Cut down on ‘call-outs’

Posted by Paul Dix on 4 April 2014 | 0 Comments

First published Times Educational Supplement (TESPro Magazine) February 2012

There are certainly a small number of teachers in every school who rack up a disproportionate amount of ‘call outs'. Think Victor Meldrew in a hospital bed with the emergency cord. As the few push the emergency button over and over, the time and resources of senior staff are quickly stripped. In schools running at 10 or more call outs per hour, the system is under strain. Senior leaders tire of repetitive castigation and side rooms become crammed with incredulous muttering children, "but....but...I only..... exhaled... can't believe... well out of order... and he sent me out". The system wobbles as the few remove support from the many. Teachers who patiently and calmly step children through consequences are left with no support on the few occasions they really need it.

Kurangkan 'panggilan-out'

Posted by Paul Dix pada 4 April 2014 | 0 Comments

Pertama diterbitkan Supplement Times Pendidikan (TESPro Magazine) Februari 2012

Tentunya ada sebilangan kecil guru-guru di setiap sekolah yang rak sehingga jumlah yang tidak seimbang 'out panggilan. Fikirkan Victor Meldrew di katil hospital dengan tali kecemasan. Oleh kerana beberapa menekan butang kecemasan berulang, masa dan sumber kakitangan kanan dengan cepat dilucutkan. Di sekolah-sekolah berjalan pada 10 atau lebih out panggilan sejam, sistem ini adalah di bawah tekanan. Pemimpin tayar kanan kritik pedas dan bahagian bilik berulang-ulang menjadi penuh dengan anak-anak amat tidak boleh dipercayai rungut, "tetapi .... tetapi ... saya hanya ..... hembusan ... tidak percaya ... dan keluar perintah .. . dan dia menghantar saya keluar ". Sistem ini wobbles sokongan keluarkan beberapa daripada banyak. Guru-guru yang sabar dan tenang langkah kanak-kanak melalui kesan ditinggalkan dengan tiada sokongan di beberapa majlis-majlis mereka benar-benar memerlukannya.

We used to stand children outside the classroom for a few minutes to cool off. Go out, speak to them and return them to the room. Now, for reasons I am still not clear on, it is a health/safety/safeguarding/fire risk and so the ‘on call' team, like trouble-seeking missiles sweep up miscreants from perilous corridors. Segregation blocks are extended, problems removed, data prepared and an array of different people become involved. The trouble is that the further away from the classroom teacher behaviour is taken the more complicated everything becomes.

Kami digunakan untuk kanak-kanak berdiri di luar kelas selama beberapa minit untuk menyejukkan. Keluar, berkata-kata dengan mereka dan mengembalikan mereka ke bilik. Sekarang, atas sebab-sebab saya masih tidak jelas, ia adalah / pengawalan risiko kesihatan / keselamatan / kebakaran dan sebagainya pasukan 'panggilan', seperti masalah mencari peluru berpandu sapu penjahat dari koridor berbahaya. Blok pengasingan diperluaskan, masalah dikeluarkan, data yang disediakan dan pelbagai orang yang berbeza terlibat. Masalahnya ialah bahawa lebih jauh daripada tingkah laku guru dalam bilik darjah diambil semua yang menjadi lebih rumit.

There are times when all teachers, regardless of their experience may need to call on support. Starting a new job or changing roles brings new groups of students who will test the boundaries until they realise they are not flexible. Removing students from the room is an essential part of drawing the lines in the sand with a new group or as support for new teachers.

For most, getting to the point where a child must be removed from class is a regrettable end to a series of well-rehearsed behaviour strategies. A few scream "WOLF!" for the first child to provoke an emotional response. Teachers who jump the consequence steps and send children out for the smallest misdemeanour cause ripples in the system that affect everyone.

Ada kalanya semua guru, tanpa mengira pengalaman mereka mungkin perlu untuk memanggil sokongan. Memulakan pekerjaan baru atau menukar peranan membawa kumpulan baru pelajar yang akan menguji sempadan sehingga mereka sedar mereka tidak fleksibel. Mengeluarkan pelajar dari bilik adalah bahagian yang penting dalam menarik garis di pasir dengan kumpulan baru atau sebagai sokongan untuk guru-guru baru.

Bagi kebanyakan, mendapatkan ke titik di mana kanak-kanak mesti dikeluarkan dari kelas adalah dikesali akhir kepada satu siri strategi tingkah laku yang dibacakan. Beberapa menjerit "WOLF!" untuk kanak-kanak yang pertama untuk memprovokasi tindak balas emosi. Guru-guru yang melompat langkah-langkah kesan dan menghantar anak-anak keluar untuk yang paling kecil punca perbuatan kurang baik riak dalam sistem yang memberi kesan kepada semua orang.

In many schools the sheer volume of call outs mean that children are not actually removed but ‘growled at and negotiated back in'. Few things are more damaging to the good order and discipline of a school than Chelsea telling you to ‘Fuck Off' and someone trying to negotiate an instant re-entry, "She promises she won't do it again". Hmm.

Di kebanyakan sekolah isipadu out panggilan bermakna bahawa kanak-kanak sebenarnya tidak dikeluarkan tetapi 'menderam di dan dirundingkan semula. Tiada perkara yang lebih merosakkan keadaan baik dan tatatertib sekolah daripada Chelsea memberitahu anda untuk 'Fuck Off' dan seseorang yang cuba untuk merundingkan segera masuk semula, "Dia berjanji dia tidak akan melakukannya sekali lagi". Hmm.

