Day four - Change By Design

Today was that last day of our research/development for the project and I am EXHAUSTED! We began the day completely confused thanks to the huge amount of responses we received from the online questionnaire. Spending the first part of this morning reading the results, it became clear that people generally felt that encouraging children to speak about bullying in particular and what they get picked on for would not help them but in fact draw more attention towards their issues. Another point which was picked up on was the fact that many parents would not be interested in continuing an activity like this at home.

After letting the new information soak in we started brainstorming once again, looking at ways in which we could tweak our idea to respond to the new feedback. Many options were discussed but we finally decided to go with the concept of a ‘circle-time’ – style activity which would encourage the children to TALK about any feelings they might have but not aimed at bullying in particular. This approach would mean that the focus is moved away from bullies and back on to the childs general well-being.

Our idea works by the child using a ‘twister board’- style dial to select their mood at the end of each day and why they feel that way. The teacher can then collect these boards making them aware of any children experiencing a recurring bad mood. Once a week or however often, the teacher can arrange a time where the class can meet in a safe/relaxed setting (perhaps by use of comfortable bean bags or colourful cushions/rugs) and share how they have been feeling that week touching on any issues they may have.As some children may still find it hard to open up on front of their peers, the teacher could continue the discussion in a more private setting. If it appears that there is a problem involving a few of the pupils then it can be explored further by encouraging the children to help each other through their difficulties by helping one another why they feel and act in certain ways.

The whole concept leads back to the fact ‘communication builds resilience’.

Deciding this was a good idea we looked at changing the name as ‘PLAY’ was no longer appropriate due to the fact it was not going to be a game any more. After some discussion we settled on ‘smallTALK’. The word small links in with the young pupils who would be participating in it as well as giving quite a cute and friendly name to the activity to make it appear more inviting rather than scary and the ‘TALK’ encourages the children to speak to each other.

Moving on from this we realised that we had a LOT of work to finalise for tomorrow and got set on dividing up jobs to use the team to our advantage. After drawing up all the concept boards, setting out the wall display and helping create the logo I began creating the power point slides for the presentation. This is a much larger task than previously thought and as a result I am still currently finalising them at 11:45pm.

Hopefully everything will run smoothly tomorrow and our idea will come across clearly to the other teams as a lot of work, a huge amount of failing and many many hours of creativity has gone into creating this idea!

Now, time for bed.