Improving Behaviour Management in Your School

Creating calm spaces for pupils to learn and flourish

Tim Dansie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317226024
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Improving Behaviour Management in Your School provides a common sense approach to understanding the causes and triggers of students' challenging behaviour and equips teachers and school leaders with simple tools that can be easily implemented in any school. In his accessible and upbeat style, Tim Dansie uses case studies throughout the book which draw on strategies based on CBT and mindfulness. These strategies have proven to make a huge difference to school life and to how challenging students are managed. Teachers are encouraged to question how schools and classrooms are structured, in order to create environments where all students have the greatest possible opportunity to learn and grow as individuals. This resource includes accessible chapters about:

• What are the challenging behaviours?
• What are the causes of challenging behaviours in students?
• How to work with parents
• How to get staff on board

This is a must-read for all practising and training teachers who wish to understand the reasons for challenging behaviour and how to improve it.

1 Introduction

Hello, my name is Tim Dansie and thank you for taking the time to read Improving Behaviour Management in Your School: Creating calm spaces for pupils to learn and flourish. I must be completely honest and say that I was one of the challenging students so often presenting in the classroom today. As a result of my own personal experiences at school, I have become passionate about helping teachers and students in learning how to cope within the school and classroom environment.

I was the student who developed the many avoidance strategies needed to survive through school. If I had a maths test on a Thursday I would rub my head against the pillowcase and then complain to my parents of feeling unwell. They would put a hand to my forehead and feel that I was hot and suggest that I stay home from school. That evening, I would ring my friends up and get the answers. Alternatively, I would get the answers to assignments from my friends before school. This worked well until the introduction of exams. As a result I left school at the age of 16 wanting to be a professional sportsman. After earning $25 in four years I decided it wasn’t a great career move and reconsidered my future.

At the age of 21, I returned to study and it was through my study that I learnt that I had the specific learning difficulty dysgraphia. This was why I found aspects of learning so challenging and my behaviours at school reflected my difficulty. I wasn’t a disruptive student but a disengaged student who avoided work at all costs.

Now at the time of writing I have completed a Diploma of Teaching, a Bachelor of Education, a Graduate Diploma of Psychology, a Masters of Psychology and I am a member of the Australian Psychological Society. I maintain my registration as a teacher and psychologist and I have spent 12 years as a teacher in schools and 14 years in private practice as a psychologist, predominantly working in schools. Not bad for a high school drop-out!

In this book I hope to provide you with an understanding of why we are seeing more and more challenging behaviours presenting in schools, the causes of the challenging behaviours and most importantly some strategies that can be put into place to help teachers, schools, students and parents manage the behaviours. I will share with you some of my observations of schools, but also case studies of some of the students I have worked with in the last ten years.

I think as a starting point we must consider why schools have changed so much over the last 25 years and why we are seeing more and more challenging behaviours.

2 So many theories, so many experts, so much information, leading to so much confusion

How schools have changed over the past 25 years! So many theories, philosophies and behavioural management techniques have passed through schools, yet still schools are being challenged by children who have great behavioural and learning needs. I always question why this is the case, given that we now know so much more about the development of children and how learning happens.

What is it that has changed in society that has impacted upon schooling, teaching and the behaviour of students to such an extent?

