Helping to make life 'calmer, easier and happier' for parents, teachers and children everywhere

In-Service training for Schools: Turning theory into practice

Training for teachers, learning support assistants, learning mentors and SENCOs in nurseries, primary and secondary schools and special units

The Calmer, Easier, Happier Teaching and Learning skills are practical and pro-active. Using these strategies makes classroom management easier and guides all pupils to achieve their best.

By putting the new skills into practice, you will enable your pupils to become more:

• cooperative and able to stay on task
• motivated to focus on doing their best
• confident and self-reliant
• polite, considerate and self-aware
• willing to follow rules, routines and instructions
• creative at problem-solving
• resilient and adaptable
• successful academically

Our in-service training addresses the needs of pupils with typical and atypical learning styles or behaviour problems (whether they have a diagnosed difficulty or not).

Sometimes teachers are puzzled and frustrated by the behaviour or learning style of a particular pupil. In these cases, Noel will observe the pupil at school and then meet with the teachers to share her findings and to make recommendations. She supports the teachers and the Senior Leadership Team to manage the problem differently. Soon the pupil is focusing better and cooperating more maturely. As a result, there are significant improvements in learning, as well as in motivation, confidence and resilience.

Our training days are interactive and demonstrate realistic solutions.

Half-days, full days, weekends, evenings or twilight sessions.

Noël's books for teachers

Noël has written two books for teachers, 'In Step With Your Class' and 'Learning to Listen, Listening to Learn'.

In these books Noël shares with mainstream teachers many tried and tested techniques that will rapidly improve the learning, behaviour, motivation, confidence and social skills of pupils in the inclusive classroom.

Noel developed the Calmer, Easier, Happier Teaching and Learning programmes from her fifty years of experience as a teacher, special needs adviser, study skills specialist, and head teacher, as well as through her research and careful observation of exactly what teachers do and how they do it, and what the results are, in the short term and the long term.

Described by Cassandra Jardine (Daily Telegraph) as one of Britain's two top teachers, Noël is dedicated to helping children learn to do their best and be their best.

As well as consulting and leading workshops across the UK and in the USA, Noël Janis-Norton is still very much a hands-on practitioner. She teaches, works with families and trains professionals.

We also give talks for parents in schools, showing parents how they can use the Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting strategies to improve cooperation, motivation, confidence, respect and self-reliance.

Top Tips for Teachers:
Improving Focus and On-task Behaviour

CLICK HERE to read some of the top tips that Noël shares with teachers at her in-service training days.

These techniques really do work to enhance the classroom experience for staff and pupils alike!

Teachers' Testimonials

We had Noel come in and do three insets (one a term for whole year) for us because we were dealing with a lot of low-level misbehaviour, and the teachers had got into the bad habit of reminding and reprimanding. That clearly wasn´t working because the issue didn´t improve, but the teachers didn´t know what else to do. She taught us a handful of strategies, and all the teachers saw a huge improvement. (Head teacher)

One year we had quite a lot of special needs pupils in Year 3, and the usual methods and tricks for classroom control just weren’t working. From the Calmer, Easier, Happier Teaching and Learning in-service trainings we learned about Descriptive Praise (instead of superlative praise), think-throughs and focusing on rewards instead of threats. Also, all the teachers already knew about differentiating, but truthfully, they often didn’t have enough preparation time. Noel showed us easier, painless ways to differentiate. (SEN Coordinator)

A few years ago we had a class of very rowdy boys, so we turned to Noel because she had helped us in the past. She reviewed the Calmer, Easier, Happier Teaching and Learning strategies with us, which was very useful for the new teachers who hadn´t been there a few years before when Noel had trained us. Some of the new teachers were skeptical, but they were willing to give it a try, and within weeks the class was significantly improved. And by the end of the term, it really was like a different class altogether. (Deputy Head)

We were all feeling rather desperate because in every class there seemed to be one or two or three children whose behaviour was taking up so much of the teacher´s time and attention that it was seriously interfering with the other pupils´ learning. Noel gave us some quite revolutionary ways of dealing with those children. There was some resistance from the staff at first, and even from some of the parents, but it turned out the children loved it. And their behaviour transformed within a term. We have now embedded these strategies and we teach them to all the new teachers. (Head of Year)

Noel came to our school and did a series of in-service trainings for us, especially targeted to our NQTs. They were all amazed that they hadn´t learned the Calmer, Easier, Happier Teaching and Learning methods at college. They were very open and they followed Noel´s guidelines to the letter, and they loved the results. And from my point of view they were the happiest, least-stressed NQTs we´d ever had. (Head)

After Noel taught the staff the new strategies, our classrooms became much calmer, easier and happier. But we still had problems in the dining-room and in the playground. So Noel did a couple of insets specifically for the mid-day staff. A lot of them had been at the school for decades and couldn´t really believe that anything would make much of a difference. They were quite resistant. But the ones who did use the strategies were very pleased with the results. Lunchtimes and break-times were much easier to manage because the children were much more polite and cooperative. (School Governor)

It´s our policy not to include names in testimonials because we have found that school staff are often reluctant to reveal what sorts of problems they´ve had.

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