January 2005

As it is the season for promising yourself you will get fit, joining gymnasiums and never visiting them again, deciding to lose weight, becoming more assertive and meeting the man/woman/car/holiday resort/house of your dreams, we have given this month’s newsletter a self-development focus. First of all we catch up on ‘ladette’ behaviour, then progress onto the science of self-talk. We introduce Will Thomas’s STRIDE model for self-coaching, provide an excerpt from Coaching Solutions and some predictions. Have a good 2005!

Dealing with the gang culture in your school

Following last month’s piece on research which suggests that winning over gang leaders can help schools cope with 'laddish' behaviour, we now reveal the research into ‘ladettes’.

Ladettes, according to research carried out at Lancaster University, are schoolgirls who drink, smoke and are disruptive in class. A study highlights an increase in so-called "ladette" behaviour - with a growing number of teenage girls fighting, swearing and being rowdy. These girls are more likely to be open in discussing sex and often do so in the belief that they can embarrass their teachers.

The study, for the university's Department of Educational Research, looked at 1,000 pupils at six schools in the north of England. Dr Carolyn Jackson, who led the research, says that while girls are becoming more assertive, some are taking it too far. Teachers feel modern girls were "becoming more loud at school and more assertive and some were more disruptive in lessons." Dr Jackson asked girls to fill in questionnaires, before quizzing 30 teachers and 150 pupils to get their opinions.

Give yourself a good talking to...

Many recent studies have shown that a person’s emotional state may affect his or her physical health. Depression can worsen heart disease, and stress may contribute to the catching of colds. Now scientists at the University of Wisconsin have shown that people with high activity in a particular brain area may muster weak immune responses in the face of negative emotions. Melissa Rosenkranz and colleagues monitored the brain activity of 52 men and women and asked them to write about emotionally negative moments in their lives. Researchers then injected each subject with a flu shot and tracked the level of antibodies in their blood to discover how well their bodies were fighting the virus in the vaccine. They found that subjects with high electrical activity in the right prefrontal cortex during the emotional writing task produced lower levels of antibodies, indicative of impaired immunity. Rosenkranz says the study is the first step toward discovering a neural mechanism explaining the mind’s effect on the body. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Another study, presented to a conference at the Royal Society in London in 2004, found that people with a low sense of self worth are more likely to suffer from memory loss as they get older, and their brains were more likely to shrink compared with those who have a high sense of self esteem.

Dr Sonia Lupien, of McGill University in Montreal surveyed 92 senior citizens over 15 years and studied their brain scans and found that the brains of those with low self-worth were up to a fifth smaller than those who felt good about themselves. These people also performed worse in memory and learning tests.

However, Dr Lupien believes that if those with a negative mind set were taught to change the way they think they could reverse their mental decline. He said: "This atrophy of the brain that we thought was irreversible is reversible - some data on animals and some data on humans shows that that if you enrich the environment, if you change some factors this brain structure can come back to normal levels"

Researchers are studying which psychological treatments work best. According to Dr Felicia Huppert of Cambridge University, the early signs are that fairly simple techniques can have an enormous impact: "There are interventions which talk about focusing on positive things in everyday life and savouring good moments. Even at times when life is difficult little tiny things may give you pleasure so there are skills involved in how to derive pleasure from the ordinary things in life".

Making Strides

The STRIDE TM model of coaching has been devised by Will Thomas. You can read about its use in detail in Coaching Solutions: Practical Ways to Improve Performance in Education, and you may want to try it out for yourself

Strengths: Ask yourself at each step: What strengths do I have that will help me right now?

Target: What do I want in place of the problem? Or what will even better performance be like?

Real situation: What is the situation like now? What is getting in my way? What is helping me here?

Ideas: How might I improve this situation? What if the things that are in my way, weren’t there?

Decision: What will I do? What will that give for me? What further support do I need?

Evalution: On a one-ten scale how committed to this action am I?

The STRIDE model could be used at home, placed in the school staff handbook or student planner and used for everyday problem solving.

Giving yourself a good coaching to...

At South Bromsgrove Community High School Year nine students were invited to take part in a confidence building programme which consisted of an introductory morning training session to introduce them to the concept of self-development and help them to recognise their strengths.

