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I have been doing some work with our P6 and P7 pupils regarding aggression. We looked at how to recognise aggression and how we can play a part in making situations better or worse. The pupils had never really made the link between emotions driving feelings and feelings driving behaviour. In the past I had relied on things like circle time to explore these issues. I have begun to develop a powerpoint that looks at the issues surrounding aggression and the part pupils can play in recognising and dealing with it in themselves and others.

Here is a link to the powerpoint for you to see. I hope some colleagues can find the time to use it and feel free to change it and add notes to help others. I would really appreciate some feedback to allow me to improve its quality.

Have you ever wondered where some people get that unshakeable self belief and supreme confidence? Not the misplaced variety we see on shows like the x-factor and others of that ilk. Well, there is a huge body of secure evidence that tells us we can do something about this for our pupils and dare I say even ourselves, but we must teach it and teach it consistently to bring it out in all of our youngsters.

I was given seven big messages about learning recently and include them here for your comment:

intelligence is not fixed

effort is as important as ability

learning is strongly influenced by emotion

we all learn indifferent ways

deep learning is an active process

learning is messy

we learn from the company we keep

I was never taught this when I was a pupil and wonder if any teachers take the opportunity to go over this with their pupils and use it as a focus to explore learning issues with pupils of all abilities. I think this is especially important for those learners who have acquired helplessness and perceive that nothing they do matters.

The whole issue of Learned Optimism has been developed by Martin Seligman who has worked extensively on exploring helpnessless and personal control. One of the key findings was that resilience in the face of defeat was not an inborn trait and it could be acquired. This is a crucial skill that can help lead to finding solutions to the challenges of raising and educationg young people and fitting them for the rigours in this fast changing society.Basically, and again the reference to x-factor sits well here, many parents bolster their child's confidence by valuing feeling good more highly than how well they are doing. This distorts the child's view and is detrimental to their development. Doing well must come before feeling good. The other way is unlikely to succeed when faced with defeat.

Anyone been working with these concepts and like to share?

My project on using wiki pages to embark on some collaborative writing is taking shape. The P5 pupils I am working with have almost finished their own research topics an will be putting them into a word document to make publishing easier. I am using formative assessment techniques to make sucess criteria and get the pupils to make inroads into recognising quality and spotting plagiarism. Not always easy at this level but I feel progress is being made. This is helped by our NQT, Rachel Clark who is doing the bulk of the classwork. Like many new practitioners she already has a good handle on formative assessment and when I talk of progress in this area it is really Rachel who is doing the day to day re-inforcement and I get to do all the flash bits on a Friday! I hope that by the end of October all of the P5 work will be published in a form that the pupils themselves are happy with.

The next task will be to wait for feedback and additions to their efforts on-line. It will be very interesting and exiting to see how other pupils extend the writing on offer for editing. A step in the dark!

During my work with the class I have tried to consider ways to engage those pupils for whom writing is a chore. I am familiar with the Clicker range of software and have used it to great effect. I have come across two other publishing tools which I am using and will report on their usefullness after I have used them for a bit. One is Slidestory which offers a free way to tell a story using digital photos you or your class have taken. I will be posting some examples on our web-site soon for you to look at.

The other is a great piece of quite cheap sotftware you can try for 30 days free, it is called Comic Life. It's dead easy to use, literally click and drag, add speech bubbles and add text. I tried it out with my son Lewis, now in P2, and he had no trouble geting to grips with it. We used our camping holiday pictures from Glencoe when he trounced me at fishing as a focus for his outrageous success. I am getting it installed on the nursery computer as it is ideal for recording the pupils' progress. Try it out and post a comment on what you think.

If you know of other ICT resources please let me know so I can try them out

I had a visit from one of our Educational Psychologists on Friday to discuss what we do in school to support Emotional Literacy amongst our students. As well as the Jenny Moseley inspired circle time we have some additional resources which we have found to be very useful. The company Incentive Plus have many resources which you can see catalogued on thier web site. A set of cards called What would you do if...... and Dilemmas, which promote emotional literacy and are really effective and simple to use. Although the company place an age of 10+ on theuir usage, I have used them as far down as P3 with great effect.

