Behaviour Management is one of the greatest challenges facing teachers. And it is not only new teachers who can feel overwhelmed by classroom demands.
Because of the ever-evolving nature of teaching, the growing diversity of students and increasing societal pressures, teachers are constantly learning different ways to manage stress, workload and expectations.
Teachers who adopt a positive approach to behaviour are more likely to have improved wellbeing through increased job satisfaction since they are not looking for a quick fix, but recognise that like all learning, we need long term solutions that take the needs of the student into account.
Planning does not just mean preparing your lesson content, but giving thought to how you want your students to behave before, during and after the lesson. Here are 5 simple yet highly powerful ways to create positive behaviour change with your students.
When you are giving instructions, think about the words and tone you use. There is often a more positive way to say most things which will provide a better learning opportunity for your students.
Student and teacher wellbeing are closely linked, and both impact student achievement and outcomes.
Adopting some simple practices in the classroom can improve the quality of life for both your students and yourself.
Focus on teaching the skill of listening (yes those acronyms do help). Break the skill into identifiable components for students and then practise, role play, make posters and dramatise scenarios. Use positive reinforcement to help with this and/or reward students for using the skill appropriately.
The beginning of the school year is undoubtedly exciting, but it can also be an overwhelming time for new teachers, or even for experienced teachers and if you are changing schools, teaching a new grade level or a new subject area or going back to teaching after a break, this time can be even more stressful.
There are three things that will make a huge difference to your classroom, your sanity and your students’ success and they are not about curriculum, they are about behaviour.
How positive reinforcement can help students behave
You can improve student behaviour 80% of the time if you use positive rather than negative feedback.
Don’t believe me?
Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
Many schools have a hierarchy of consequences that increase the level of punishment as the behaviour escalates. While that approach works with 75-80% of the population, a student with behaviour issues will not respond to increasingly negative penalties.