Connie Dembrowsky Leads Teachers

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Connie Dembrowsky Leads Teachers
There was no lack of valuable information provided by Ms. Constance (Connie) Dembrowsky during her lively and interactive seminar for educators, “From Disruptive to Disciplined: Practical Strategies for Motivating Your Disinterested, Defiant At-Risk Students.”

Connie Dembrowsky is an internationally renowned lecturer and educator on the topic of affective skills. She is the author of the “Personal and Social Responsibility” curriculum – which forms the basis of the DCTS Parent Seminar – as well as several other school aged and adult curriculums. Connie has devoted her life to educating teachers, students and parents in the values of working affectively to build personal relationships that maintain dignity and respect for self and others.

Connie’s seminar, held March 8 at the Holiday Inn, Grantville and sponsored by the Bureau of Education and Research of Bellevue, Washington, attracted an interested audience of 62 teachers, principals and administrators from various school districts in the Harrisburg area. Included in the audience was DCTS ninth grade facilitator, Larry Evans, and DCTS principal, Jim Crane.

The seminar opened quickly with a number of approaches and techniques that teachers may use to interest, involve, engage and discipline young students within everyday classroom activities.

Connie related simple ideas such as discussion guidelines that allow students to regularly and unobtrusively evaluate their own behaviors in class, teaching strategies to improve attentiveness and procedures for rulemaking and discipline that allow students to choose for themselves the consequences they receive. All of these strategies are geared towards bettering and reinforcing student performance by aiding them to think for themselves and to understand positively the unique values and talents they possess.

And yet this seminar was much more than just teacher strategies. Connie continually focused the audience on the internal worth and value of each person, and especially our children.

“To have internal worth,” Connie relates, “kids must know that what they do makes a difference. They must develop within themselves a sense of significance.”

Adults must help children in finding and developing their own unique talents.

“How many kids,” Connie asked, “are trying to develop talents they don’t have?”

They feel there is something wrong when, in fact, there is nothing wrong at all. We all have different and valuable talents, but kids may be wasting time working at abilities they don’t have while missing the talents they truly have.

In this vein, Connie demonstrated activities for aiding children to track measurable accomplishments and allowing them to discover and chart for themselves their own capabilities and improvements. Change is incremental. By giving children the ability to see and affect their own change you help to give them a sense that they can do it. Keeping a “Personal Best” notebook was one such idea.

Connie went on to discuss the benefits to kids of giving encouraging feedback over simple praise, of teaching the of handling mistakes by taking responsibility for them and of creating with them powerful language by helping to remove words like “can’t” and “try” from their vocabularies.

Teachers experienced through stories, lecture, exercises and activities the steps to personal power, the workings of the behavior loop, the power of positive self-talk and techniques for empowering students through the environment of involvement and responsible choice.

Connie emphasized the value of stories in opening and inspiring young minds and provided several references for the use of teachers and parents. Many of the stories Connie told were from her own experiences growing up as a special education problem child and in raising five adopted children taken from prisons and broken relationships.

A real highlight of the seminar for me was the analogy given by Connie early in the day.

“Every kid, she said, is a gift.”

Like gifts, each kid is wrapped and packaged. Some kids are wrapped with barbed wire and some may have tears and even large holes in their packaging. But again, like gifts, every kid can be unwrapped and opened. And when we take the time and effort to carefully unwrap the packages of our kids we find something very valuable inside.

For details on Connie’s visit with us at the Friday evening meeting of the Parent Exploratory Group just click here.
-- John Borland --

Affective Skills Web Site

Last Modified: April 02, 2003