Teacher's Guide to Anger Management

Paul Blum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138131880
• eBook ISBN: 9781134573752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As schools are making efforts to include children with emotional and behavioural problems, teachers are having to deal with angry and violent pupils almost every day. Paul Blum's latest book offers a recognisable, blunt and truthful account of widespread and often quite horrendous problems affecting teachers today, and offers practical strategies and solutions. He provides basic day-to-day guidance as well as help for the longer term PSHE planning for schools, based on his own adaptation of the highly successful 'Everyman' project. Issues discussed include a practical survey for teachers on the types of incidents they have to deal with, where anger comes from, the problems that anger causes, and strategies which can be used to help individual pupils. A teacher's inability to deal with difficult pupils can affect their professional and personal life, as well as their ability to successfully teach all their pupils. This essential book offers guidance when they need it most, offering a life-line to teachers in difficult circumstances.

Part 1
On how anger is causing problems to pupils and teachers in our schools

Chapter 1
A survey of anger situations that teachers face in schools

How many of the following situations happen in the lessons you teach? Around the corridors in the school at lunchtime? Between lessons? After the day is over at the bus stop or train station?
If the answer to the vast majority is ‘never’, then this book will be of no more than academic interest to you. If the answer is ‘frequently’ or ‘occasionally’, then you might find it useful to read on. If the answer is ‘no’ for most of the pupils but ‘yes’ for a significant hard-core minority, then this book could be useful to you.

IN THE CLASSROOM

1. A pupil deliberately bumps into another in the classroom. There is a bit of pushing, shoving and name calling.
2. A pupil flings an object such as a paper plane or screwed-up paper ball across your classroom. Another student flings something back. A round of flinging paper begins and it is difficult to get your lesson back on track.
3. A pupil cusses another across the room. It seems to start as a joke but it starts to get out of hand. Lesson momentum is seriously interrupted.
4. A pupil takes another pupil’s bag or pen and refuses to give it back.
5. A number of pupils mock and insult each other in a round of energetic banter during the lesson. As a result a lot of working time is lost.
6. Two pupils are having a stand-up argument in your class. They incite each other to a fight. The class shouts and jeers encouragement.
7. A pupil gets in a strop at being told off. They verbally abuse you.
8. A pupil gets in a temper when they are told to concentrate on the lesson. They kick their chair or a table.
9. A pupil shows you disrespect with an obscene mouth gesture, nicknamed ‘kissing the teeth’. The rest of the class laugh.
10. A pupil is asked to leave the room and goes out kicking over a desk or a chair, and maybe slamming a door.
11. You have a fully fledged fight in the classroom.
12. A pupil keeps on interrupting you and becomes verbally abusive when you ask them to stop doing it.
13. You may be in a situation in which a pupil needs to be stopped from getting up to hit another pupil in your classroom.
14. A pupil pushes past you. They refuse to stay for their detention.

OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM

1. Pupils who are not in your lesson keep on trying to get into your classroom to speak to a friend. They are verbally confrontational and try to push past you.
2. Pupils get into a large group and chase another group of pupils down the corridor, shouting abuse at them and then attempting to attack them.
3. A huge group of pupils, almost the entire school population, run across the playground to get a ringside view of a fight.
4. An entourage of pupils encourage two pupils to fight.
5. There is a violent incident at the local bus stop between your school and the one down the road. The police are called. You are trying to go home at the time.
6. Strangers to the school try to enter to settle a feud with a pupil in your building. Their behaviour is aggressive and they are intent on physical violence.
7. Pupils are involved in physical horseplay as they move between lessons. There is a lot of pushing, shoving and jeering.
8. Pupils are shouting at each other as they move slowly between their lessons.
9. An angry parent comes up to the school. You see them shouting and making threats.
10. You ask a pupil to leave the room. They swear at you and refuse to budge.

You may have seen some or all of these things happening in your school.

