Teach Secondary - Issue 14.6

5 tips for brilliant BEHAVIOUR Robin Launder unveils his ‘Super Tips’ for ensuring your lessons don’t get derailed by challenging behaviour... I ’ve just written a book, Brilliant Behaviour in 60 Seconds or Less . It’s a tips-based work that pares behaviour management down into nuggets of practical wisdom. Essentially, they’re the approaches that those teachers who are best at behaviour management will use, and just as importantly, the ones they don’t . There are over 100 tips in total, the first five of which I’m going to share with you here – the Super Tips. Tip 1. Be a behaviour practitioner The teachers who are best at behaviour management fully embrace their role as behaviour management practitioners. For them, it’s as integral to teaching as being well-versed in pedagogy and possessing in-depth subject knowledge. Consequently, they give it equal attention. They never simply hope that their students will behave for them, because their understanding of human behaviour is much more grounded than that. Rather, they proactively and deliberately set up the conditions for a calm, safe and respectful classroom. They convey clear expectations, set firm boundaries and embed routines. In effect, they teach their students how to behave – and once taught, ensure they maintain that same level of behaviour. Further, when misbehaviour starts – because even for these teachers, it still will – they employ quick, efficient and fuss-free strategies to get their students back on track. (I’ll be sharing these strategies from the book with Teach Secondary readers over the coming months). They also learn from past mistakes. They ask themselves what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what do they need to do differently so it doesn’t go wrong again. Hence, they become their own best critical friend, developing and refining their behaviour management skills over time. Tip 2.Maintain high expectations The teachers who are best at behaviour management will also have consistently high academic, behavioural and social expectations (the latter being how the students interact with each other and the teacher). They know that an expectation is one half of a self-fulling prophecy, the other half being its consistency. In other words, they know that behaviour moves in the direction of an expectation when that expectation is unrelenting – but how do they know if their expectations are genuinely high? After all, every teacher would say they have ‘high expectations’, yet between teachers, those expectations can vary wildly. Here’s what they do. In any given situation, they’ll imagine what the best possible student behaviour looks like, and make that their expectation. Whether it’s students entering the classroom, following instructions, paying attention, answering questions, working in pairs, working in fours, doing homework, asking for help or any other required behaviour, they’ll visualise the best and aim squarely for that. And they’ll do that consistently – lesson in, lesson out, day in, day out. Tip 3. Followthe 100% Rule The teachers who are best at behaviour management aim for maximum engagement from their students. This is the 100% rule. In other words, they’ll make it their constant aspirational target that 100% of their students will working 100% of the time, with 100% engagement. They understand that the closer they get to meeting this rule, the better behaved their students will be. Firstly, because it’s not possible to work hard and misbehave at the same time. Brains simply can’t multitask in such a way. Secondly, because whenmost students are engaged in work, the social opportunities for misbehaviour diminish. Simply put, there are fewer students to misbehave with. A third reason is that the 100% rule encourages conformity through social proof. When students see their peers working hard, they’ll tend to work hard too – or, to put it another way, the behaviour of the group cues the behaviours of the individuals within that group. Most importantly of all, the 100% rule can embed, as a social norm, an expected and accepted standard of behaviour that all students default to . This normalising effect won’t happen overnight, but it can happen over time, and oftenmore quickly than you think. When it does happen, appropriate behaviour becomes self-reinforcing. The students work hard with that teacher, because with that teacher, they always work hard . Tip 4.Adopt ‘Withitness’ The teachers who are best at behaviour management are ‘with-it’ teachers. ‘Withitness’, a term coined by Jacob Kounin in the late 1960s, refers to teacher awareness in three specific areas. The withit teacher: • Knows (or has a good idea) what their students are doing at any given time • Knows (or has a good idea) what their students will do in any given context • Conveys this dual awareness to their students “Behaviour moves in the directionofan expectation when that expectation is unrelenting” 24 teachwire.net/secondary