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Have a Go Spaghettio! The ABC of REBT – part 1


Have a Go Spaghettio! is a pedagogy for teachers to teach their students about the think-feel-do connection using Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) principles in daily early childhood teaching practice.

REBT provides the ABC Theory of Emotional (and behavioural) Disturbance counselling and teaching paradigm which considers how emotional and behavioural upset is linked to the event or happening (A) but is also influenced by the thinking (B) about the event or happening.

The six-colour coded Have a Go Spaghettio! visual teaching and learning graphic is underpinned by REBT and General Semantics theories. The word is not the person!

Slide 2

Teachers teach their students about the ABC’s, words and meanings, sentences and reading and writing. I can recall being told that ‘you go to school to learn your ABC’s.’

There’s another type of ABC that we can teach our young constructivist learners, the ABC Theory of Emotional Disturbance.

Ms Smithers has completed the Have a Go Spaghettio! course and has the confidence and ability to teach her students how they can develop their Success Helper habits of thinking. She talks about Brain Friend and Brain Bully thinking, and how their thinking is connected to how they feel and act. It teaches them that they can do dumb but not be dumb!

Albert Ellis said ‘the future of psychotherapy is in the school system and Ms Smithers is bringing principles and practices of psychotherapy into the classroom via Have a go Spaghettio! teaching the ABC’s of REBT.

Slide 3

A represents something that happens, an event, in terms of the ABC paradigm, it’s called an ADVERSE EVENT that can invoke extreme behavioural and emotional upset. Ms Smithers will talk to her students about things that can happen that we deal with every day. She is aware that that we can make ourselves more upset than necessary but how do we generate extreme feelings of e.g., anger or worry? These questions Ms Smithers will attend to and here she talks about day-to-day uninvited happenings. Does the event, A, make these feelings and behaviours? Or is something else at play.

Ms Smithers also shares her own ADVERSE EVENT experiences, as she is learning to manage how she deals with things. She is a Have a Go Spaghettio! Rational Emotive Behaviour Educator and she’s teaching her students the ideas and skills which will help them learn how they can help themselves.

Slide 4

Here we introduce to the children the head stuff, what we do inside our head when we are thinking. Brain Friend (BF) or Success Helper (SH) thinking, Ms Smithers tells the children is a helpful way of thinking about things. When we think what are we telling ourselves about the ADVERSE EVENTS mentioned before? This is the B part of the ABC Theory of Emotional Disturbance, what we BELIEVE and how we think about or interpret the event, A. Ms Smithers talks about thinking and how we think about things that happen. Are we using helpful SH/BF thinking or is Brain Bully at work, telling us stuff that’s not true? What has all this got to do with how we feel and behave?

Slide 5

The C part of the ABC of REBT is the emotional and behavioural consequence of A, how we respond to what happened, the A of the ABC? Here Ms Smithers will talk about feelings and different strengths of feelings and the behaviours we choose when things don’t go so well for us. Ms Smithers has an Emotional Thermometer which suggest different words for different strengths of emotions.

She will ask questions like:

That person feels very angry and stomps their feet. I wonder why?

I feel very sad. Why do I feel this way?

These feelings (C) are connected to the event A and the thinking part at B of the ABC of REBT.

Ms Smithers talks like this all the time and gets her students to suggest ideas and possible solutions to the problems they bring up. The goal is to fill the classroom with ideas and language about the ABC of REBT, so it becomes part of the natural discourse of her classroom. Give it a try banana pie!

Slide 6

Ms Smithers says”

‘Talk about the A of the ABC of REBT as happenings, things that happen. Talk about how we all deal with things we don’t want or don’t like.

Talk about how we might feel and behave when things don’t go our way, the C part of the ABC of REBT

Talk about thinking, the B part of the ABC of REBT and speculate on what Brain Bully thinking might be making Brain Bully feelings and behaviour. Talk and talk and talk.’

Have a Go Spaghettio!

Slide 7

This presentation is one of three. The next one will introduce two further elements of the ABC of REBT so stay tuned.

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