary minimum. They aim to create an environment that encourages the children to understand their behaviours, implications and the impact that they have on themselves and other. This approach allows them to focus on the positive behaviours in the school rather than always focusing on the negative situations. I agree with their behaviour and discipline policies, which aims to provide consistent responses to both positive and negative behaviour, to define acceptable standards of behaviour and have real expectations of these, to allow the children choices within the classroom to avoid conflict and to actively encourage everyone involved to take part in their development. At Holy Trinity for rewarding young children we give them stickers which they then get to talk about at the end of the day and why they received them to the rest of the class. Although the children love the fact they got a sticker and got to talk about why they got it, once the day is over it is forgotten about and will probably end up in the bin. Whereas, I think a personal homemade sticker chart would be more effective. The children could decorate them themselves to get them motivated to earn more stickers for themselves. Their personal stickers charts could then be displayed prominently on a wall in the classroom for all the children to see, as young children want everyone to be aware of what they have accomplished and