Mary Shaw

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

@StBernardsPS Brilliant performance today. 👏
Well done everyone superstars
🌟Big thank you to everyone involved in putting on a great show 🎉

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

@StBernardsPS @PGLTravel Well done girls 👏 🫶
Posts are fab looks like your all have an amazing time ❤️

[St Bernard's Primary @StBernardsPS]

🌟 A huge well done to three amazing girls who were recognised by the PGL Dalguise staff for their helpfulness and thoughtfulness during our school trip! 👏 Your kindness and teamwork made us all very proud! Well done! 💫 #SchoolTrip #KindnessMatters @PGLTravel

[Maureen McKenna @maureen0207]

The work continues with day 3 of training and a bit of a change in the weather yesterday in Malawi, @MalawiLOL hoodies were needed @elmmorrison @AislinnBurke512 @mrs_reddoch @ScotGovID

[Heather Douglas @ELCHeather]

A free event for parents and carers to find out more about how their baby develops - please encourage any parents you know who may be interested to go along ! ⁦@GCParentsGroup⁩ ⁦@earlyyearsscot⁩

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

https://t.co/dii7NOWCjz

Great job 👏 Thank you

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

Today I heard from a parent that their son was terribly upset when he got covid, because it would ruin his 100% attendance record. At the end of the year, those with 100% get book tokens & certificates in assembly. She mentioned it in passing, she obviously didn’t think it was a big deal. It was just how school worked, and last year her son had got the award.

Here’s why policies like that should stop.

What’s the problem, you might think, with rewarding those who turn up day after day? Surely it’s just a nice little treat to recognise their commitment? And book tokens! How worthy. What’s the problem with free books for kids who take school seriously enough to make it in every day?

As with all reward systems, however, we don’t think enough about those who don’t get the reward and the effect on them.

Who are these kids? Well, it’s the children with serious illness - the mum then went on to tell me that one girl in his class has leukaemia, for example. Or the disabled child. Or the child with overwhelming anxiety. Or the child who became homeless with their mum due to domestic violence and has to go to the shelter in the night, and then doesn’t make it to school the next day. Or even the child whose dad died and who had a day off to attend the funeral.

It’s the kids who find school most difficult and who have the most challenges who struggle to attend.

What happens to them when everyone else goes up to get their book tokens? They sit in assembly watching, and they are punished. They are punished because the absence of a reward acts as a punishment for them. It’s a public punishment too, everyone knows that they didn’t make the grade. No free books for them. Tough.

Whenever there are rewards, the flip side is punishment. When we reward one person, the others are punished by the absence. When we reward someone one year, and then not the next, that again the absence acts as a punishment. It makes them feel bad.

Of course, we know this. We know that children feel bad when they don’t get something and others do. This is in fact pretty well how rewards are meant to work. They are meant to motivate. The idea is that children will try harder to get the reward.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that 100% attendance isn’t about trying harder. It’s largely about luck, particularly at primary school. Luck not to get ill, luck to have a stable family, luck to be the kind of person who doesn’t find school overwhelmingly stressful. Luck to be the sort of person for whom life is a bit easier, in fact.

Rewards for 100% attendance reward the lucky, and by doing so punish the unlucky. The lucky feel good and the unlucky feel bad. And that has other consequences. Because making those who find school attendance hard feel bad is very unlikely to make them more able to attend. They are already struggling, and now they’re being punished for it.

It contributes to anxiety, because children are aware of the consequences of not getting 100%, and some of them will become really anxious about it. For others, it will contribute to their anger and their feelings that they aren’t valued as much as others.

So yes, the proud children up the front of assembly can’t see a problem, and their parents think it’s ‘just a nice gesture’, but it’s so easy to ignore the effect on the least advantaged. We celebrate the winners and the losers are invisible, shamed into silence. The winners assume that the losers deserved to lose - they say that they worked hard for their awards, and the losers couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed and so why should they get book tokens?

This happens again and again in our education system, and that’s why I keep on banging this drum. Every intervention should be evaluated for its impact on losers as well as winners. It’s not enough to pretend they could all be winners if they just tried hard enough.

Sometimes people tell me that the attendance awards helped them learn that everyone is good at different things, because whilst they didn’t get attendance awards, they did well at other things and got awards for music or creative writing. Which is nice for them, but again, let’s think about the losers. For it’s not true that in a school context everyone is good at something. It’s not true that everyone gets awards somewhere. Some children learn that they aren’t good at anything. Not even turning up.

These reward systems come up often when I talk to young people who are disillusioned and burnt out by school. The significance of book tokens goes beyond the money. That’s why it doesn’t work when parents say they’ll buy the book tokens instead, to try and lessen the pain of not getting the reward. Those book tokens, awarded in public in assembly, signify approval, status, validation - and to those who don’t get them, they signify the opposite

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

This is awful Cameron thinking of you #StayPositive

[Cameron Sprague @CameronSprague2]

Devastated... 5 years on from our January fire Storm Gerrit took us out. Teaching resilience sometimes is a stark reminder of what it means to have it. Just feel like I've already displayed all that I have... #StormGerrit #resilience #startingoveragain

[St Bernard's Primary @StBernardsPS]

We would like to invite all prospective new 🅿️1️⃣children and parents to an Open Afternoon on Monday 6th November between 3.30pm and 4.30pm. We look forward to meeting you all and to welcoming you to our wonderful school! #P1EnrolmentWeek

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

Good luck Fiona 🎉

[Linn PSADC @linn_psadc]

Last Early Years Heads’ city meeting for Fiona today before her retirement/closure of Linn . Thanks to all the friends, colleagues and families who have supported us all over the past 13 years since we opened. ❤️

[Dr. Bryan Pearlman #MaslowBeforeBloom @DrP_Principal]

What would happen if we looked at a student’s off-task behavior through a different lens? How would our response differ if we focused on the emotion that is driving the behavior instead of just the presenting behavior?

#MaslowBeforeBloom

#WhateverItTakesForKids

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

@Jimmydunnachie1 @LfsGlasgow @Doug_GCC @ELCHeather @Sharon16145110 Very well done @Jimmydunnachie1 great work 👏👏

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

@MissLMacDonald @MalawiLOL @MissfairbairnPE @Mr_DHenderson Well done 👏 congratulations 👏 to you all @MalawiLOL 🥇💕

[Eleanor Restrick @EleanorRestrick]

Scots schoolboy begs Nicola Sturgeon to 'sort out' NHS and help end his pain https://t.co/061krqObwr

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

@bmstores #BMShedComp

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

#BMShedComp

[B&M Stores @bmstores]

🏡 #COMPETITION TIME 🏡

Get your garden nice and tidy for spring with a chance to #WIN this amazing 8 'x 6' Double Door shed, big enough to fill with LOADS of garden items!

For a chance to WIN;

1) FOLLOW US
2) RT this post
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Competition ends 9am 27/3/23

[Gerry🧠🌱 @gerrydiamond71]

So by the tweets going abt,we are seeing more challenging bhvr.A major part of the problem is that we are asking many YP to meet chronological age expectations instead of where they are developmentally.This exacerbates thr stress response system & will often show up in bhvr.🧠🌱

[John Carnochan💜 @JohnCarnochan]

Ken Robinson on the money here.

[Mary Shaw @messhaw]

@MartinSLewis @itvMLshow #MartinLewis don’t need to be told when to be romantic & declare my love along with rest of world! Constantly know how we feel about each other #love #romance❤️