’30,000 kids a day cut class’ – surprise?

’30,000 kids a day cut class’ – surprise?
Not at all!’ says stress management specialist

By Werner Naef, a people management, stress management and human factor training specialist who has worked in high risk and high stress industries such as aviation, medical, defence and high speed transport.

Today’s DomPost front page deals with the issue of truancy by our teenagers. The measures the Government is readying aim at control and command such as automated computer systems emailing and texting parents to explain the whereabouts of their kids. This is just a reactive move that demonstrates how little is being understood what’s going on in our younger generations.

Research in the USA has demonstrated that young people with a specific personality structure do not learn by reading and listening. They need to do the things. And they get bored quickly if they don’t like it. Others need action. Again these people learn by doing things. Not sitting and thinking.

It is a fact that many of these types are school drop-outs, mainly because our school system prefers to deal with the adapted, willingly learning and complying kid. Teachers have missions to teach kids to learn how to think clearly, to develop a sense of responsibility versus others, to be nice to each other and to be dedicated, conscientious and observant. Kids who have different needs rather than just getting recognition that they are doing well at school have a problem with their teachers’ attitude. That’s why there is trouble looming.

This USA based research shows why there are different ways of how we communicate, how we learn, and how we are motivated differently. There are ways to quickly build effective rapport, to win motivation and thus win co-operation. This can also work at schools in New Zealand. How can we expect a teenager to co-operate at school if he or she is not getting any motivation and if the communication style does not match his other?

As managers, leaders and role models it is our job, responsibility and accountability to build rapport, to win motivation and to win co-operation. If I can’t achieve this, I do not perform well as a leader, manager or role model. It is rather mismanagement that I’m doing instead of getting the very best out of my staff. As a manager I’m actually a failure.

What about teachers? Do automated texting systems help them to do a better job? Of course not. But the politicians at least can say that something has been done. For teachers this must be extremely frustrating.

What we should offer teachers is a better training in dealing with the ‘unruly’ kid? What if the teachers in NZ could understand now how kids “tick”, in a more sophisticated way than what they have been told some decades ago when they attended their professional education?

The results of related research projects in the USA in exactly the area that the DomPost highlighted today show outcomes like these:

• 14% increase in test scores
• Behaviour problems down from 33% to less than 2%
• Dropout rate reduced from 42% to below 9%
• Students going to higher education raised from 19% to 43%

These are only a very few of stunning outcomes.

In the USA at present 1/3 of all students between 9th grade and 12th grade do not graduate. They drop out of school before reaching the legal minimum time at school. A survey revealed the following six statements of these drop out students giving insight into their real problems. The six statements are in order of their magnitude:

• #1: ‘No one cared about me as a person’
• #2: ‘I didn’t feel that I belong in the school community’
• #3: ‘It wasn’t useful, it hadn’t any relevance to me and my life what I had to do at school’
• #4: ‘Classes and teachers are boring’
• #5: ‘I had to go to work to support my family’
• #6: ‘I got pregnant’

The order of these reasons to drop out of school is alarming because obviously for 1/3 of teenagers school does not provide motivation at all.

President Obama now makes this a national priority. The US Government has realised that they got the order wrong. If teachers form relationships with kids, if they show them the relevance of what they are learning, then they can make it as rigorous as they want and the kids will stay.

Specialist researchers reported that learners who feel that their needs are being met in the classroom seldom cause discipline problems because interfering with something that is meeting a need is contrary to their self-interest .

The same basics are true for adult learning, for management and for leadership training. This is why NASA has introduced this method for astronaut team training as early as 1978, and why organisations around the world are successfully using this tool in people management.

Background:

Mr Werner Naef is a former Swiss airline captain and Swiss air force pilot / colonel. He has been an airline instructor, fleet and training manager with 32 years experience. He holds a postgraduate degree in psychotherapy (1981), has been a Board member of the prestigious European Association for Aviation Psychology, and still is a registered Aviation Human Factors specialist.

He has worked conducting research for Daimler-Benz-Foundation, lecturing and consulting in Europe, and was a Human Factors Investigator for Air New Zealand. He was the recipient of the 2008 EAAP award for outstanding contribution to the profession.

Mr Naef and his wife Andrea are the Directors of Kahler Communications Oceania Ltd (KCO), who specialise in management training in business and the professional area, including education. They are based in Waikanae but undertake training with companies throughout New Zealand.

ENDS

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