Behaviour Management
When you are a secondary school teacher, your mission to educate your students encompasses many different challenges, such as motivating teenagers to learn what you want to teach them, ensuring deep understanding while managing the class behaviour, and assessing their learning along the way so as to tailor your teaching to their needs. This is an incredibly multi-task job where each task in itself is difficult.
Behaviour management is central in a teacher’s work. It is something that PGCE students realise very quickly, and while some enjoy the power they can exert on students, for many others it is one of the most unpleasant parts of the job. At university, we had some sessions on behaviour management. One of the key messages there was “Make the lesson interesting and you won’t have any behaviour issues.” It sounded easy. They also advised to give students a sense of responsibility for their behaviour. For instance, we watched a film of a real classroom situation in which the teacher allowed one student to sit near their friend, but only under the premise that they behave well. This is a key behaviour management technique, we were told. And that was it.
In schools, however, the reality was very different from the discourses made at university far away from any real teenage student. But at least, we must recognise and welcome their attempt to give us some ideas of behaviour management…
The widespread behaviour management technique I observed at school was the so-called carrot and stick approach, consisting of a system of rewards and praise to encourage and reinforce good behaviour, and of punishments (generally detention hours) to discourage bad behaviour. I understood what I was expected to do only after several months working in my school when I benefitted from expert guidance by other teachers. I could then observe with my own classes that this system works. When I followed the instructions and started writing the names of the students who were showing either a good or a bad behaviour (using one ‘+’ and one ‘-‘ columns), it was amazing to see that some students would try to appear in the ‘+’ column and some others would be quiet because they were afraid of me (or rather of my capacity of giving detention hours). As a teacher, you have to dedicate an incredible amount of time to this monitoring and displaying of students’ behaviour. Probably at some point it becomes second nature and you can manage to focus as well on e.g. pedagogy and your students’ learning. But as a beginner I felt incredibly frustrated because I felt like I was expected to train animals and not to teach kids.
Certainly, this behaviour management technique works, but I could not help but wonder if there is not a better, more respectful way that most importantly develops students’ intrinsic motivation for learning. Indeed, the first unpleasant aspect of this behaviour management technique was the lack of an overall positive relationship between teachers and students. I had the feeling I was perceived as the enemy by my students, while I had in fact chosen this change of career to fulfil my wish to contribute to society and help students from deprived backgrounds — what an irony! Also, many teachers say that they go and teach as if they would go into war, but would assert that even if they shout at the students, they do care. I believe they do, but I just couldn’t engage in that spirit. Similarly, one of my friends dropped out of the PGCE course because she didn’t want to feel like a police officer in the classroom. Eventually, I was convinced that I was too soft for this job and that pretending to be hard would be too alienating.
It must be noted that the second half of the 20th century saw substantial increases in adolescent antisocial behaviour in many Western countries, including the UK, and, interestingly, the cause for this is not clear.[1] But the fact is that times have changed and today’s children no longer show the same respect to adults as e.g. 30 years ago — whether we like it or not. However, I find it disturbing that in the 21st century many schools could not find any better response to disruptive behaviour than an authoritarian behaviour policy. I wish I had the possibility during my PGCE to be authoritative, i.e. being demanding with my students but in a caring and benevolent way. But you cannot be yourself during the PGCE because, first, you are observed during almost every single lesson, compelling you to behave like your observers want you to. And, second, you are not regarded as a true teacher by your students, introducing a bias in the teacher-student relationships you would like to establish.
Despite my self-perception that I was not fit for teaching because of my lack of natural assertiveness, I keep in mind the heart-warming comments by some year 10 girls who told me, when I left the school, that they would like to have me as a maths teacher again. So there might be a silent majority of students who feel gratitude for caring teachers. Unfortunately, the challenging minority of students constrain teachers to show their hard face. Unsurprisingly, there is some research evidence that a caring teacher does contribute to their students’ motivation.[2] Also, the teacher’s enthusiasm can be communicative and enhance students’ engagement[3]. However, I still have a bitter memory of a lesson with a low year 9 set in which my students had to model an atom at our scale (i.e. with a nucleus of 1 mm in diameter at the centre of a 10-meter-diameter sphere occupied by a few electrons). All along, I had this uncomfortable feeling of being the only one in the room enthusiastic about this amazing fact that the nucleus, which concentrates all the mass, is so tiny, meaning that most of the volume occupied by matter is… vacuum! So, maybe enthusiasm is not always enough! As with many other educational theories, the problem is that children can be very different, and what works with one classroom may be a fiasco in another.
As a final word on that topic, I would like to emphasise that teenagers are in a delicate period of their life, and, while suffering themselves, they make a teachers’ life very tough. Having as only knowledge about what they are going through the recollection of our own teenage period is surely insufficient to understand them properly. I believe there should be a course on teenage psychology during the PGCE to help future teachers have some understanding of teenagers’ behaviour and know some methods on how to respond to it.
[1] Collishaw, S., Gardner, F., Maughan, B., Scott, J., & Pickles, A. (2012). Do historical changes in parent–child relationships explain increases in youth conduct problems? Journal of abnormal child psychology, 40(1), 119–132.
[2] Wentzel, K. R. (1997). Student motivation in middle school: The role of perceived pedagogical caring. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(3), 411–419.
[3] Patrick, B. C., Hisley, J. & Kempler, T. (2000). “What’s Everybody So Excited About?”: The Effects of Teacher Enthusiasm on Student Intrinsic Motivation and Vitality. The Journal of Experimental Education, 68(3), 217–236.
