In response to the Coronavirus outbreak, APS has just taken the decision to cancel all work/visits for now and the foreseeable future.  While this is a decision that obviously has significant financial ramifications for a small independent company, it is a decision we feel we have to take.  In this blog article I’m going to elaborate on our reasoning and decision-making so it’s visible to others, and in the hope of encouraging others to consider taking a similar approach.  Indeed, our decision-making in this respect has been inspired by the actions and thinking of other people and services, and if this article helps even one other person to think through their actions then that in itself will be a result.
 
There are essentially two reasons why we’re doing this:

1. Government guidelines as of Monday 16th March 2020.
2. More importantly, a commitment to a broader social responsibility not to spread this virus around or provide it with new hosts.

​Welcome to the March 2020 edition of Psychology for Positive Change, a blog about how psychology can make a positive difference to lives/society.  In this article I will explore the notion of our ‘inner gremlins’, how they can be a hindrance to us (looking particularly at how they can interfere with the writing process), and how we can manage them.

​Welcome to the May 2019 edition of Psychology for Positive Change, a blog about how psychology can make a positive difference to lives/society.  In this article I will explore the concept of Stress Mapping and how we can use it to support ourselves and/or others.

​Welcome to the November 2018 edition of Psychology for Positive Change, a blog about how psychology can make a positive difference to lives/society.  In this article I will explore the concept of core human needs and signpost to a language of needs that can help us to understand either ourselves or others.

What do you want to achieve?  Where do you want to be in five years’ time?  To what extent are you on-track to achieve your goals?  What might you need to keep doing or do differently?  In short, how are you doing, and what’s next?  Whatever your role, it can help to regularly set aside some time to take stock of your situation, revisit your vision and values, review progress and learning points, and plan next steps for the future.  With September 2018 marking five years since the beginning of APS as a service, it seems a timely opportunity for me to reflect on our own journey so far.  In doing so, I will cover three core strands:
 

1. (Briefly) The growth of APS as a company.
2. The application of coaching/coaching psychology in schools.
3. The development of coaching in the profession of Educational Psychology.

​Welcome to my first blog article of the new academic year – typically (in education, at least) a time of new beginnings, and an opportunity to think about what we want to achieve in the time ahead.  With that in mind, this post offers some thoughts on the nature of the creative process, what it takes to make our ideas a reality, and the importance of persistence and determination as we shape and refine our efforts.
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​For the final PfPC article of the year I’m going to completely swerve away from the theme of the rest of this academic year’s articles, and am instead going to offer some personal reflections on an aspect of my recent practice that didn’t go as well as I would have ideally liked.  In so doing I will draw upon the spirit and messages of Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed’s engaging and inspirational book on the importance of systematically learning from failures.

So far this academic year, this series of articles has outlined a psychology-informed coaching approach to lesson observations that can be applied to support education practitioners to reflect on and further develop their classroom practice (see the APS blog archives, September 2016 to January 2017).  In this article I’m going to expand on one particular component of this approach – how we can support and guide reflection on practitioners’ successes – while also highlighting how we can use the process to develop teachers’ skill at being reflective.

​My previous two articles have focused on:
 

1. Problems associated with traditional lesson observation procedures (September 2016).
2. How principles from evidence-based psychological approaches can be applied to transform the practice of lesson observations (November 2016).

 
This post represents the third part of this series of articles, outlining a seven-step psychology-informed framework (Adams, 2015) that can be applied in the context of lesson observations to support practitioner learning and development.

​My Term 1 blog post focused on some of the problems that can be associated with traditional lesson observation procedures (see the archives, September 2016).  This post outlines some ways in which the application of principles from evidence-based psychological approaches can transform the process and enhance the likelihood that it will result in change.