Positive Teaching

The Behavioural Approach

Kevin Wheldall, Frank Merrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351794459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Problems of classroom management and control are a recurring concern for many teachers. Disruptive behaviour and inattention hinder effective learning and impose a constant drain upon the teachers' emotional resources. Continual nagging at children only increases teacher stress: what is needed is an effective alternative set of strategies.

Originally published in 1984, Positive Teaching seeks to meets this need by presenting the behavioural approach to teaching in a clear, direct and lucid way. By adopting the behavioural approach, problem behaviour can be minimised, or rapidly nipped in the bud when it does arise. While punishment may be used in an attempt to stop almost any kind of behaviour, only the appropriate use of positive methods applied contingently, immediately and consistently can teach new, more adaptive behaviour. This is a crucial issue in real teaching and is rarely encountered or even discussed in most teacher education programmes. It is the central focus of Positive Teaching.

This book is for all teachers, from the beginning student to experienced head teachers; for those teaching in a first school, and for those teaching sixth-formers; for those experiencing difficulties and for those whose authority is already well established. The behavioural approach offers practical support to those who are struggling and a rationale for the effective, positive strategies of the successful. We can all improve our teaching.

Part One

The Behavioural Approach to Teaching

Chapter 1

Introduction: Setting the Scenes

Teaching is an exhausting business; not physically but mentally. The exhaustion felt by teachers at the end of the day, and more especially at the end of the term, is the result of having to make snap decisions in a great variety of situations, which are constantly changing. In most of these situations teachers are, in addition, responsible for the well-being and academic progress of their charges. For the beginner, this is daunting as well as exhausting. By degrees teachers learn to cope by ‘learning on the job’ but, once out of their probationary year, they do this on their own by rule of thumb, seldom finding the time or the opportunity to stand back and consider what is happening to their behaviour or that of their classes.

Advances in educational psychology have helped to make life easier for teachers in some respects. Knowledge of the intellectual, social and emotional development of children, for example, provides teachers with an invaluable framework upon which to build a school curriculum. A knowledge of ages and stages helps teachers to decide when to teach what. Similarly, cognitive psychologists have passed on their discoveries about how information is received, processed and stored, thereby providing useful information about how material might ideally be presented to maximise learning. Psychology has also had a great influence on the methods of evaluating children's progress so that more objective measures are now possible. In all of these areas educational psychology has helped to make the difficult lot of the teacher a little easier.

But in spite of all this, teaching is still a complex business. Very little time is spent during most college courses in actually dealing with everyday, practical problems occurring in classrooms. There is little emphasis on teaching teachers the classroom management skills which it is necessary to learn in order to become really effective. Moreover, it is very rare that an all-embracing theoretical model of teaching is explicitly presented which enables the teacher to understand what is happening in classrooms. Ideally, such a model would have implications for what teachers should do; it should have an accompanying methodology for approaching and analysing problems and a technology for solving them. In this book we are presenting what we believe to be the best teaching model so far discovered which encompasses a sound theoretical basis, a methodology and a technology, and which, if seriously considered and practised, can yield more effective teaching and a more rewarding teaching experience. We call this model positive teaching or the behavioural approach to teaching.

The day-to-day problems classroom teachers face are probably all too vivid to you, but let us now follow a young teacher, Jan, and look in on some of her encounters during a typical day at school. Many teachers will doubtless feel great empathy with Jan and her attempts to come to terms with the diverse, and apparently unrelated, conceptual difficulties she experiences. The behavioural approach to teaching will provide the model to show how Jan's difficulties can be understood within a common framework. We will return to this in Chapter 2.

