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Demonstrate supportive and realistic responses to children

and young people’s questions, ideas, suggestions and

concerns

In the same way that you are able to self-examine during your reflective time, and

put strategies in place that enable the positive aspects of your ability to build

relationships, you also need to have a strong awareness around the way children

behave and respond, both as individuals, and in groups.

If you are able to predict what they are likely to do next, you can offset problematic

situations and pick up with positive aspects of these. For example, if you know that

when two friends sit together, they tend to spend the whole lesson whispering and

chatting instead of listening, you could sit just behind them or next to them, or even

join their 'group' to ask them about the class and check their understanding of the task

at hand. Engaging them with the task without passing comment on their chatting is a

positive way to get them to participate productively.

Supportive and realistic responses to children and young people.

Children's behaviour comes from a variety of sources, both inter- and intra-personal

responses to external stimuli. Those stimuli may be their background and the culture

at home in which they are growing up; it could be fed by their economic background,

their previous experiences of school or groups, their relationships with other children,

and their relationships with adults.

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How you respond to their thoughts, ideas, issues, and questions, is really important

to how they see you in your relationship with them. In other words, your responses

feed the way in which they respond to you. If you are supportive, accepting, and

realistic towards them and their ideas, they will mirror this attitude back to you, and

are likely to continue this type of attitude around their peers too.

Consistency

We already know that consistency is one of the key factors in establishing rapport and

maintaining positive relationships with children and young people. When we talk about

consistency, we do not mean delivering the same responses to all the children in a

class on a variety of issues. However, it does mean ensuring that the same levels of

attention are given to individuals throughout the class, and that no-one is favoured, or

less favoured, than anyone else.

An example of this is in the acceptance of ideas or questions. You couldn't take

several questions around a task from a couple of children in the class, and answer

them fully, but then later belittle another question from a different child - even if it is a

question that has already been asked and answered. Answering consistently, and

giving fair and reasonable responses to all queries, comments, and opinions, are all

strategies that can be easily applied and will work good things in terms of your

relationship building with them.

Congruency

Part of consistency is about ensuring your responses are congruent. That is,

congruent with your body language, with your behaviour in general, and with the

expectations of the class as a whole or of the individual children to whom you

respond.

For example, telling a child that they have done really well at an activity, but using a

bored tone of voice, while looking away across the classroom at some other children,

would introduce incongruence into the situation. Although the words you use may say

one thing, your body language and tone may say another.

Congruency feeds the supportive aspects of your work, and you should be very aware of it when working with children and young people