Classroom Behaviour: A Practical Guide To Effective Teaching, Behaviour Management And Colleague Support

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In this Third Edition of his bestselling book, Bill Rogers looks at the issues facing teachers working in today's classrooms. Describing real situations and dilemmas, he offers advice on dealing with the challenges of the job, and how building up a rapport with both students and colleagues can support good practice. When a teacher establishes these arrangements and understandings, within about three to four weeks most teachers have got a reasonably expectant group of students and certainly by halfway through Term 1 there is that sense of emerging cohesion that’s been built and established by the teacher’s conscious planning in those critical first few weeks.

You ask a question to the class, hoping that they'll all have thinking time to mull over the concept, then one kid blurts out the answer. What do you do? Don’t be an Indecisive teacher: hoping for compliance but not insisting; being timid in the face of a challenge; pleading not directing.I think it’s important that the teacher has a seating plan and they decide that plan on their understanding of their students within their team, and they can modify that seating plan as time goes on. Have friendship group groupings only on particular occasions, because kids have got plenty of time to play with their best friends outside of classroom time and we need to make that clear to them, that this is not merely a place where we sit with our friends during classroom teaching and learning time. You have directed a student to work silently. Soon after, they begin to chat. You then force this student by giving them a choice – you can choose to work silently, or I will have to move you. Positive correction refers to the on-the-spot techniques you use to manage students while teaching. It assumes you have already established things such as rules, routines and relationships with your students. However, you use it before having to use formal consequences (or in some school’s – being sent to the Responsible Thinking Classroom). In short, it is a set of strategies that help you nip small problems in the bud and keep everyone’s focus on the lesson at hand.

It is crucial for colleagues to reflect on and discuss how to calmly and firmly cue very challenging students (see Rogers, 2011 Op. Cit). It is also crucial that time-out be used calmly as well as decisively when needed. Time-out should not be a de-facto reward or used as intentional punishment. The theories and models for behaviour management that have been popular throughout the years and are effective in many different scenarios are: Some teachers struggle with this one, but it is one of the most potent behaviour management techniques you could use. If the student refuses to co-operate with the fair direction, reminder, or directed choice and his behaviour is clearly affecting the learning and safety of others, we will need to be more intrusive and apply clear, firm and calm time-out measures.

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Pause after saying student's’ name, and then give them their instruction once they are looking at you. There are at least three essential aspects of that establishment phase we have to get as right as we can. The first one is those core routines. They cover everything from the way we enter the class; coming from a restless, busy playground environment where there’s a lot of noise and movement into a quieter, calmer setting. Even that movement, that transition between if you like ‘social’ time and ‘class’ time is crucial. Teachers who establish positive routines in these areas will find a kind of a smooth running developing in those critical first weeks. And that includes issues like how we establish whole class focus and attention, seating arrangements, noise level in the room – the volume of noise with 25 students plus their teacher in a small space – right through to keeping the place reasonably tidy and organised and monitor systems, right through to lesson closure and the way we leave the room. The particular reference cited in this article (Rogers, 2011) is the major third edition of his book, Classroom Behaviour: A Practical Guide to Effective Teaching, Behaviour Management and Colleague Support (Sage Publications, London). This book has been translated into several European languages. This exciting new edition of the best-selling and beloved teacher's companion looks at the everyday behaviour issues facing teachers working in today's classrooms. Describing real situations and dilemmas, Bill Rogers provides theoretically sound strategies and best practices to support you in meeting the challenges of the job, as well as building up a rapport with both students and colleagues to enable positive and productive learning environments.

We always distinguish between our characteristic use of language in discipline and bad day syndrome. We all have bad days, as do our students. We’re obviously fallible. What our students remember is our characteristic language as a key feature of our relationship with them.Teacher: “Maybe not – but we’re all clear on the rules about that aren’t we..and I’d like you to help me out next time, Thanks” I mean, right from day one the more distracting and disruptive students who tend to be attentionally insecure do need a fair bit of guidance from their teachers about their behaviour, both in the public sphere of the classroom itself and also following up with students one-to-one who’ve been particularly difficult in those first few lessons. And again, there’s plenty of very clear research that effective and positive teachers follow up with students one-to-one away from their audience, where they’re able to have those behaviour conversations respectfully about the way in which that student has affected the rights of others in the room. And it might even be on the first few days that the teacher will be following up with one or two students who are the more attentionally insecure students. That balance between the public behaviour leadership and the private behaviour conversations are crucial in those first few weeks. Even that is part of building relationships with those more challenging students. BR: It is important to make it explicit, even with secondary students to explicitly explore with them in that critical first meeting what the right to feel safe involves. In a sense, the right to feel safe and the right to learn and the right to fundamental respect and fair treatment, those rights are not negotiable. You don’t begin the year by saying to older children or even upper primary children ‘what rights do you think you have?’. You begin by coming from those rights and discussing within those rights what a safe environment looks, sounds and feels like; what a respectful environment looks, sounds and feels like; and what it feels and sounds like to have a learning environment where we support one another – and that includes everything from noise level to reasonable sharing during class discussion and even allowing healthy disagreement. But also pointing out that in class discussions that disagreement has to be conducted respectfully so that if you disagree with one another about something we’re sharing you give reasons for that, you don’t simply mouth off at another student because you disagree with them. They whinged again, “I told you other teachers…”“You did,” I partially agreed. “What’s the school rule about football?” I wanted to keep the focus on the primary behaviour / issue, i.e. the fair, school-wide rule. This is probably the Bill-based-belief that many teachers find it hardest to embody. From our own school days we are used to getting pulled up for these such transgressions ourselves, so it seems only natural to try to clamp down on ‘disrespectful' behaviour in our own classrooms. It has helped me to consider the fact that, just as it's hard for us to implement these new behaviour leadership techniques (as we are trying to overwrite our natural impulses much of the time), so is it difficult for our teenage students to overcome their conditioned response of an eye roll or huff and puff. These behaviour leadership techniques could be thought of as similar to a martial art, something that we need to practice the fundamentals of over and over again so as to ensure that the above techniques become reactions that are embodied and ingrained to the point of automaticity (a process that Josh Waitzkin writes inspiringly about).