This was followed by six coaching sessions at approximately one-week intervals with a trained coach. Each session focused on an area of personal development that the students chose for themselves. Throughout the programme students made excellent progress. Pre and post coaching assessments showed improvements in self confidence, communication skills and clarity of direction. Many of the students focused their sessions on defining their future career plans and linking this to their goals in and out of school.

Review questionnaires completed by teachers and the students showed that the coaching work had had a positive impact on the confidence of many of the students in classroom learning scenarios and one-to-one work. This was with both adults and their peers. Students reported a greater sense of direction and focus and a deeper understanding of their own strengths and self management. They were able to rationalize information more effectively and make decisions which were more in line with their future goals.

Manchester Consulting Incorporated carried out a study with one hundred senior leadership personnel from 1996 to 2000. The research concluded that there was an estimated return on the amount invested in the coaching of 5.7 times. It is very early days in the field of educational coaching to be making such specific measures of impact, but nonetheless there are many schools and colleges around the world who are buying into the coaching ethos and reporting significant changes both quantitatively and qualitatively.

A report in Education World Magazine this year outlined the success of a coaching programme rolled out across every school in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Here a whole-school change coach worked with schools to implement structures of coaching within the schools. This coach worked with senior staff, teachers and students. At Ludwig van Beethoven Elementary School, the principal is quoted as saying that “the coaching has really encouraged kids to be independent readers and writers. The model works very well when implemented properly”. He goes on to credit the coaching programme as “energizing and empowering the school”.

C.W. Henry Elementary School, West Mount Airy, Philadelphia, USA has used coaching to help teachers to “ move beyond labeling children with real or assumed deficits and explore student behavioral problems from the point of view of the students”. They report that the programme has also helped teachers deal more effectively with parents.

Excerpted from Coaching Solutions: Practical Ways to Improve Performance in Education, Will Thomas and Alistair Smith, NEP, 2004.

Trend spotters

At the recent Alite team meeting we asked the question: how will schools differ in five years time? Our trend spotters removed their anoraks, put down their clipboards and came up with the following answers:

There will be increased concentrations of power around ‘successful’ specialist schools
Schools will have more control over their own affairs
League tables will have gone
Self-evaluation will have replaced external evaluation and inspection
The current Inspection Framework will be further revised in favour of a Learning Framework
Schools will be networking more with more monies tied to networking outcomes
There will be more adults who are not qualified teachers in various support roles in schools
Examination coursework will have been replaced by ‘exhibitions’ and ‘extended research’
There will still be confusion over what ‘personalised’ learning means
Schools will serve a greater range of community need and be more of a focus for community activity
Staff development will be a blend of face to face and on-line provision
The school ‘year’ will be locally negotiated
Individual coaching will feature more and more in staff development
There will be more ‘agencies’ running schools
The first Fast Track alumni will be running some of our schools
The curriculum will be less content driven with clearer vocational choices at 14, 16 and 18
ICT will provide a loop between student, school and home
Schools will have their own web designers – shared amongst smaller schools

Pause for thought

It was the first day of interviews for University. The business studies programme was a popular choice and the first batch of candidates for interview were sitting, most of them nervously, awaiting their call. It was a hot summer’s day and the windows opened out onto a sunlit area where a handful of postgraduate students hurried about their business. Traffic noise murmured across the background. From time to time, the door at the far end of the hall would open and a name would be called. Another hopeful, brushed and scrubbed would disappear. As the morning wore on, a few more candidates arrived. Arriving together, were an eighteen year old girl fresh from A-Levels and a woman who looked as though she was well into her pensionable years. They struck up a conversation very naturally.

‘I’m applying for the four year honours course.’ said the old woman.

‘Really?’ replied the young girl, her voice betraying a degree of disbelief.

‘You’ll be thinking, why bother at my age?’

‘No – not a bit…’ lied the young girl without much conviction

‘I’ll be 83 when I graduate.’

‘Isn’t that, perhaps … maybe a bit old?’

‘My dear – I’ll be 83 anyway.’

At the end of the hall, the door opened. The two women sat back and smiled knowingly.