REBTOZ

Mr Popoffalot of What's Up? News has popped by for another chat about the Have a Go Spaghettio! Success Helper approach to student personal development. Mr P. has interviewed Ms Smithers before, and he is eager to follow up and learn some more. Mr. Popoffalot ‘How are things going Ms. S.?’ asks Mr. P. Ms. S. replies: Well, we’re well into the term and classroom discourse is very Have a Go Spaghettio! rich. All the students have set their personal Success Helper goals for the term, the Have a Go capability they want to work at. E.g., Ahmed has a Red Success Helper goal, Bridget, a Yellow SH goal, etc. They each have identified a habit of thinking which may be Brain Bully stopping them from doing stuff because they might be too scared, worried etc. Mr. P. A great idea. So, they decide what they want to get better at. This gives them agency. Yes indeed. Agency or locus of control, where personal goals are set and work planned to realise them. Locus of control and frustration...

  Headwork Ahead is a sign that Ms. Smithers has standing in her classroom. It’s a visual reminder that monitoring how we feel, behave and how we think about what’s happening around us is an ongoing matter of mindful mind maintenance that can become an automatic, intuitive practice. Nevertheless, we need to be vigilant because Brain Busting Brain Bully is an opportunist and lurks around every corner! Have a Go Spaghettio! is a constructivist-based teaching and counselling pedagogy. It’s based on Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and General Semantics theories. Each posit that how we see ourselves, others and the world is a construction, a mind made virtual reality that can either be far removed from how the world is or is pretty well aligned with it. General Semantics introduces the notion that the ‘map is not the territory’ meaning that our constructed ideas about how things work are just that, a simulated internally fabricated model, the map that we believe represents the ...

Ms Smithers is a Rational Emotive Behaviour Educator. She teaches to the Have a Go Spaghettio! pedagogy based on Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. She teaches her junior primary students that they are constructivists, they make or build the beliefs that inform how they perceive events in their lives. Epictetus said: "It is not the things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance."  This in turn connects to the persons behavioural and emotional responses to those events i.e., thinking, feeling and behaving are all connected. Ms Smithers knows that if her students understand this, they can learn to regulate how they feel and behave by monitoring how they think about themselves, others and life in general. "As we think so are we." Suzy is one of her students and she believes she can do stuff, and through persistence she can achieve her goals and if she doesn’t, she strives to work out how to solve problems. She doesn’t believe in fai...

Have a Go Spaghettio! introduces the REBT theory of psychotherapy to the early childhood young constructivist. General Semantics also comes into play which says that the map is not the territory, the word is not the thing or person. Have a Go Spaghettio! teaches how to think in self-helpful, Brain Friend/Success Helper thinking ways via the ABC of REBT and General Semantics theory. Ms Smithers is a Rational Emotive Behaviour Educator. She has learned about the ABC of REBT, and she wants her young constructivist learners to know all about it. In the first presentation we considered the ABC of REBT, and how it informs the Have a Go Spaghettio! pedagogy. The idea is to take REBT from the rooms of the therapist specialist to the excitement and energy of the early childhood school and classroom settings. Albert Ellis said the future of psychotherapy was in the classroom and here we are! Good on you Ms Smithers!   Ms. Smithers Slide 2 introduces to additional components of the AB...

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 ...

The goal of REBT, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, is to help the person identify the beliefs they have constructed and how they are connected to the way they feel and behave in response to adverse happenings. The emphasis is on the views one holds, personal philosophies that underpin and drive how we feel and behave, as it is they, not solely the adverse event, that ‘makes’ them as upset as they become. In essence we upset ourselves, and Albert Ellis calls this self-disturbance, we are causing what he calls our own ‘upsetness.’ This presentation is titled ‘our – upsetness’ as Ellis’ invites us all to learn to be less ‘self-disturbable.’ In the school context we call this endeavour Rational Emotive Behaviour Education. Dr. Albert Ellis The Have a Go Spaghettio! Success Helper approach to social, emotional, and behavioural wellbeing provides a pedagogy for teachers to use in the early childhood context. It is underpinned by Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and General Semantics t...

If the 'map' (our belief constructions) isn’t the 'territory' (reality) and people believe it is, then there’s a lot of unwarranted emotional and behavioural upset endured by many who believe what they think is reality. This kind of thinking sees life’s twists and turns as major inconveniences that shouldn’t happen. So, if, for example someone doesn’t say thanks when you open the door for them, and you feel the indignation rise within, and you say ‘you’re welcome’ after them, who or what is causing your angst? The answer is that you are! But how? Rational Emotive behaviour Therapy, (REBT), the Stoics, General Semantics and the Buddha say that how we interpret what’s happening has a connection to our emotional and behavioural response. How we interpret what’s happening is related to philosophical belief rules we’ve constructed over time, of which we may not be aware. Consider the scenario above, how might the aggrieved person be thinking at the time, about the inci...