• • Family breakdown
  More and more students are living in single-parent families or blended families and this is a common catalyst for challenging behaviour for students. Students come to school each day with uncertainty, grief and confusion about rules and routines, due to not having any or too many rules and routines in the houses in which they live.
• • Change in the approach to discipline
  Many of today’s parents have moved well away from an authoritarian style of parenting, due to rejecting this style that they experienced as children. What we now see are parents who do not enforce boundaries, rules or consequences, again leading to very confused children, as at school there are boundaries, rules and consequences. Unfortunately, parents are often very poor role models for students, leading to a student showing similar behaviours to those of their parents.
• • Parents’/society’s expectation of schools has changed
  Parents, and to some extent society, are dictating that schools need to raise students rather than purely teach them. Many parents I meet have the belief that it is not only the school’s responsibility to teach their child, but to also ‘fix the behaviour’.
• • Changes in school structures
  When I first started teaching, the classes were streamed into three sets: A, B and C. The A set had the most students in the class, while the B and C sets had smaller numbers of students, with the C set receiving the most extra learning support. Today here in Australia, schools do not have streaming, rather it is up to the teacher to differentiate the curriculum to meet the needs of the entire class, which given the range of abilities within a class is a great challenge. Furthermore, gone are the majority of the traditional Australian trade schools which allowed students to attend a school which prepared them for working life and really catered for the students who had specific learning disabilities. It seems the push is for every student to complete their final year of school and then to progress into further education.
  Another change in school structures is the reduction in the numbers of schools specifically designed for students whose behaviours caused such a disruption to the classroom environment that they could not attend the mainstream school or for students whose learning/functioning needs were so great that they could not be cared for in a mainstream school. This has resulted in more and more students being left in schools that do not have the resources to cater for them properly.
• • Curricula with far too much in them
  So many teachers tell me that teaching is no longer fun. The demands of meeting the curriculum are just too great, which leads to fun activities and lessons being shelved. As a part of this, teachers also state that there is now such an excessive amount of paperwork, reporting and over-governing in schools that it is too hard to do fun activities. I have seen the steady decline in wonderful school-based activities such as camps, excursions, sport, musicals or drama performances due to factors such as health and safety, police clearances, political correctness and the fear of litigation. The end result is that students miss out, and teachers are caused excessive stress.
• • Greater understanding of mental health
  We now have so much more information at our fingertips and schools, teachers and parents now know so much more about conditions which impact upon the behaviour of our children. The difficulty is that teachers now have to be psychologists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, psychiatrists, doctors (how many teachers give medicine to children?), as well as teachers. I see this as a major shift in the view of teachers, but also the expectations placed on them.
• • Specific learning disabilities
  Our knowledge has increased enormously about how students learn. Teachers are now required to cater for the individual learning needs of the entire class, while differentiating the curriculum to meet the needs of the different ranges of overall abilities of the class. Again, so much is required of our teachers.
• • Schools as businesses
  With ever-changing funding models, some schools are now under pressure to keep students at school or to attract students to their school. Funding is now a constant restraint in so many schools, which leads to lack of support for students who need it the most.
• • School involvement
  This is a passion of mine, but I am sad to see the lack of extracurricular activities offered in Australian schools. I grew up playing sport for my school in summer and winter and, although we had parents predominantly coaching our teams, they were totally supported by the school. Friday afternoon was always interschool sport coached by teachers and as students we looked forward to it and loved it. Bring back interschool sport into schools on Friday afternoons, as it develops school pride, a sense of belonging to a team, but also an incentive for students to behave well during the week.

Finally, it has become so confusing for teachers, school administrators and parents alike as to what rules/laws actually apply to students who have challenging behaviours. There are many legislative acts, laws and policies that all have an implication in the management of children with challenging behaviours in schools. An example of some of the Acts that apply here in Australia are as follows:

• • The Human Rights Act
• • United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
• • Education Act
• • Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act
• • Disability Standards of Education
• • Discrimination Act
• • Work, Health and Safety Act
• • Information Privacy Act
• • Health Records (Privacy and Access) Act
• • Children and Young People Act
• • Domestic Violence and Protection Orders Act
• • Working with Vulnerable People Act
• • Australian Curriculum
• • National Safe School Framework
• • Parent Engagement in Children’s Learning Program
• • Student Resilience and Well-being Policy
• • National Education reform Agreement.

Countries such as the UK, the USA and New Zealand also have similar legislation relating to education and it is the sheer volume of legislation that causes so much confusion for schools administrators, teachers and parents alike.

In my view, a significant cause of the confusion is the language that is often used in the documents. Too often I read words such as ‘reasonable’ and ‘justifiable’ and this leads to many questions. Unfortunately, what a parent who has a child with challenging behaviour perceives as reasonable can be markedly different to what a teacher perceives as reasonable, and this is again different to what a principal or parent of another student in the classroom perceives as being reasonable. Some of the legislation conflicts, leading to an unclear understanding of the process of how to manage a student with challenging behaviours.

Schools have changed dramatically and there is no doubt that there is so much more pressure on teachers and school administrators. But the behaviour of students has also changed. All of this has made managing behaviours in schools a great challenge and one that our teachers need to have more and more support to do. Bearing this in mind, I think it is a good time to reflect on what a school in a perfect world looks like. Before reading on, put a bookmark in and create a list for yourself of what you believe the perfect school looks like and how it manages challenging behaviours. After five minutes, open up the book, read on and compare your ideas to mine. I trust we are thinking the same way.

3 In a perfect world, what does a school look like?

My belief is that in a perfect world every child has an equal opportunity to learn, which leads to my classroom mantra – ‘as long as a child’s behaviour does not impact upon the learning environment or opportunities of the other students in the class, the classroom is a good place’. If behaviour is impacting upon the learning of others, then action needs to occur. Unfortunately, in many classrooms today this is the case, and more and more teachers are becoming frustrated because they spend 95 per cent of their time managing, say, one to three children (sometimes more), while the other class members simply go about their work.

I recently visited a Year 3 classroom of 27 students. Within the class there was a student who was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 So many theories, so many experts, so much information, leading to so much confusion
• 3 In a perfect world, what does a school look like?
• 4 What are challenging behaviours?
• 5 What are the causes of challenging behaviours in students?
• 6 Practical classroom strategies
• 7 Working with parents
• 8 Getting staff on board
• 9 Clear procedures and policies relating to managing challenging behaviours in schools
• 10 Where to from here?
• Appendices
• Index