Thoughts on Jen Foster?
If you don't know, Jen Foster has quite a sizeable following and is a teacher Instagram influencer/"behavioural specialist"? I bought a book she wrote back in 2023 when I was a fairly new teacher but the more I've stayed in the profession, the more I've realised a lot of what she's saying is the usual drivel that puts the onus on teachers to be psychotherapists and figure out what awful, disruptive behaviour is 'communicating' rather than firm, logical consequences. I'm not entirely against regulation, re-connection, rehabilitation etc. as behaviour philosophies and management techniques but her specific approach takes on that tiresome extreme whereby you assume children are not sentient beings with free will who sometimes behave like that just because. It's never the child's fault that they threw a chair or trashed a class, it's the adult's for not picking up on warning signs quick enough. It's not the child's fault that they're shouting out, chatting constantly, lying, picking fights with other children, bullying. No, it's actually communicating that the adult has created a culture that allows the classroom to harbour that. No accountability for children, no concept of free will, parental influences, the cultural attitude of anti-intellecutalism in the U.K.
I also wonder if this Jen Foster lady has ever really worked with truly difficult children. Has she worked in areas of high deprivation where it isn't just one disruptive child in a class but 3 or 4 on average? Has she ever had to deliver a curriculum with no TA while a child continuously screams in the background? It's usually these people whose idea of "difficult children" is the odd outburst here and there from typically leafy-green, middle-class demographics who seem to think they have it all figured out and insist that there's something inherently wrong with teaching practices instead of there being a wider societal issue of entitled parents and screen-obsessed children.