Pat, Pat — Hands Back
Managing Student Behavior
Students love Physical Education (PE) class, right? They get to escape their classrooms and have fun after all! This has got to be the easiest class to manage!
You’ll be surprised.
**Bell rings for PE** Voila, here come ten students yelling “Coach, we always play football during this period”, while five others claim “Coach, this is free period no?” Before Coach can respond to either, five others have slunk away to a corner to gossip.
Any new teacher will tell you that the first hurdle they face in handling a class is the difficulty in managing student behavior.
Many wise people have said that a healthy space for learning can only be established once the teacher can effectively manage the students and build relationships with them. The task of handling a large group of excited students and guiding them towards a structured health and fitness session after being used to a free period is a significant OMG moment. While the pre-school Institute Training for the CoolCoach Fellows did cover Behavior Management thanks to an informative session by Mohini Pandey, their actual experience with students in schools brought forth a flood of questions and doubts. We knew we needed someone who’d been through the same journey to come in and speak to our fellows.
Enter TFI Fellow, Tushar Kaushik. His colleagues swear by him, claiming he is THE person to step in and help out our Fellows. He strode into the CoolCoach training lab, a body and mind filled with experiences as a new teacher in the classroom over the past year. After a lot of sighs and uugghs and pfffts Tushar has learnt that behavior management is not a control tool, but that it is a powerful engagement tool. Through his session with the CoolCoach Fellows, Tushar focused on how important it is to connect with the students in any classroom and focus on one of the biggest rules “Be liked and the students will respond!” Proving his colleagues right, he spoke to the fellows about vision setting for their PE sessions and about having rules, values and consequences in place for each class.

Unlike Tushar and many other teachers who handle a single age group of students every day, the CoolCoach Fellows take PE for the entire school, dealing with ages 6 to 16! Moreover, the CoolCoach Fellows are confronted with the task of bringing students to enjoy a structured fitness class that was earlier often a free period for them to do whatever they liked! Not surprisingly, the Fellows had many questions for Tushar and a flood of experiences to share.
Avinash and Sunny, two of the CoolCoach Fellows in attendance, wanted to understand what mindset they should enter each class with and how they should react when faced with rebellion and disrespect. Like many of us, the Fellows have also grown up seeing teachers hit students as a response to disobedience. Here Tushar stressed the importance of dialogue as an effective alternative. He stressed upon the use of class procedures, attention grabbers and countdowns that help structure a session for the students. He also spoke to them about and modeled the tone and language one must adopt with students and the practice of specific and repetitive instruction. Finally, he ended with a TED Talk about how Every Kid Needs A Champion inspiring the CoolCoach Fellows to be a champion for their own students!
Ever since Tushar’s session many positive changes have been adopted by the fellows. Sunny in particular shares how better behavior management has helped him use his class time more effectively. Pat, Pat — Hands Back, is one of the catchy attention grabbers that Sunny has come up with to excite and manage his students. In fact, Sunny has drawn chess squares on the school corridor so that the students can quickly identify which tile to stand on, helping him manage them efficiently.

Not only did the Fellows enjoy and learn from the BMC (Behavior Management Cycle) session by Tushar, but Tushar also enjoyed facilitating interacting with the CoolCoach Fellows. Particularly impressed by their engagement and willingness to change and adopt new methods, Tushar believes that “The Fellows are highly invested in transforming health and fitness for their students and that fills me with hope”.

