Why Behaviour Management in the Classroom Never Works Out

Why Behaviour Management in The Classroom Never Works Out

A Guide to Help You Change the Way You Manage the Behaviour in Your Classroom

All teachers know one of the hardest things about teaching is the disruptive pupils who disrupt your lessons and distract your other pupils. However, using disciplinary and punishing techniques isn’t working well within our classrooms and is not helping support these pupils that are more challenging. It is clear that a new form of behaviour management and a new perspective on how we view and approach the behaviour of these pupils needs to be in place.

Making your Classroom a More Orderly Environment

Creating clear rules and procedures will help establish a mutual agreement with your class. These rules will work more effectively if you sit down with your pupils and negotiate the rules and expectations you want them to commit to. Also, as a teacher you need to ensure all rules are justified and explain their purpose, this should help pupils understand why they need to be followed and they will be more likely to follow them.

Another effective way of enforcing rules is to remind pupils of rules before they are potentially going to break one. This should radically reduce any inappropriate behaviour that could occur in your classroom as it reduces the amount of discipline you give a pupil and will not affect your pupil-teacher relationship.

Finally, an idea to maintain your pupils’ behaviour is to get them to self-assess how they think they are behaving in class by giving them some form of checklist about the rules to determine how well they have been behaving and use this to set targets to improve their behaviour.

Maintaining a Teacher-Pupil Relationship

It is essential to create and maintain a relationship with your pupils. You need to think about the style of relationship you want to establish with your class. The most effective type of relationship that will help control behaviour will be a dominant yet co-operative relationship with your pupils.

This ensures that the pupils will respect you for allowing them to have a say about how they act in their learning environment but they will still be aware that you are the one in charge and who has the control in the classroom.

Be a teacher who stresses how much you want your students to do well – this seems very obvious but it is important for your students to know you believe in them. Make sure you comment on when they are doing well, award them when they improve and keep giving them a constant reminder that they can do anything they put their mind to.

You should also incorporate humour into your lessons, perhaps sharing jokes with your pupils, a bit of playful teasing or laughing at yourself when you make a silly mistake. Students massively respond to this and it will make them enjoy coming to your class more because they will love the relief of a substantial amount of informality.

Rewarding Your Pupils Instead of Punishing

Create a clear set of boundaries with your class and especially the more difficult individuals that good behaviour and hard work will be rewarded and avoid giving threats of punishment and sanctions if this is not established (if not necessary). Approach a situation of bad behaviour with the idea that, if the pupil changes their behaviour around, they will be rewarded and all will be forgiven rather than immediately giving a sanction or punishment when you spot someone being disruptive or disengaged.

It is clear that we need to approach the way we manage behaviour in our classrooms more fairly and view bad behavioural situations with a different perspective. Keeping a good relationship with pupils, maintaining order and having fun whilst learning will enhance a positive working environment for you and your pupils and will massively decrease the negative behaviour of students. It is time to put in place a more friendly and effective way of keeping behaviour in check in the classroom.