REBTOZ

How do you help young children develop and sustain healthy habits of thinking? By having fun of course! Learning is a serious business and it’s important to have some serious fun on our learning journey. Children learn our behaviour, interpret the messages they receive, and process information accordingly. They construct their own set of rules, belief system that will guide them in the choices they make. These can be by and large helpful or unhelpful, rational or irrational. Give it at try banana pie! There’s more to this than meets the eye! We want our children to develop the capacity to take on tasks with a view to do their best and to hang in there when the going gets tough. This is the ‘if it’s to be it’s up to me’ idea that helps the individual to complete tasks and build on self-confidence. Here are some ideas for teachers and parents/carers to use. When children are working say: ‘You are giving it a try banana pie! (thumbs up gesture) When th...

Inevitably failure and rejection are part and parcel of our experience. It is very energy sapping to protect our children from every vagary of human existence. Such vigilance also denies our children the opportunity to deal with disappointment and build their own resilience to tough situations. Children need our support and guidance but they also have to learn to stand on their own two feet and protecting them from the reality of rejection and failure does them no favours. "We have to give them self- esteem so that they feel good about themselves,' so has been the wisdom of the recent educational past. What is self esteem and how can you give it to someone? Albert Ellis who passed away five years ago this week said: 'Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.'   He was on to something here, people learning to esteem themselves according to how others viewed them or how well they did at tasks was the order of the day....

The purpose of his post is to compare and contrast the contradictory philosophies, which underpin the practices and processes used in schools to address student behaviour. Traditionally we have had a one-size fits all approach where student behaviour is managed and controlled by the adult characterized by language like ‘warnings, steps, detention, suspension and exclusion.’  Using our authority to punish might get students to comply and fear us but it doesn’t help them to gain insight into why they respond as they do emotionally and behaviourally to daily challenges in life. This approach contradicts constructivist theory on which all teachers’ work is based. Why do we base our teaching on constructivist theory for the subjects we teach and then use a system of behaviour management that ignores the developmental needs of the child? Why are we using two models for learning at the same time in the same context, one inclusive an the other not? Enter Rational Emotive Behavio...

What is zest and how do you get it? Bertrand Russell used the term in his book the Conquest of Happiness to describe the qualities of optimism and enthusiasm for life. He scoffed at the idea that we should aspire to be happy and successful all the time as an impossible ideal! The expectation that we could achieve such a state of being was an affliction in itself, an unrealistic goal indeed, causing anxiety and depression. So zest is a quality essential to the enjoyment of life, an energy precipitated by what? The literature talks about the role of our genetic predisposition towards having a particular personality type and the importance of our early learning, our socialisation. It is not clear which plays the bigger role in determining our philosophy on life but I think that our early experience goes a long way to formulating the ideas and beliefs that govern how we go about things. I subscribe to the constructivist view that each of us seeks meaning from the world around us and in mak...

Albert Ellis, creator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy was renowned for his turn of colourful phrase in his illustrious lifetime. Consider the following utterance, used to illustrate his idea of conditional self-acceptance (CSA). “I am a  turd  for acting turdily , as I must not. And I'll always be this way, and I'll never succeed" Albert Ellis Probably expressed at a time and place when etiquette would have demanded a little more reserve and attention to protocol he was practicing unconditional self-acceptance. ‘If they don’t like me, too damn bad! I accept myself anyway’ I can hear him say. He didn’t need the approval of people in the room though he may have desired it. If they took umbrage at his colourful language it would have been an opportunity to point out that their ‘oughting’ ‘shoulding’ and ‘musting’ was causing it, not him. Ellis used humour on many different levels to get his point across to his audience. In this case his use...