On behaviour management…

I hope you guys are‘finding your feet’ as teachers in the classroom by now. Are you still fussing about behaviour and expectations?

The tendency is for trainees to focus too much on behaviour management and end up stressing. Let’s deliberately shift our attention from this but still address it through thoughtful planning.

From my experience and the advice that I can give now is if these are still not yet established, there are 2 areas to look at: The school's behaviour policy (and how you are applying it) and your pedagogy, in particular planning and the match between class characteristics and pedagogic approach.

Questions to ponder:

Is the class chatty? They don’t listen/start to talk as you try to explain? If so, why not try very structured and constrained approaches to planning e.g Short explanation/short video, then task, instead of a verbal explanation they retrieve information from a source then the write down or share with the class? DARTs activities, where they annotate text or highlight? Instead of a Q&A session, they answer questions into their books (progress check)?

You will see that all these activities involve them being ‘minds-on’ , actively involved in the learning than you feeding them with information. You transfer the responsibility for learning to them, and in the process simplify your job. As they are doing these activities, you also get time to circulate around, check progress and misconceptions, and address behaviour issues through a ‘quiet word’. You could also do some'live marking' as you circulate.