Behaviour Management: An Essential Guide for Student and Newly Qualified Teachers

Eleanor Overland, Joe Barber, Mark Sackville-Ford, Eleanor Overland, Joe Barber, Mark Sackville-Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138392632
• eBook ISBN: 9780429687969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Behaviour Management: An Essential Guide for Student and Newly Qualified Teachers explores the current issues and theories in behaviour management. It encourages readers to think and reflect on their own experiences and offers practical advice for developing confidence in the classroom and quickly adapting to the changing needs of different students and settings.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of behaviour management, addressing issues such as building routines, health and safety, mental health and using technology to support behaviour management. It includes:

• Tasks designed to encourage analytical, reflective and original thinking.
• Resources and guidance to develop practice and collate evidence to add to portfolios or other files required by tutors, mentors and assessors.
• Case studies from personal experience that provide tips and tools for effectively managing behaviour.

This book is an essential resource for student teachers, newly or recently qualified teachers and anyone with an interest in developing an understanding of behaviour within schools.

1
Behaviour management for student teachers and NQTs: An introduction

Eleanor Overland

Chapter aims

To consider how theory can be linked to your practice in the development of behaviour management.

To determine how the tasks within the book can contribute to your portfolio or assessment evidence.

To consider different approaches to using the book and how it can support you throughout your student teacher and Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT) journey.

Keywords: Behaviour management; reflection; theory; classroom practice; portfolio of evidence; ethics and data protection

Introduction

Welcome to all student teachers, newly or recently qualified teachers and anyone else with an interest in developing an understanding of behaviour within schools. This book is quite different to others that you may have read about behaviour management. It is not simply a pragmatist’s guide with lists of hints and tips, nor is it solely a theoretical book. This text aims to combine a wider understanding of behaviour management, from both historical and theoretical perspectives, alongside providing practical advice and guidance to support you in both your understanding and classroom practice relating to behaviour management.

Our team of authors are all highly experienced educators and have spent many years supporting student teachers and NQTs as they develop their understanding of behaviour management and classroom practice. The team have also supported and marked many student assignments linked to behaviour management in the classroom. To achieve the highest grades, it is essential to be both analytical and reflective in your writing and this book encourages exactly that. In this introduction we will outline exactly how you can use this book effectively to develop your practice and collate appropriate evidence to contribute to your portfolio, files or other evidence required by your tutors, mentors or assessors. We will also highlight ways in which you can use the book to support your academic assignments, the most successful student teachers will be able to combine both.

Most importantly, this book is designed to make you think and reflect on your own experiences and practice. We are all shaped by our own experiences as pupils when we were at school, by what we perceive from the media and talking to others, by what we observe in schools and also by how we are influenced by what mentors and colleagues tell us. This book encourages you to challenge the norms, explore a range of practice and reflect on how your own practice may develop to best fit your own beliefs, values and the pupils you are working with.

Theory into practice

We often find our students can become quite nervous or switch off when they hear the word ‘theory’. As student teachers and NQTs, there is often a view that theory is complex and only relevant when tackling the academic aspects of teacher training. This is, of course, not the case and many of the practical guides and policies you will find in schools are underpinned by theory. For example, you may find yourself in a school with a ‘zero tolerance’ policy on behaviour. This originates from the field of psychology based on ‘deterrence theory’, which is widely researched in criminology. A simplified version of deterrence theory is that poor behaviour is prevented through fear of punishment or retribution. Knowing this can help you reflect on how this is working in the school and for you in your classroom. It may also help you find research or case studies in other fields that can be transferred to your own experience (Gregory & Cornell, 2009). Having an understanding of the origins of such policies may also provide a suitable starting point for developing your own views and theoretical approaches to behaviour management.

In addition to theories written by academics and researchers, it is also important to remember individuals are a huge part of the process within behaviour management. Your own experiences shape your understanding and development and it is possible to frame yourself within a theoretical framework. Some teacher educators make use of the work of Bourdieu to do this and it provides a useful starting point to help understand your own position within your role as a student teacher or NQT (Kirkby et al., 2017). Think back to your motivation for wanting to train to be a teacher. You may come from a family of teachers and it felt like a natural career choice for you. Perhaps you are a ‘career changer’ and already have financial security but would now like to work in a school environment and make a contribution to the lives of young people. You may even have been inspired by your own teachers at school and be the first person you know to join the teaching profession. Some journeys to this point will have been much more straightforward than others, some of you will have already had to show true determination and overcome challenges to get here. All of this will impact how you feel in the classroom, how you yourself relate to children in the classroom and how you approach behaviour management.