SCENE 1

Jan sipped moodily at her cup of coffee, staring vacantly out of the staffroom window. Her gloomy thoughts as to whether she would ever gain a scale two post were violently interrupted when a 9-year-old Lancaster bomber swept over the horizon and across the playground. Machine guns blazed as Gary from the third year mercilessly gunned down his classmates, arms outstretched winging his way back across the school yard in solitary play. As she watched, the plane faltered and lurched badly, as Gary's feet skidded on the loose gravel, and came to an undignified end in a crumpled heap. From where she stood, Jan could see clearly that apart from falling on his well-padded bottom, the only injury he had sustained was a mild case of wounded pride and she was amazed to see the boy begin to howl. Fists furiously rubbing his eyes, he rushed over to Eileen who was on playground duty nearby. Jan continued to watch as Eileen knelt to comfort the sobbing child, wiping his eyes with a tissue until she managed to raise a smile from him. With a quick wave of thanks, Gary then resumed his previous posture and made a perfect take-off into the slate grey sky.

‘He's a funny lad, isn't he, that Gary Summers? He seems to cry at the slightest thing. Proper mardy, as we used to say in Derby. It's not what you'd expect from a great, strapping lad like Gary.’

Jan had not noticed that her friend Hilary was standing behind her. ‘Yes’, she replied thoughtfully, ‘I've noticed that too.’

‘I'll tell you one thing, though’, continued Hilary. ‘I was standing just where you are the other week and watched him playing with some of the older boys in your top class. They were playing at pirates and one of them accidentally caught Gary with the back of his hand. He started to cry, of course, but the older lads just laughed in disbelief and ran off, and left him to it.’

As the two friends talked, Gary landed his Lancaster in the midst of the group of older boys Hilary had just mentioned and joined in their game of commandos. The sound of battle cries filtered through the staffroom window as a play punch from one of the top-class commandos connected and Gary was sent reeling against the wall.

‘Gosh, sorry Gary, I didn't mean it’, said the commando.

‘S'all right’, said Gary looking round and picking himself up. ‘Didn't ‘urt.’

‘Coo – bet it did’, responded the commando in genuine admiration. ‘Come on, I'll be the German this time.’

Inside the staffroom the two teachers watched in amazement.

‘Well I'll be damned!’ said Hilary. ‘Aren't kids funny.’

Jan nodded in silent agreement. What was it that made kids like Gary behave in such an unpredictable way?

SCENE 2

Sarah was a 10-year-old in Jan's class. She was a likeable girl but painfully slow, especially in maths lessons. Sarah would just be starting the second problem by the time most of the others had finished their first work-card and had gone on to another.

‘Come on, Sarah’, Jan would frequently say, breezily, to hide her concern. ‘A snail could work quicker than that.’ And the class would titter whilst Sarah smiled sleepily.

Jan had spoken to Sarah's parents who had assured her that she always went to bed by 9.00 and usually slept soundly until 7.30 the next day. ‘Perhaps she's got a block about maths’, Hilary had volunteered. ‘I'm like that too. I go to pieces when I see numbers. Thank goodness I teach reception!’

‘What makes you think that?’ Jan had asked.

‘Well, she can't do her sums, can she?’ Hilary had replied airily. ‘It stands to reason that she must have a block about it. You know, number blindness; like word blindness, dyslexia. I bet Colin, your psychologist friend, has got a posh word for it.’

‘But she can do the work’, Jan had persisted, ignoring the jibe. ‘The few sums she does do she invariably gets right. It's just that she hardly does any!’

‘Well, maybe she's just a bit slow then, a bit backward perhaps’, Hilary had said, unwilling to give up. ‘There must be some reason.’

‘Maybe’, Jan had replied. ‘But that doesn't tell me what to do to help her.’

Later on that morning after break, Jan popped in to see Eileen in her adjoining third-year class in order to ask her advice about Sarah. Jan, who had taught the same class when they were in their second year the year before, looked out warily for her ‘bad lads’, a trio of cheerful trouble-makers who had continually disrupted her lessons. She was amazed to hear Eileen saying to one of them, ‘That's tremendous Tommy, you're really working well today’, and there was Tommy, and the other two, working away like beavers.

‘Well, my “bad lads” have certainly grown up a bit since last year’, whispered Jan, when she caught Eileen's attention.

‘Oh, they're all smashing kids’, laughed Eileen. ‘We really have a good time and yet they're so willing to work hard when I ask them to. I guess different classes react differently to different teachers. Oh, excuse me a moment.’ And with that she turned back to her class. ‘Well done, class 3, I could have heard a pin drop while I was talking to Miss Hastings. That's what I like to see. I think we'll do some drama this afternoon.’ The class murmured delightedly and then quickly went back to their work. Eileen turned back to Jan and looked at her expectantly.

