Zoe Girl
4-29-13, 12:00pm
I have posted at times about my work situation. I had a real positive the other day, great boost after the year we have had.
I have one staff who can be very negative. She also can be reactionary to some of the children's behavior. She has a serious write up for an incident where a child did something threatening, I suspended him for 2 days, she still went outside of our chain of command and filed a police report. So this has been a challenging situation this year. The child came back to program, was suspended a second time and we made one social services call. I am pretty committed to working with kids and balancing that with overall safety and respecting the needs of staff. towards that end I work extensively with staff on behavior plans plus work around changing our attitude and interactions towards the child. In this case it partially took calling staff on judgemental comments that were not useful. I consistently told them I needed information (such as child hit staff and used a swear word) rather than judgement (he is bad and mom doesn't care) in order to have parent conferences and support suspensions. This wasn't always a lovey dovey process ya know, LOL, I couldn't be sure she wouldn't quit. We get lots of staff turnover and I know how hard it is to work with that.
So the last few weeks this kiddo is doing great! He makes some strange comments and needs to be reminded to give appropriate space. However the staff is noticing much better behavior instead of focusing on negatives overall. They are also letting him have more choice in the program. We are working on Service Learning through a 6 step process of youth choice and he was really engaged and helpful. He has been kicked out of every child care program since he was 4 years old and we made this work!! Not only with him but my staff has seen that another way of working with kids that is more positive, and really can work.
The added bonus is that we were sharing success in a meeting and I shared with my superviosor and totally took credit for the improvement, which she agreed with.
I have one staff who can be very negative. She also can be reactionary to some of the children's behavior. She has a serious write up for an incident where a child did something threatening, I suspended him for 2 days, she still went outside of our chain of command and filed a police report. So this has been a challenging situation this year. The child came back to program, was suspended a second time and we made one social services call. I am pretty committed to working with kids and balancing that with overall safety and respecting the needs of staff. towards that end I work extensively with staff on behavior plans plus work around changing our attitude and interactions towards the child. In this case it partially took calling staff on judgemental comments that were not useful. I consistently told them I needed information (such as child hit staff and used a swear word) rather than judgement (he is bad and mom doesn't care) in order to have parent conferences and support suspensions. This wasn't always a lovey dovey process ya know, LOL, I couldn't be sure she wouldn't quit. We get lots of staff turnover and I know how hard it is to work with that.
So the last few weeks this kiddo is doing great! He makes some strange comments and needs to be reminded to give appropriate space. However the staff is noticing much better behavior instead of focusing on negatives overall. They are also letting him have more choice in the program. We are working on Service Learning through a 6 step process of youth choice and he was really engaged and helpful. He has been kicked out of every child care program since he was 4 years old and we made this work!! Not only with him but my staff has seen that another way of working with kids that is more positive, and really can work.
The added bonus is that we were sharing success in a meeting and I shared with my superviosor and totally took credit for the improvement, which she agreed with.