Your ‘primary habitus’, as outlined by Bourdieu, occurs within the family. What were the expectations within your home when you were a child? In what way do you think this influences your expectations of behaviour in children now? ‘Secondary habitus’ develops as you continue through social situations. Institutions and organisations such as schools, clubs and places of worship are ‘homologous habitus’. This is key in the development of your personal understanding of your relationship with behaviour management. Not just your own experience in education but the homologous habitus of the school you are in now. It is also worth considering that of your mentor and tutors. Sometimes conflicting views can make for challenging relationships and a level of understanding and empathy can be beneficial. Using a theoretical framework can depersonalise such complexities whilst still allowing for personal differences in experience and views.

Whilst theorising themselves as part of their reflection and development in behaviour management the most successful student teachers and NQTs have a sense of agency, some level of ownership of development in their classroom practice (Huber & Yeom, 2017). Rather than just being told what to do and getting on with it, this book encourages you to think about behaviour differently and so you may want to explore alternative approaches to behaviour management in the classroom. Having ‘permission’ to do this can sometimes be difficult, particularly where school policies are specific and consistently followed. Assignments and reflective tasks can provide a useful catalyst to allow you to deviate from usual practice. It can allow you to carry out small-scale research in your practice to explore different approaches. You will need your mentors and tutors to support you with this so the more informed you are prior to explaining your ideas, and demonstrating links to other theories and research, the more likely you are to gain their approval. Where school-based mentors are willing to contribute and even participate in the research with you, the impact can be great.

The overall messages we would like you to take from this section are: first, don’t be afraid of theory. Think of it as a treasure hunt, trying to identify theoretical underpinning for policies and approaches to practice. Second, remember you yourself are part of the process. Having an awareness of your own ‘theoretical framework’ will allow you to explore your thinking in a more informed and analytic way. Finally, use your teacher training and NQT year as an opportunity to explore different approaches and have agency over your development in the classroom. As you develop these aspects of your practice you may well discover you would like to go on to carry out further classroom research and perhaps even engage in study for a Master’s or beyond!

Developing a portfolio

As a trainee teacher or an NQT you will usually be expected to collect and collate evidence to demonstrate your development and achievements in practice. Often the organisation of these files is linked to the Teachers’ Standards but they can also be organised in other structures such as by class or year group you are teaching. Regardless of the structure of the portfolio, student teachers and NQTs are asked to demonstrate how they have developed and met the standards. Demonstrating this for behaviour management can be quite a challenge; sometimes a short interaction in the classroom with pupils can demonstrate huge leaps in your classroom practice but how to capture this and generate evidence is more problematic. The issue with ‘evidencing’ your progress in behaviour management is that it often does not generate hard evidence or data that can be easily filed and catalogued. You’ll also find that your progress with behaviour management does not follow a smooth upward trajectory. Chapters in this book challenge different aspects of your practice; as you make progress in one area or with one particular group of pupils, you may find it takes longer with others.

The key to your development with behaviour management is realising how developing relationships, personalising approaches and being reflective in your approach will evoke subtle changes in your practice that have an impact with your pupils. It is clearly most important to develop your practice in the classroom with the pupils but there will also be a requirement to provide some kind of record to demonstrate your progress. Written lesson evaluations, personal journals and reflective pieces can capture subtleties in developments within your classroom practice. Lesson observation records completed by tutors or mentors can also generate evidence. The problem with this is that we often see student teachers or NQTs generating pages of ‘evidence’ for the sake of it. Reflective writing should be a purposeful process to give you time and space to organise your thoughts and analysis aspects of your practice. This is appropriate when exploring key incidents and constructively reflecting on your practice but may be an unnecessary process at other times when it is purely for the sake of generating evidence.

Alternative ways to collect evidence, such as video and sound recordings of lessons, have also been suggested. It can be a highly constructive process to record your lessons, particularly to watch them back and reflect on your own practice. Consider carefully how these will be stored and whether it is appropriate to include these as part of your portfolio. Children will be identifiable in the recordings so having these online or in your own personal folders could be problematic and may go against school policies for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or safeguarding. Before you record in any classrooms check the policies for the school: are you permitted to use your own devices? How will you save information securely? When will you ensure the recordings are deleted appropriately? (DfE, 2018).

Collating documentation that ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Editor biographies
• Contributor biographies
• 1 Behaviour management for student teachers and NQTs: An introduction
• 2 The history of behaviour management: Key theorists and current context
• 3 Developing routines and minimising disruption
• 4 The motivated classroom
• 5 The importance of planning and subject knowledge in managing pupil behaviour
• 6 Working with texts: Behaviour challenges and possible solutions
• 7 Your voice and your classroom management
• 8 Technology to support behaviour management
• 9 Behaviour management in a practical setting and outside the classroom
• 10 Before the system: The importance of building relationships with your pupils
• 11 Being human: Compassionate education rather than behaviour management
• 12 Mental health and behaviour management
• 13 Looking at ‘behaviour’ through the lens of SEND
• 14 Reflections on behaviour
• Index