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Quest
Creating a circle of change
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Jenny Mosley — teacher educator, drama therapist and education consultant from the U.K. — will be in Delhi and Bangalore in April and May respectively to conduct "Circles of Confidence" — three-day training workshops for principals and teachers from schools all over India. These sessions will be conducted as a part of The Hindu's Newspaper in Education programme. She has developed ingenious resource materials for the classroom that are sure to turn a school round.
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Jenny Mosley, the acclaimed teacher educator, drama therapist and education consultant from the U.K., will be in Delhi and Bangalore in April and May to conduct "Circles of Confidence", a three-day training workshops in each city for principals and teachers from a wide range of schools from all over India. These workshops are being organised by The Teacher Foundation and supported by the Newspaper in Education Programme of The Hindu.
Mosley travels to various parts of the world conducting workshops on her quality circle time model. She has developed ingenious resource materials for the classrooms and has written several popular books, among which are two bestsellers, Turn Your School Round and Quality Circle Time In The Primary Classroom.
Here are some excerpts from an exclusive interview:
How did you first develop your interest in Circle Time?
I was a class teacher in a very tough inner city school and we had a head teacher who was very committed to listening to everybody in the school. He valued every single person — the teachers, the secretary, the cook, the child. And he was the first person I've ever met who said we should get children into circles and listen to them. We should get adults into circles and listen to them. I was fascinated by his very democratic, very valuing ethos in that school.
How would you define Circle Time?
When people hear of Circle Time, they immediately say, "Oh! That's children sitting on the floor passing around little objects and chatting". For me, Circle Time is much bigger than that. It's all the system in the school that makes people feel respect.
When I say Circle Time what I'm imagining is a Circle that goes around a school — against which you can examine all the systems in the school. If those systems are emotionally safe, if adults and children feel valued and heard, that for me is Circle Time!
Many of the things I do in Circle Time are already in your history, tradition and culture. I integrate into Circle Time mediation, imagery, story-telling, yoga, puppetry and all these wonderful creative things that are a part of your philosophy. Your philosophy is the same as the philosophy of the whole Circle Time model — about integrating the spiritual, emotional, academic and physical beings.
How long does it take a school to become truly inducted into the Circle Time approach?
If you are really committed to it, you can achieve an astonishing amount in one school year. We've had the BBC go into schools that have turned themselves around. Some of them have done this by getting a fantastic lunch time policy setting up zoned areas for different activities during lunch time, integrating playground games into their mainstream PE teaching and children becoming lunch time helpers. So working on ONE system — the lunch time policy, you could turn your school around within a year heading towards real excellence in terms of caring, good relationships, respect for each other, respect for the quiet child and the average child. To get every system into place could take five years.
You have helped schools develop Whole School Behaviour polices. What would such a policy entail?
`Behaviour' is a huge word! It means the way we relate, the way we feel about ourselves, the way we respond. Whole School Behaviour Policy would entail all policies that ensure that the moment children walk into the school they are physically and emotionally safe — so you look into the corridors, the toilets, the playgrounds, every aspect! Because it's so highly motivated, all your exam results, all your good relationships hinge on what I call the `trunk' of the school. The trunk of the school is the Behaviour Policy — you can put your branches in later, but your trunk must be in first.
A Whole School Behaviour Policy first covers consistency to school rules — the whole school needs to agree on its moral values and how to display them and then it also needs to agree on its routines. The routines are not moral values. They are important things like walking down the school corridors on the left hand side, where you put your bags, do you line up outside the classroom or don't you, etc.?
Next, the whole school would have to look at its Rewards Policy — how do we celebrate the achievements of every child, though the achievements are different? Do we have a rewards system that says Well Done for `kindness, honesty, gentleness'? So the school has to overhaul its rewards policy to make that every average child, every middle-plodder child feels that they have something to offer. And finally the school needs to review its sanctions or forms of punishment. I believe punishments enhance students' self esteem. It gives them boundaries — "this is a far as you can go and we care about you". The most effective form of sanction is the withdrawal of a privilege. As long as punishment is based on that principle, it's fine! But it does mean that every child has to have a privilege and that schools have to search into their hearts as to what privileges they are going to create in order to withdraw those privileges.
In elementary and middle schools. I use something called "Golden Time". Now that's a privilege for every child. But any child who during the week has broken any rule or routine or has had a visual warning and breaks another rule, loses five minutes of Golden Time. During that time they have to reflect, by looking at a sand-timer for five minutes at what they did. I don't like to use writing or lines — because if children are given words as punishment, they won't become poets, or authors. They won't love words.
What statistics have you gathered over the years to prove Circle Time is not just a passing fad?
We have a very rigorous inspection of schools by the OFSTED (The Office for Standards in Education, U.K.). We have worked with 500 schools over the past 10 years and we recently wanted to find out if they had been OFSTED inspected. Sixty-nine per cent of the schools had been OFSTED inspected but of this , 97 per cent of schools had received very positive evaluation report in the areas that we call person, social and emotional, behavioural and cultural development. The OFSTED set aside 25 per cent of the overall marking of the school for that. The schools attributed their positive evaluation to the work they had done with us. That was one piece of research.
We've done another piece of research funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. They wanted to see the effect of using a circle time approach in a 1,500 strong high school.
So we had two teachers teaching PSE (Personal and Social Education), a prescribed subject in the National Curriculum, in two different ways. One teacher taught it in the usual way, which was quite student-centred with group work and open discussions. In addition we got one of my circle time accredited trainers to teach the same syllabus with another group of students just using the circle approach. At the end of the term, the academic results were slightly higher among our students. But the main thing that was higher when they compared the two groups, was our group's self-esteem. Their knowledge of their peers was far more detailed then the other and they had an inner locus of control (because we measured that on the Bandura Self-Efficacy Scale).
How effective is the circle time technique with adults?
It's a longer road in that adults' trust has often been shattered by leaders who haven't listened to them or there's been a backlash, when they would have spoken up. Adults also take a longer time to reach a level of emotional honesty.
So it is important that the leader of the circle should be committed to the programme and psychology of circle time. They couldn't just seize power back after the circle finished. So everything depends on trust. The leaders have to commit themselves to role-modelling the principles of circle time outside the circle If they use power in a harsh authoritarian manner, outside the circle it devalues the circle. Fortunately it is possible with good circle facilitators, to build trust amongst adults over a period of time.
Visit Jenny Mosley's website: www.circle-time.co.uk
For readers (teachers, educators, parents) interested in attending the Circles of Confidence workshops being conducted in New Delhi and Bangalore, contact The Teachers Foundation at 080-2350163, 2358336 or e-mail: teacherfoundation@vsnl.net
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