After The Adults Change Quotes

“The shift in culture and climate comes from adults changing their behaviour and sustaining that change.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“The book hare wants the right things, has the right values and is keen to make change. However, the hare won’t wait for others to engage with the theory and practice by slowly digesting the ideas in the book. In their desperation to make things better they often make things worse.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Stories connect people. Although endless anecdotes can become dreary, the right story at the right time can pull everyone together.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“It also needs two people to champion the changes, not one. Being a solo revolutionary is not easy and leading in-house training always feels safer as a pair.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Teaching behaviour is so much more than teaching routines. Of course, routines are important, but they can also become an obsession for some schools and a route towards a lack of tolerance.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Some people’s empathy is limited – so unless the action is squared off with a sanction that bites they will never be satisfied, often regardless of the child’s context. This is not a reason to retreat.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Leading a school through a change in policy and practice is not a job to be rushed. It requires a great plan, patience and a relentlessness that signals to everyone that you are not changing course.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Trying to script every moment of the school day. Scripts are not there to make micromanaged compliance routines more palatable. They are about getting around some difficult moments, not creating more problems.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“In: ‘Do you have one minute for a bit of positive feedback?’/‘I’m just about to teach but do you have a second for some good news?’ ■ Message: The message should always link to our over and above behaviours: achievement, resilience, contribution. ■ Out: ‘That’s it, I just want to pass that on before the weekend – thank you.’/ ‘That’s my next class heading my way but I just wanted to pass that on.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“A pause is completely useless if you are struggling to get everyone to listen. In a chaotic situation, a pause is easily misinterpreted as indecision or weakness. Regardless of your dynamic use of shifts in tone and pauses, prompts and mantras used in the same way and in the same context will become dull, boring and repetitive to the children.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Start with curiosity and a space for the child to speak: ‘Are you OK? I thought it would be better to talk away from everything. I was wondering what was up.’ ■ Accept where we are: ‘I asked to speak to you because I noticed you were struggling to keep to our rules.’ ■ Signal where we are going: ‘This is just a pause – I want to get you back in and working.’ ■ Reset expectations: ‘We have agreed that “safe” is one of our rules. I need you to …’ ■ Offer help: ‘What do you need most right now to help you get back to learning?’ or just: ‘How can I help now?’ ■ Plan to go back in: ‘OK, breathe. We need to “go again”.’ Or ‘When I/we/you go back in, I’m going to make it easy for you to walk back in/move desk/save face.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Nobody has ever improved a child’s outcomes by taking them out of the classroom and pointing out their faults.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“To paraphrase Robert Nesta Marley, one good thing about kindness is that, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Researchers using ‘observational measures of children’s internal representations of their self-conscious emotions’, as well as reports by parents, have linked high levels of ‘shame and maladaptive guilt’ to depression in preschool children as young as the age of 3.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“If every interaction is an improvisation, it is easy to say things that, on reflection, you would have chosen to express another way.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Often, it is not that we want to shame someone; it is just a default, counter-intuitive response that needs to be guarded against.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Children are laughed at for their answer, for their accent, for their colour, for their faith, for their sexual orientation, for their trainers, pencil case or mobile phone. Shame is alive and well in schools which don’t actively work to root it out. Shame is the bindweed of school and classroom climate.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Persistence always pays off. Bake the three rules into the language of the school and you will have already come a long way.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“it is critical that everyone keeps referencing the rules. They underline the boundaries every single time.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“There are children whose lives are so chaotic that they need specialist teachers.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“There are no overnight transformations in education, but there are miracles.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“The trust-building, lack of fear or shouting, and certainty of response take time and hard work.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Head teacher Chris Dyson has his door open all day and expects children to arrive in his office at any time. Regardless of the perceived importance of other meetings, the children come first.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Try making coaching questions part of your intervention strategy for your pupils. The right one at the right time can develop a difficult conversation into a truly reflective one.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Just like a good restorative meeting, the best coaching conversations are not held interview-style across a desk.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“self-supporting groups just try to get better at their work.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“The need to build relationships with both the adult and the child has real urgency if any intervention is to be effective.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Too many adults try to teach during an escalating confrontation, so by the time the teachable moment comes they have walked away or become immersed in the fog of the argument.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“In sport, coaching is there in times of joy and crisis. When things get tough, the coach doesn’t hide away. When the rain comes they get wet too. They remind the athlete of their training, their routines and, critically, link their discipline in the most emotionally charged moments to their desired future success.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana

“Understanding and teaching boundaries is an essential part of teaching. At the end of the conversation, the boundaries remain the same whether the child agrees with them or not.”
― Paul Dix, After The Adults Change: Achievable behaviour nirvana