Positive Solutions Associates
Training Philosophy
Effective training to implement a cognitive skills program must change perspectives and behavior; any thing less is a waste of time, money and energy. This important staff training must expose ineffective practice while powerfully and gently lifting individuals to new levels of understanding and performance. It must enrich, inform, enlighten and invigorate its audience with theoretical and practical tools that can be immediately utilized with a high degree of success. It must offer hope without overwhelming and ultimately introduce ideas and practices that will lighten heavy burdens and improve personal performance and job fulfillment. In essence, it must prepare the trainers to experience the very principles of change they will be expected to inculcate into the lives of the target population as they teaches them to place the responsibility for change and personal development on the shoulders of the client/student. Finally, it must model, in every detail, the skills the trainers are being asked to develop.
The training programs offered by Positive Solutions Associates (PSA),meet and exceed these training expectations.They are based on principles and practices outlined in George D. Nelson’s, The Aristotle Effect: Breaking the Learning Barrier. It focuses on helping trainers understand the keys that will make them more successful in help their target population overcome their criminogenic risks, especially those who have not been successful in traditional learning environments. The training reintroduces the use of Aristotle’s principles of dramatic educational structure into the process of change. Dr. Stephen R. Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Successful People has said of this approach, “…a breakthrough paradigm for teachers, writers, patents…in fact, anyone wanting enduring influence. The shift of focus from teacher teaching to student learning is profound, yet really a blinding glimpse of the obvious.”
According to Nelson, “Whether we wish to admit it or not, the minute we step in front of a class or a group with the purpose of holding or direct their attention, we become performers in a unique dramatic presentation. How could it be otherwise? Creation of a sound learning or change directing environment requires one to be aware, intuitively or otherwise, that every decision or every interaction with a learner or group of learners causes us to enter a world where dramatic laws and principles have a controlling influence.” For this reason, the PSA training models exactly how dramatic principles play an important role in our attempts to help people replace negative thinking, belief and behavioral patterns with more healthy and positive ones. It presents a centrist approach to learning that focuses on individual values as the means for engaging all learners in the process of personal change. It provides practical and theoretical assistance for improving the performance of every trainer while increasing the engagement of every client/learner.
Positive Solutions Associates
Training Philosophy
The training begins by exploring the basic principles and stages of change to help trainers rediscover their own love of learning and its power to alter thinking and behavioral patterns. A teaching and learning style instrument is utilized to help each trainer accurately assess his/her own values, joys, needs, strengths and weakness as an instructor. These personal preferences and abilities are compared and contrasted with others in the training to help form an exciting and applicable understanding of differences in educational styles and approaches. From this foundational point, the training turns its focus outward to the individual learning needs of the target population, the specific demands of the required curriculum, and finally the entire system or learning community at large.
Trainers will come to a deeper realization that life and life's natural experiences provide the best environment for fostering and supporting change. They will develop the skills to utilize dramatic structures to mimic these natural learning principles in their daily delivery of this cognitive skills program. They will master important motivational keys and practices that will enliven the learning process and create deeper participation in the work of learning. They will become more comfortable mixing alternative learning strategies with traditional teaching and group process approaches. They will discover the power of dramatic exploration as a tool for self discovery and change.
The entire training process is designed to make them more comfortable using alternative delivery and assessment tools that simulate the natural learning desires of non-traditional learners. The principles of these learning tools are used in familiar dramatic activities like, mock trials, laboratory experiments, classroom presentations, manipulatives, role-play, simulation of future events, and other interactive techniques. These learning and counseling activities have their roots in the dramatic and mimetic arts and are the essential elements of all effective and creative learning models. The training helps them to harness an individual’s “need to know instincts” by creating situations where they are required to apply newly acquired understanding and cognitive life skills in simulated “real life” applications.
The training goes much deeper than most programs of this kind because the entire focus is to create and sustain intrinsic change in the lives of its target population. Trainers cannot expect to do the same things they have done before and hope it will work this time. They must experience and understand this change process themselves and then learn the pedagogical elements and principle that will enable them to become and more proficient agent of change.