TEENAGERS’ BEHAVIOUR

The teenagers involved in aggressive displays are often playacting. They are testing out physical and mental boundaries through the rough and tumble of their interactions with each other and the teachers. Many of the events are playful and harmless but a significant minority that start like this quickly degenerate into disruptive aggressive situations. The 11- to 18-year-old youngsters involved are at an age when egos are much more insecure and fragile than in fully fledged adults.
What starts out as a bit of fun can quickly upset or offend. The banter of physical and verbal abuse that the pupils engage in is a dangerous and volatile activity, and the culture of aggressive display (which we look at in more detail later in the book) is also an ingrained part of youngsters’ lives. This makes the boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable more easily blurred.
A form of street culture is a norm reference for so many social interactions with its brash aggressive posturings. One look at playground behaviour for boys supports this. Most boys conform to a stereotype in which they run about playing football.
The only emotions that are deemed expressible are demonstrated in pushing, tugging, slapping on the back and mock fighting. This book will show that the limitations in the range of emotions that boys are allowed to show make aggressive angry behaviour all the more likely. The effects of this on the whole school community will be discussed later.

Many incidents on the initial lists you were asked to consider could occur with less frequency in secondary schools if tired and frustrated teachers did not encourage escalation, by responding to such unruly and aggressive behaviour in kind. In some circumstances they will shout first, shout back, overreact, provoke and escalate situations further. Sometimes this happens because the teachers themselves are part of a macho aggressive culture in which some of their professional colleagues bully the students and gain quick obedience from them. This can put pressure on all teachers to perform in a certain way, to command, shout down and dominate, or else be seen as weak and ineffective.

A school is meant to be a place where the main activities are teaching and learning. For those two activities to take place successfully, certain things are critical. The school must have a stable emotional environment. A teacher cannot teach classes of between twenty and thirty individuals effectively unless there is a calm, purposeful equilibrium. All teachers need to know how to control themselves and the anger of their pupils if a lesson is to stay on course.

HOW COULD THIS BOOK HELP YOU?

This book sets out to help teachers understand more about the causes of the anger that leads to verbal abuse and violence every day in their workplace. It focuses on the laddish culture that surrounds teachers in school and society as a whole and the way it impinges on relationships and expectations in the classroom.

This book gives practical advice about what you can do to minimise and control the anger of your pupils in difficult situations. It explains the ways you could influence your school to move forward as an institution on anger management so that all relationships within it can improve and classrooms can become a better place for learning. It is hoped that the strategies suggested here would also be useful to all support staff who have to deal with angry pupils.

The advice comes at a time when teaching unions are reporting increased frequency of teachers experiencing physical and verbal abuse from their pupils. Despite this alarming situation, the vast majority of teachers are able to find incredibly creative ways of forming positive relationships with their most challenging pupils. This book should help to sustain them in their work by showing new approaches to handling angry behaviours as well as reinforcing the approaches they already use.

Chapter 2
The conflicts of managing behaviour in schools

INCLUSION, EXCLUSION AND THE LACK OF REAL CONSENSUS ON HOW TO HANDLE POOR BEHAVIOUR

If you asked teachers what their greatest frustration is, the majority will tell you about the anxieties they have over the behaviour of a few individual pupils in their class. Teachers worry about how these pupils’ behaviour will impinge on all the other pupils. Everyday they use much more of their nervous energy anticipating how the behaviour of a few will spoil their lessons than on improving the way that they teach the majority of well-motivated pupils.

If you asked the educational bureaucrats who work for the local education authorities (LEAs) and the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) what they are most concerned about within the British school system, they may concentrate on what is described as the quality of the teaching and learning, particularly in basic skills. Although this includes the issue of behaviour management it often seems that it is by no means their main focus and priority. The bureaucrats, after all, are not the ones who have to manage the behaviour of twenty-five or more teenagers in each lesson and they constantly underestimate how difficult it is to do this well. Perhaps they don’t understand how pivotal it is to the teacher’s daily experience of the classroom.

