Personal Skills

Having a set of seemingly noncompliant learners aided in my decision to research challenging behaviour. Setting out to discover what I believed the key issues were relating to challenging behavior was my first target. I also decided to look into how the behaviour could be identified and dealt with effectively, looking at different learning theories to support my findings. Finally I decided I would trial within my sessions any new teaching strategies I discovered that would enable me to deal with the challenging behaviour more effectively.

Challenging behaviour is a very broad term and can be interpreted many different ways. What is deemed as challenging to one may be seen as acceptable to another. The type of challenging behaviour I have been dealing with is largely intermittent patterns of attendance and non-engagement/lack of motivation towards learning.

Looking into why these particular behaviours have been displayed I discovered that with quite a lot of my learners, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs physiological and belongingness layers had not been fulfilled. Not having any breakfast and not being hydrated properly, having a poor home routine including no support or sense of belonging to their family and the fact that outside agencies i.e. social services being involved are all true examples that my learners are dealing with outside of their working lives.

The second area I decided to research and develop is how the use of ICT affects and enables learning. I chose this subject, if I’m honest, because ICT is not my strong point. In some way it scares me, maybe this is because I have very little confidence in the subject and I have found it difficult trying to incorporate it into my sessions. Before beginning this research I would much rather have taught without ICT and used books and magasines as reference points.

My targets for researching were to distinguish the impact on the effectiveness of learning of using/not using ICT in sessions. To work this...