A few years ago we had a pupil in school who was experiencing quite severe emotional and behavioural difficulties. Part of the problem was that the child did not have the vocabulary to express the difficulties being experienced at the time. This made meaningful communication very difficult and led us up several blind alleys before we could make a clear and balanced judgement of the patterns of behaviour being exhibited.

To compound the problem the staff, myself included, did not really have the expertise or indeed the proper vocabulary to explain the behaviours ourselves. I discovered a very helpful document which made everything much clearer and easier to quantify and helped describe different behaviours. It sets behaviour into three areas, learning behaviour, conduct behaviour and emotional behaviour. It then sets out criteria for measuring emotional and behavioural development which can be filled out as a tick sheet. For example Emotional behaviour is defined as empathy, social awareness, happiness, confidence, emotional stability and self-control. These are then further defined and it outlines desirable and undesirable behaviours.

We adopted this document as a staff and it has enabled us to be more accurate and more professional about our judgements. It also provides a common vocabulary and a reference point for meaningful discussion with parents who are understandably concerned about their child's behaviour.

The good news is that this document, Supporting school improvement , is now free to download as a pdf file from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

Get it, read it, use it.

I have been very busy engaged in school and home business over the holidays. I had to advertise and appoint an Admin Asst, Janitor and playground supervisor over the vacation period and am glad to say the process, which can be protracted, is nearing its conclusion. I am always gratified by the level of interest in any jobs we have on offer here, it allows for a great level of choice and lets us choose the best possible candidate for each post.

On return I had a look about to see what was on offer for my own development as a Head Teacher and decided to sign up for the Five Minds for the Future launch in Glasgow. The speaker is the famous Howard Gardener who is credited with developing the notion of multiple intelligences. I remember reading about this some years ago now and was very excited by the idea as it seemed to make a few of my observations as a class teacher a bit clearer in considering the way my pupils learned and what influenced the teaching and learning process. The launch will consider the 5 minds necessary for the future of education. I look forward to hearing how a tie between A Curriculum for Excelllence and Gardener's ideas will become apparant. His notion is that there are 5 minds:

1. disciplined
2. synthesizing
3. creating
4. respectful
5. ethical

It's easy to see how ACE and Gardener's idea might be a close match. I will report on the conference after I attend. I will also tie in these ideas with my own Collaborative Writing Project which I will be piloting with a P5 class in my school. I will match the outcomes of the project with the ideas of successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors and keep a log of how I can prove this. At the same time I will be interested to see if the Five Minds of Gardener can be moulded to fit within the same framework and provide empirical evidence to prove any or all of the ideas. You can visit my wiki pages and see our progress over the year. If you wish to participate please e-mail me with you details as you must be a member to edit the pages. Drop me a line and your ideas at rwilson@eastlinton.elcschool.org.uk

After reading the literature I recalled similar talk about this from my college days and remembered that the Greek philosopher Galen proposed that there were four areas that explained personality, they were:

• melancholia
• irratibility
• optimism
• phlegmatism

This influenced thought on the subject for many years.

More recently modern theorists came up with:

• extroversion
• neuroticism
• agreeableness
• conscientiousness
• openness to experience

Many personality test in recent times included these as measures and plotted out grids to see what sort of personality you had. The range included respectable journals to less respectable magazines and papers. Many people used it as a bit of fun and some establishments used them as part of the recruitment and selection process. There's a plethora of examples on the internet for you to try if you wish.

Modern geneticists are now establishing a growing body of evidence that it is our old friends genes that in fact play a much greater part in determining personality than has been previously thought and that although nature and nurture modulate each other genetic influences run deep.

If you have any interest in this check out Dan Jones blog.

If you are really keen to see more of your personality Steve Quartz at Caltech will do a brain scan for you for $1,000 and see what's on your mind!

I will be keeping a detailed log of the On line Collaborative writing project on my wiki pages.

I will be adding pages about the pedagogy of writing, on-line security, qualitative improvement measurement and project management for those who wish to try something similar as a class, whole school or bigger project. I will be paying particular attention to and sharing information about how to use ICT to improve writing, the costs, training issues evaluating projects and any problems that arise. If I miss out anything you want to know post a question on my wiki or here.

Your additions and comments will be much appreciated.

Thanks to Sharon from Dumfries and Galloway for adding her P6/7 class to the project in September.