The arrival of the ‘on-call' teacher can become a pantomime of power and subversion. Oh yes it can. Teacher and offending child vie to retell their version of events. Both the ‘wronged' child and the righteously indignant teacher are infantilised by the arrival of authority. Who did what to whom and which one is rude/obnoxious/aggressive/slack etc. gives way to an encore of swearing, bag-swinging, audience-cheering chaos. Such issues are always best dealt with by the classroom teacher and when everyone has time to look at it calmly. It should not be the duty of the on-call adult or anyone else to talk through the incident, issue punishment or make judgement. The class teacher must be in control of the discussion and resolution. On-call must be for support: to remove the child, not to prosecute the crime. There is no need for discussion at the door or the monologue that begins, "Well Mr Dix, I am so glad you have come, perhaps Darrell could explain....." You undermine your own authority and risk intransigence from the child, "I ain't fucking going anywhere with yoooooooooou bruf". No words are

needed. No explanation necessary. No castigation required. The perfect on-call performance has few lines just that weary look of disappointment matched with a healthy disinterest in blame. The responsibility for redrawing the boundaries is left for the class teacher to lead.

Sometimes a growling experienced and respected teacher is useful to have at your side: to bring weight to the message, to emphasise the consistency of boundaries and certainty of unpleasant consequences. Feeding children to the growling beasts of punishment and expecting them to emerge as better human beings however is fantasy behaviour management.

Deferring to the arriving adult further undermines what you are trying to do. It sends a clear message to the child that, "I can't deal with your behaviour......but she can". Schools that operate using the "Take him away, convert him into a better-behaved human being and return him to me in a permanent state of humility" system of behaviour management create mighty leaders with many minions. Power is removed from individual teachers and many told, "We will deal with him now". A senior teacher at your side shows unity and resolve. Passing ‘problems' up the chain and imagining that others can remotely control behaviour is futile.

The answer lies in a firm and binding agreement on the triggers for emergency calls and on the role of the support. An agreement that is consistently applied by all, even in the face of the most irritating behaviour. When support is really needed it can then arrive speedily. Reduce emergency calls, manage them well and fixed term exclusions fall. Senior staff can come and say hello and spend more time with the majority of the children who deserve as much attention as the few.

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Ideas for Testing Callouts on Higher Education Sites

Wednesday, October 30th, 2013 at 9:00am -- Holly Wright

Callouts are a generic term for the graphic or text-based regions of a website that are intended to compel someone to take action. That action could be clicking a link, filling out a form, reading a story, subscribing to an RSS feed or signing up for an event, among limitless other options.

One of the features of Spectate that is available to all of our Cascade Server customers is the ability to easily create callouts and then embed those onto pages of your website. Even if you don’t use Cascade Server as your CMS, you can still embed Spectate callouts on just about any site that allows you to use javascript code. An important feature of Spectate callouts is A/B testing, in which you can embed a single callout on a page, and then when that callout is loaded for web visitors, the actual content that is displayed rotates between a number of different images or HTML.

Since so many of our clients are in higher education, here are some ideas for how the ever-versatile callout can be used (and have been used) on college and university sites:

Test the wording of an offer.

Let’s say you are trying to figure out whether your prospective students would prefer to “sign up for a monthly email newsletter” or “subscribe to e-updates about campus events.” Theoretically, the deliverable for these two signups could be the exact same monthly emails, but one wording may work significantly better for increasing subscribers. You can use callouts to drive people to the exact same signup form, and over time, determine which wording is more effective for generating signups.

Test a landing page.

Just because you can upload more than one different callout image to rotate on your site, doesn’t mean you have to. For example, let’s say you have an offer to visit campus on your site. You can upload the same callout image twice but each “version” can drive visitors to one of two different landing pages. One landing page may have an image of a male campus tour guide while the other landing page has an image of a female campus tour guide. Since you’re using the same callout to drive people to the two landing pages, you’ve isolated the image on the landing page as the variable that is influencing any difference in conversions once they are on the landing page. So, does the male or female guide convert better? You tell me!

Test an offer.

There’s only so much real estate on your website, right? Even if you have plenty of options to offer web visitors, you may only have room to offer one thing on your homepage. By using callouts, you can use the same space to display multiple offers to different visitors. For example, one-third of the visitors to your MBA website homepage may see an offer to meet a current student, another third may see an offer to sit in on a class, while the remaining third may see an offer to attend a panel discussion featuring current students. It’s possible that all three offers may perform well, but if one is performing poorly, you can take it out of rotation and replace it with something else. If all three are performing well, you could choose to keep rotating three offers.

Test stories and teasers.

One effective tool for recruiting is to share alumni or student success stories with prospective students to give them a glimpse into what their future could be like with a degree from your fine institution. You could test a few different teasers of these stories to see what works best on different pages. For

example, maybe a success story that highlights earning potential would be more effective than one about someone at a prestigious fortune 500 company on your financial aid page, while a story about an alumni’s successful launch of a nonprofit may perform better than one about job placement rates after graduation on a more community-oriented page. These examples are meant to be obvious, but your alumni success stories may be so varied and unique that it’s not so obvious which ones should be featured on different pages of your site. You could also test two different teasers for the same story and see which drives more engagement.

Test colors, fonts, styles, shapes, images.

The last test I’m going to discuss is the most basic A/B testing for callouts. For a particular message, you could keep the wording the same and just test one isolated variable at a time to see which color, font, shape, etc. results in the highest number of clicks through the callout. It is one of the simplest tests you can do on your website, and it is incredibly easy to set up in Spectate and Cascade Server.

If you’re new to Spectate or Cascade Server or you’d like to learn more about either product, let us know. Spectate is free for Cascade Server clients and we offer a free 14-day trial of Spectate for anyone else interested in trying it out. For more information about how to set up callouts, please take a look at our help articles on setting up Spectate callouts or watch our short video about creating and using Spectate Callouts.