Essential Guides for Early Career Teachers: Understanding and Developing Positive Behaviour in Schools by Garton Patrick;Hollis Emma;

Author:Garton, Patrick;Hollis, Emma;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Critical Publishing

So what? What difference will this make?

Plans versus reality

We have already established the importance of planning in order to design and deliver successful lessons and sequences of lessons. We have also established that thinking about behaviour at every stage of your planning is important in helping to create and sustain successful systems, processes and relationships. In the very early stages of your time in the classroom, you may find that there is a disconnect between your plans as abstract ‘paper-based’ activities and the reality of what actually happens in the classroom. This is understandable and inevitable, but you will find that the two become more connected as you continue to plan, deliver and reflect on your lessons.

One of the crucial things to bear in mind is that things generally take longer to complete in reality than in our minds. This ‘planning fallacy’ is covered by Hofstadter’s Law, named after the American scholar Douglas Hofstadter (1991), which simply states of complex tasks that: ‘It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law’. The point of including this here is to recognise the psychological burden of feeling time pressured, both for you as the teacher and for your pupils. There are, of course, legitimate reasons why you want to support pupils in making ‘rapid progress’, but it is also undoubtedly the case that in many circumstances this potential obsession with pace and fitting lots in can be counter-productive. By having an unending and, at times, uncontrolled sense of time pressure, you inevitably put yourself and your pupils under stress. Stress brings many associated behaviours, lots of which can be unhelpful in developing the kind of classroom atmosphere that teachers aspire to. In addition, it is important to recognise that speed is sometimes an adversary of depth.

I have often seen early career teachers sabotage their own lessons and cause lots of personal stress by rushing through things too superficially because they want to stick to what is on their plan. In order to avoid these situations, it is generally better to plan for fewer but deeper activities in the lesson and allow yourself the freedom to divert from your written plans if appropriate.

As you develop an ever more sophisticated understanding of the complex web of elements that make up a successful lesson, you will appreciate that some tasks and activities have a positive impact on learning and some have a positive impact on behaviour, but not necessarily both at the same time. In his presentation ‘What Makes Great Teaching?’ at the IB World Regional Conference in October 2015, Robert Coe identified ‘poor proxies for learning’, by which he means activities that you might actively pursue in the mistaken belief that they represent learning. Examples he gives for poor proxies for learning are: pupils being busy; lots of work being done; pupils getting attention and feedback; and classrooms being calm and orderly. He is of course absolutely correct in pointing out that these things do not necessarily lead to deep learning.

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