Working within the Ministry of Education provides educational psychologists with a whole range of opportunities,
anywhere from working with individual families and children and schools.
Whether it's project work. Whether it's schoolwide interventions.
Whether it's a particular area you're interested in, like teacher development, or parental development.
You've got the ability to broaden your range of skills.
I work as an IWS psychologist. That stands for Intensive Wraparound Service.
And the focus of it is working with the students that are the most challenging with learning and behaviour issues.
It is, as the name suggests, a wraparound so it involves the family, the young person,
but spreading out into the wider areas of influence for the young person.
It includes the school, extended whānau members, practitioners who are already working with the young person, mentors.
And the team can be as broad as the family wants.
I definitely put quite a bit of time in at the start of the process,
getting to know families so that they get used to me,
and they can see the kind of person I am so
they're more comfortable with talking freely about how it is for them at home.
At least three-quarters of my week is spent going to visit
either families, or schools.
Either to do an observation, meet with the young person, or a teacher.
We're really seeking from the family, and the young person,
what are the strengths that the people in the family, and the young person, have.
And we're going to use those as the basis of any intervention work that we do.
And then we base our intervention around those things that the young person loves doing and enjoys.
What we find is that there are ripples that span out into the young person's
other areas of their life where they get a bit of mana, for example, at school
and they are a bit more cooperative, say, in the learning activities at school
which previously they didn't engage well with.
I can remember an event that had the potential to have an impact
on a number of schools and early childhood centres in that community.
I met the principal of the school that we thought was most impacted
in terms of the number of students affected.
She said to me, "They won't, the students, the kids won't be at school."
And I said, "They will be at school."
And she argued with me, "No, they won't be."
And I said, "Well, I think they will be and these are the reasons why.
They'll want to be at school because those are the people they know and trust.
Their peers and their teachers and the other people in the school.
They know and trust you. They'll want to be with them."
So we talked with the staff about how they needed to approach the day.
So we talked about some key things.
School routine's important. We're going to maintain the same routine that you do every Monday.
The same structures are in place.
We're not going to change anything.
We're going to think about, as classroom teachers, what we might say to students
if they ask questions about what's happened.
So let's write a script so you're not put on the spot.
So we did that.
We helped the Principal write a script in case the media rang.
And we helped the Principal and the Board Chair figure out who was going to be the spokesperson if that happened.
So they wrote; they were prepared.
We helped them write something for the school newsletter to communicate that to the community.
That school had a good day.
They had a good week. They continued to function.
They didn't lose any class time. The students felt supported.
That school community moved on.
This session today is for early childhood teachers
who are focusing on shaping their environment and their teaching strategies
to support children who have challenging behaviour or developmental needs.
- What we notice around children's learning and development is
when we ask them more questions we're not adding anything in,
we're expecting something back.
A lot of the teaching practices, historically, have been around questioning children
around what they're doing.
What we're wanting teachers to do is to,
instead of asking questions, to comment on what the child is doing,
through play, which builds on the child's language and doesn't expect them to answer the questions.
- Oh, your red fire engine crashed into the blocks and knocked them down.
- You've found a duck. You've sat it on the blue block.
We're feeding in information rather than trying to elicit which doesn't put as much pressure on the child.
- You've found some blocks of two blocks together.
You've added a blue one. Putting a red one on top. Now you've got four.
- Eleven. That's a good idea, use the blue one to hold them down.
- I thought that was really good
and you were showing such amazing creative skills. - Wasn't she.
It certainly does challenge their teaching philosophy and
often some of their beliefs that they come into these sessions with.
However, we have received an incredibly positive response.
We have the opportunity to work in the field and
to work alongside teachers and parents to help grow their knowledge and skills.
But the outcome of that is actually creating more a positive pathway for children and
isn't that what we want to do for our future?