The government and the LEAs have recently focused on the policy of social and educational inclusion for all pupils in all schools. It has not been a problem to explain why pupils with physical, visual and hearing impairments should be integrated into mainstream schools. I have been to conferences where there hasn’t been a murmur from the headteachers on this policy apart from worrying about the accessibility of their school buildings.
But mention the words emotional behavioural difficulty (EBD) and there is a big sigh in the room. There is a great fear of this, the biggest group of Special Needs pupils. Heads and their staff may be worried by the challenges they offer. Parents and governors may feel their schools have enough behaviour problems to deal with already. They may be frightened of the aspect of an inclusion policy that threatens to make it harder to exclude pupils temporarily and permanently. Almost unanimously they ask how they are supposed to improve results and at the same time absorb even greater numbers of challenging pupils who can often spoil lessons.

Some schools have been given money under the Excellence in Cities (EiC) initiative to set up behaviour support units.
The government intends that these units should be used as a temporary measure to help pupils who are having behavioural problems in mainstream classes. But some schools have been using them as a way of getting difficult and uncooperative students out of the system for a few weeks to give their teachers and the rest of the pupils a breather.

In the Education Action Zones the National Curriculum can be disapplied to let some pupils pursue courses personally tailored for their needs. Some schools have used this as a way of creating classes with behaviourally challenging pupils and removing them from the main system. They are being tucked away in the quiet corners of buildings so they can be contained without disturbing others.

None of this is in keeping with the spirit of inclusion but many schools are frightened of children with EBDs. The great majority of the staff have not been trained to deal with behaviourally challenging pupils whether the school has them in large or small numbers. So if the LEAs are cutting back on off-site provision for children with EBDs, many schools will be increasingly tempted to create on-site provision which is like a school within a school – a ‘sin bin’ in which to shove difficult problems.

Currently it seems that there isn’t an honest and open dialogue between schools and policy-makers about how best to deal with pupil anger and disaffection. Without an honest dialogue, real progress on these issues is difficult. Central government simply imposes its own solutions to these problems and then links its own initiatives to funding that schools desperately need.
There are few hurdles they won’t jump in a bid to get a little extra money.

TEACHERS DIVIDED ON BEHAVIOUR MANAGEMENT

Any honest dialogue on behaviour would reveal that there is little consensus about the best way of managing it. No two people agree exactly about managing behaviour. Individual teachers find their own personal way of maintaining good order in the classroom and that takes years of experience. There are usually several camps on behaviour management in the staff of a typical school. Into these camps fit a range of individual styles.

DOMINANT TEACHERS

The first camp is the dominant one: their position is that ‘I am a teacher and I’m here to teach. As I’m in charge of the classroom, pupils will do what I tell them to do. Pupils who have a particular problem with that should not be in my classroom.’ This end of the staff room is usually in favour of punishment and sanction as the cure to the problems of particular pupils.
Dominant teachers want exclusion and expulsion if other sanctions don’t work. They are sceptical about rewards, believing they pander to low student expectations.

‘Drama and personality’ discipline teachers

Within the dominant teachers’ group are the high-energy ‘impulse’ disciplinarians. They don’t like systems of rewards or sanctions but instead use the power of their personality to overcome difficult situations.

‘Sit there now! You do exactly as you are told or you’ll be sorry.’

‘Get over there now. Sit down and shut up!’

There is a lot of drama around the enforcing of egos. These teachers’ displays are often entertaining and exciting. They are often highly liked and respected individuals. By equal measure many are disliked and feared. But the principles on which their discipline is based is not flexible. Pupils who react aggressively to a barracking from such teachers and answer back rather than submit to their domination soon reach a point of no return. The only alternative to this is to be excluded.

This style of laddish discipline is the dominant style of behavioural management in many secondary schools and boys’ schools.

SYSTEM SANCTION TEACHERS

The second broad category of opinion and style in schools contains the systems people. They impose their personality on their classes not through dominant ego displays but by strong enforcement of school systems or, when those are lacking, their own personal ones. Often the emphasis is on sanction, with members of th...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1: ON HOW ANGER IS CAUSING PROBLEMS TO PUPILS AND TEACHERS IN OUR SCHOOLS
• PART 2: WHOLE SCHOOL AND CLASSROOM STRATEGIES FOR DEALING WITH ANGER
• PART 3: THE EVERYMAN PROJECT THE INSPIRATION FOR THE PILOT ANGER MANAGEMENT COURSE IN SCHOOLS