At the beginning of the year one special student started at our school and he has taken me on a learning journey that I could not have predicted at all.
Back Story
This child had struggled at pre-school to make connections with other students and also struggled to conform to the boundaries that were in place and at one point had to start at a new preschool because of this.
His transition to school was going to be tricky to manage however we had managed students like this before and I felt confident that the skill level of staff was such that the transition would be successful.
Our Story
Advice from the psychologist was to have strict boundaries and stick to them. I had done this before and to be honest it suited my style of behaviour management. Our SENCO had reservations about the advice we were getting, RTLB's had differing opinions also - we all met - we talked and we took bits of advice from all sides - we were eager to succeed.
We only planned to have this child at school for two hours a day at most as this was all the child could manage. Sometimes these two hours were so fraught we were all exhausted mentally and physically when the child went home.
I was still trying to stay firm as per the advice given to me so there were times that we had to restrain the child as he was hurting his teacher, and times when just being removed from class was so physical that it triggered a major escalation.
Along the way we talked, tried different things like low demand, high demand activities; reward systems (which would work one day and have no effect the next); bribes; and all the while the SENCO did a lot of reading and forwarded articles to me that would challenge my thinking and others around me about what we were doing.
The above article, a discussion with a supervisor of a Preschool about how they would manage this child's behaviour and a lot of reading and refocusing myself with questions about best practice in regard of managing volatile behaviour challenged my thinking around our practice and affirmed what I was now thinking - if we kept on trying to do the same thing expecting a different response... we were foolish. We needed to rethink or re-imagine "school" for this child.
Rather than making this child fit into our current ways - we needed to rethink our current ways to fit with him. This child was clearly not ready for school and we needed to accept that - and move forward with our thinking.
Enter - Play Based Learning
The more I read and the more I interact and build my relationship with this child I know that this is the answer for him. He has missed out on this at kindergarten and he is not ready for school.
written by Stephanie Menzies challenges us to bring back play-based learning.
"Give yourself permission to roam around the room observing the children at play, listen to their conversations, take photos for picture stories, sit down alongside them and engage in conversation, identify ‘teachable moments’ and run with them. You will soon work out the right time and place to intervene. Use your intuition, experience, knowledge, expertise and common sense to judge when the time is right."
I know any teacher at my current school would laugh if they heard me say bring back play based learning. I have been loud in my criticism of "free time" and "choosing time". For good reasons I thought as I saw it as time that the teachers were using to catch up on paper work while the children did whatever they wanted - I made assumptions that may have been unfounded.
However from what I have seen I think this could unlock the curriculum for this student and hopefully we will be able to progress from there.
In her article Stephanie Menzies gives educators 10 ways to bring back play, have fun and promote learning ... I am keen to see how introducing more play based learning will make a difference for this student and the many others in our school who will benefit also.
Your post resonated with me Jo. We have so many children (less extreme than your wee fellow admittedly) arriving at school and finding it such a huge culture shock after the free play environment of most early childhood centres. Apparently our commitment to school starting age at 5 hails back to WW II when early starting was a response to women stepping up to the war effort. Why we didn’t revert back to six years like many other countries, escapes me. We try and make these children (many of them boys) come inside and conform to a system that they are just not ready for. On a positive note though, the way collaborative new entrant classes are looking these days, the gap between early childhood and school is closing nicely.
ReplyDeleteThanks Maire - that's so interesting re the school starting age - didn't know that! Even 6 years is too young for some.
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