‘Oh, I was just going to ask your advice about Sarah’, said Jan lamely, ‘but it will keep till lunch-time. I must get back to my class.’

As she was returning to her pupils, she felt helpless. It seemed to her that some of her colleagues just had it made – they were born teachers. Entering her own classroom again, she put these thoughts aside and heard herself saying, ‘Sit down Anthony! How many times do I have to tell you. . .’

SCENE 3

That afternoon Jan had an appointment to visit the nearby comprehensive school to which most of her class would be moving after the summer holidays. It was funny to think of her kids going on to secondary school – they seemed so young still. She had been invited to sit in on a first-year maths class for the first part of the afternoon, and made her way to room M45, pausing to peer through the half-glazed door before going in to introduce herself to the teacher in charge. The general hubbub finally died as the maths teacher shouted to make himself heard.

‘OK. Just shut up and get your homework books out. Right, pass them forward. Adams, you're a twit! Sit down and stop messing about. Always the clown, aren't you, eh?’

‘Yes sir.’

Muted mirth bubbled around the room.

‘. . . twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Hang on, there should be thirty-one. OK. Who's not handed in their homework? Come on, own up. I can count, you know, even if you illiterate, innumerate morons can't. Shut up! That's not funny! Now, who's not handed it in. Come on, I can easily find out.’

Sniggering stares, ruler poking and downcast eyes identified Adams as the culprit.

‘So it's our friend Adams again. I should have guessed, shouldn't I?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘And might we be privileged to hear why not, Adams? Too busy working on extrapolations from Einstein's theory of relativity, were we?’

Sycophantic tittering rose from the class.

‘Shut up! I'm talking to our mathematical genius friend Adams, who's too brilliant to bother with homework. Is that right, Adams?’

‘No sir.’

‘Well, come on laddie, why didn't you do the work I set you then? Come on, I'm waiting!’

‘Lost me pen sir.’

Smiles spread across the room like an infectious disease.

‘Lost your pen? Stop smirking you lot! Lost your pen? You are a twit Adams! What are you?’

‘A twit sir . . . and . . . and a moron sir.’

The giggles began at the back and swept, like a wave, over the rows of desks.

‘You are a FOOL, Adams! You could have borrowed a pen. You just didn't do it because you're a lazy, idle, good-for-nothing little . . . words fail me. SHUT UP YOU LOT! You continually have to kick against the pricks, don't you Adams? That's not FUNNY! You've got minds like sewers.’

The class are helpless by now – this is even better than Basil Fawlty.

‘You were too busy, Adams. Is that it? Too busy watching Starsky and Hutch, perhaps?’

‘It's not on on Tuesday sir.’

Someone on the back row cheered whilst others pointed to the clock which indicated that at least ten minutes of the lesson had already been wasted.

‘Shut up! Or too busy reading comics, eh? Tell me, Adams, does Desperate Dan still eat cow pies? I'm sure you must be an expert on this monumental figure of English literature.’

‘Yes sir, I mean no sir ... I mean, yes he does sir.’

‘Shut up you lot! I'm sick and tired of your tittering. That's NOT funny! And you Adams are in detention again. That's the third night this week and it's only Wednesday. You know something Adams? Sometimes I don't think you know the meaning of the word punishment.’

Jan watched and listened horrified and then walked away. She had heard enough. She remembered how she had seen Eileen coping with her ‘bad lads’ earlier and thought to herself, ‘There must be better ways of handling kids like these’.

SCENE 4

Returning home on the suburban line train that evening, Jan tried to piece together her conflicting impressions of a confusing day, whilst trying to read the Times Educational Supplement at the same time. She was hindered in both of these activities by the voluble presence of a family occupying a set of seats nearby.

The young parents sat sullenly amidst their brood of three little girls aged from about 18 months to 4 years. He stared fixedly at the sports pages of his newspaper whilst she puffed determinedly at a cigarette, showering ash a...