Emotional Intelligence in the Curriculum - The BAAT Approach

• It uses the unique method of teaching both staff and students
• It teaches Emotional Intelligence on a incremental basis
• It works because students experience new behavioural models before trying them in real-life
• It as a unique back up service over 12-months to support staff who have been trained
• It works with severely affected pupils in EDB schools
• It caters for all students from 2 to 18 years

This is a recent letter posted on the Internet:

I have just started as a teaching assistant in a special school for kids (they are all boys) who have EBD and such behavioural issues. I was shocked today when one of them (who I thought was a quiet lad) went into a rage and had to be restrained on the floor by two members of staff while he calmed down, I later found out that he has ADHD, needless to say I was very shocked!!!!

Can anyone offer advice on how they deal with children in situations like this and how much force is acceptable?

There are also a couple of boys who use very bad language whether it's aimed at a teacher, student or under their breath in frustration. How do people go about this? Obviously if it was in main stream school you would discipline/punish them but teachers seem to calmly say not to use the language or make no comment. I would be grateful to hear how other people deal with such situations.

The Life Science Curriculum is the answer - the Academy has just finished training staff in an EDB school with incredible results!

Part of the problem that occur with behaviour relates to the labels we give it; we just don't understand Brain Dominance.

Brain Dominance affects both personality characteristics and learning styles. (Just a note: if your spouse doesn't mind being a little late for church, but it drives you crazy, you're probably dealing with a characteristic of brain hemispheric dominance, rather than sheer disorganization or stubbornness. 'Left Brainers' seem to have a clock running in their head, whereas a 'Right Brainer' doesn't appear to have this phenomenon . . . although they almost always know what month it is!!!!)

Children tend to display these characteristics at an early age. All children are creative, but your right- brain child will be even more imaginative. The right-brain learns things in "wholes" rather than parts, so that child will get math concepts well, but struggle with the "details", like the math facts, or checking work. In thinking styles, the right-brainer often goes by "gut feel" whereas the left-brainer needs multiple facts before coming to a conclusion. In test-taking, the left-brainer prefers the black and white choices presented in multiple choice questions, while the right-brainer may prefer essay questions where the whole picture can be given.

Eighty percent of the struggling learners I see are right-brain dominant. Does that mean that being right brain dominant is a weakness? Not at all!! As you know, Einstein was a 'flaming' right-brainer. Then why the discrepancy? It is because schools, and schoolwork, are set up to teach in a left-brain style. Workbooks, worksheets, rote memorisation (math facts), timed tests, lectures, learning facts from a test, learning vocabulary by looking-up the meanings of the words in a dictionary and writing it out, are all left-brain activities.

If you have a child who is "balking" at doing the schoolwork that fits the description above, you probably are working with a right-brain dominant child. To help this child become successful doesn't require an entire change in curriculum, but rather a change in the teaching strategies for this child. It isn't as hard as it sounds. In fact, it's easy, fun, and inexpensive. Let's look at the teaching of spelling words. We all want our children to be good spellers and are very frustrated when our methods aren't working. The most common complaint I receive is that the child learns the words for the test but continues to misspell them in other writing tasks. This is one of the easiest problems to solve and I have regularly seen two-year's spelling growth in one year using a simple method. Have you ever seen a picture in the newspaper of a Spelling Bee winner? If you have, you may have seen the student with their eyes in an upward position. In other words, it looks like they are looking at the ceiling for the word they is spelling. This makes sense in light of the recent brain research that tells us that we can cause our right-brain to become more responsive by looking up with our eyes.

In other words, we use our eyes to help us think as well as to see. When the student is looking up, they are "seeing" the word in their head: because they are seeing the printed word, they can spell it backwards as easily as forwards. You can train a child to use this very efficient strategy. Not only will it be painless, but you will find the that the right-brain is responsible for visual memory and long-term memory so your child will remember how to spell their words long-past the week of the spelling test.

This efficient right-brain spelling strategy is simple:

Give your child a pre-test from a short list of words from the "most commonly used words" list. For the words that were spelled incorrectly, take the letters that were wrong, or left-out, and color them and "weird" them up. For example, if they spelled "Saturday" as "Saterday", put the 'Sat-r-day' in black marker on a card, since they knew those letters. Put the "u" in blue with wavy lines in it, to represent water, and a stick figure diving into the water. You can add a story, such as: "They all Sat around on Saturday and one of them got bored, so the brothers decided to go swimming".

Hold the card straight up in front of the child so their eyes are looking up (Make sure his chin isn't up, but only his eyes). Have him glance at it, then bring it down while his eyes remain looking up where the card had been. Flash this card in the air five or six times until your child can "see" it in the air and easily spell it forwards and backwards. If your child can't easily "see" it in the air, show it more times, or put more "velcro" on it by putting in more colour, or a more detailed picture.

Review the card each day of the week for a few minutes.

Your child's "photographic memory" will become stronger and stronger as you use this method. Remember that your child's visual memory is their greatest strength. As you help them develop that, using spelling words, math facts, or anything, you will see learning and memorising become much easier. The success a child feels when they can "see it" is priceless!