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Showing posts from April, 2013

The Enduring Practice of Negative Psychology

If constructivist theory is what all learning and teaching is based upon how well do we know and understand it? How do we help students understand the philosophies they have constructed and how they by and large determine the choices they make and the emotions they experience? If a child has given up on herself and has reasoned that she is hopeless how then can she develop her potential? If she has hit a psychological brick wall and can’t push through it or clamber over it what can be done? This psychological impasse has a negative affect on the student and if schools are not equipped with the means to support her then nothing changes for that student.   Could educators unwittingly be peddling a brand of negative psychology in schools? If educators are addressing behaviours only and applying consequences to them this is not enough as the underlying individually constructed beliefs that give rise to dysfunctional behaviour and emotions aren’t being addressed.   We can...

I am the best - the teacher told me so!

‘The teacher said I’m the best pupil’ the student declares proudly (see picture below). What does this mean? The individual may construe this in a rational way or an irrational way. Rational Emotive Behaviour Education teaches student’s about Unconditional Self - Acceptance that demonstrates how one positive or one negative personal attribute or characteristic does not or cannot define categorically a person’s total value.   It teaches students that their worth isn’t given to them by others and therefore cannot be taken away. They have worth because they exist and ‘that’s that’ as Albert Ellis would say. The same applies to success and failure.   We can fail at something but does that make us failures? This is a very important insight for students to have. How many students measure their worth according to how well they do in their exams? Or how they are esteemed by others? When we measure our worth according to how others view us or how well we do we are at gre...