I have started to put together the bones of the Collaborative Writing Project as a wiki page that anyone who has an interest can contribute.

I have been heartened by the very positive support and promise of participation I have recieved from around Scotland. Wouldn't it be great if someone from a different part of the British Isles or further afield would join in!

Please visit the wiki page and contribute, even if you are just looking around any comments would be welcomed.

I decided (benelevolent dictatorship) that a wiki would be the best method of keeping tabs on what is happening and allowing a sort of discussion forum as many people who want to take part are quite far afield. If you know of a better method please let me know.

If you want to put in links to your own blog, web page or another teaching an learning wiki please do so. If you are not confident about using wikis just think of it as a word processing page you can edit and publish. Any east Lothian folk who would like me to come and demonstrate I'm more than happy to visit you, just ask!

I am issuing a challenge to all educators and pupils out there who have read my blog. On my return from summer holidays I am going to be working with a P5 class trying to develop writing in a meaningful, interactive and highly stimulating way. I will set up a collaborative writing project that any pupils or educators can contribute to on the web.

My idea is this, I will set up a wiki page which can be accessed through the school website or here. The contributors will be faced with a selection of different stories and poems which they can read and add to, following the genre.

There will be a menu of story lines to which new characters can be added and plots and sub-plots developed. This could be added to live from the web at home or at school as a class or individual contribution.

The pupils will then vote on the 'best' stories and each school can then voice record it, add art work and then podcast it as a digital story. I would also like to invite pupils/actors/famous people to join the project to do voice overs.

To those who don't have the skills I am offering to come to your school and either train staff or pupils to take this task on. If it is outwith Scotland, you pay the costs!

If any East Lothian teachers ( or any others) would like to join me in setting this up please let me know and we can meet to discuss and improve the concept.

If you have ever experienced difficulty in motivating learners to take part in writing then this will be a great opportunity to collborate with others in a novel way.

Team-Teach is now the preffered response to using de-escalation techniques and positive handling for the Education and hopefully the Social Work setting in East Lothian. The authority now has several intermediate tutors and from last week seven advanced tutors. The range of skills now available to staff who have to deal with children who put themselves or others into danger is considerable. The course I attended was one, if not the, most demanding I have ever attended. The pass mark for one part was 100%!! We all passed. The physical part to the training was exhausting and the emotional aspects of using positive handling techniques on children cannot be underestimated. It is only when you undertake the training that you start to really consider the range of problems faced by the youngsters out there and the level of support they need. Having an unconditional positive regard for youngsters should be the baseline from which we approach and try to resolve difficult situations. The beauty of the Team teach training is that it takes an holistic approach to behaviours and gets practioners to reflect on all of the influences that result in undesirable behaviour patterns. An integral part of the training is to get staff to work together to look at the topography of behaviour and tease out trigger points and responses. Often the problems are exacerbated by the poor choice of language and other communication skills by teachers themselves. Sometimes we can be the problem ourselves without even realisng it. One of the help scripts to combat this is for staff to ask themselves and share the notion 'is there a better way'. Over 95% of all conflicts can be resolved without putting hands on any youngster. If you have to restrain or hold a child you better make sure it is done properly with the outcome being an improved ralationship between the practitioner and the youngster, our duty of care is always to make safe and risk assess accordingly.

In the advanced course we learned how to deal with attacks from blunt and sharp objects (where there is no other way, running away is good!), ground assaults and dealing with children who go to ground and are best described as floppy dead weights. A technique my five year old has perfected! Bless!

Hopefully we won't be called upon to instruct these techniques very often, but the skills are now there if needed. One part of the course dealt with Transport and the issues around getting difficult youngsters to and from school or an educational outing. There were many practical suggestions which I am sure many staff will benefit from.

The squirrels? The conversation went something like this:

What is the daftest thing you have done?

Well..... I once blow dried a squirrel.

Why?

It was wet!

How did it get wet?

They're always like that when you take them out of the deep freeze!

Why was it frozen?

Oh! My brother's a taxidermist!

Nice thing to look forward to at the weekend, I am meeting up with some old friends who were all at teacher training college, Callendar Park, from 1973! Still going strong (ish). The babysitter is organised and my wife, Marie, and I will actually be out on a social occasion without our five boys. I view that as a cheap doo! Now, whose turn is it to drive?