OVERVIEW OF THE BETTER BEHAVIOUR GUIDE
The Better Behaviour Guide is addressed to every teacher in every school, primary or secondary, mainstream or special. Whatever the type of school you may work in, all teachers are concerned to promote better behaviour and provide their pupils with the personal and interpersonal skills to become more effective learners and citizens. At one end of the behaviour spectrum you may be looking for techniques and skills to establish sufficient good order in your lessons so that you can get on with the prime business of teaching. At the other end your interests in ‘better behaviour’ may be to teach your pupils the social skills implicit in good working relationships, whether they be for more effective learning or for developing greater personal effectiveness.
The approach we take in this guide is that the management of difficult behaviour in our schools must be integrated into the general programme of discipline that runs throughout the school. That means it must start with the behaviour management skills of every teacher. For all sorts of reasons, the problems of behaviour management are probably far more demanding than in previous generations. The chances are, however, that few teachers will have received adequate preparation to feel confident in managing these demands. Schools therefore have to look for ways of developing these skills among staff in a culture where teachers can safely acknowledge the reality of these problems, and in an atmosphere where they feel supported to address these issues of professional development positively. We have to work out a variety of strategies for managing student behaviour. Ignoring the problem early on can often lead to an escalation of problems where we are only left with exclusion as our response to difficult students.
The articles and checklists contained in this guide are designed to support your school planning and staff professional development for promoting better behaviour. We will take account of the skills required from the whole class management of behaviour to the support for individuals with significant behavioural and emotional problems. In the course of this we will consider these key factors -
- how your school behaviour policy accommodates the different levels of behaviour challenge and the different resources of teachers to cope
- what the ‘bottom line’ standard for managing behaviour in every classroom should be, and the key skills required
- approaches to managing more challenging behaviour in the classroom and individual behaviour planning across the school
- how you support teachers in these tasks and develop their skills
Undoubtedly, and notwithstanding all our very best efforts, we will still face students for whom we can do little else to help them. There are going to be times when exclusion has to be the final option. Yet, despite the impression one might get from media coverage of discipline issues, exclusion is not the only response we can make in school to the problems posed by our difficult students. We have to look first at what goes on in every classroom to see if we can create more positive conditions for classroom management. We need a systematic approach to behaviour problems, one that picks up on unresolved problems as part of a staged response to behaviour difficulties throughout the school.
Our approaches to promoting better behaviour, then, require a stance in which your efforts are proactive rather than reactive, where interventions are systematically deployed, and where the support for better behaviour is integral to the quality of teaching. These are three key themes that run throughout this guide.
