As every teacher knows, your behaviour management starts at the moment in which your students see you. Particularly important are the routines which you set at the classroom door. It goes without saying that every lesson is a clean sheet as far as behaviour management is concerned. Whatever happened in the last lesson, however badly […]
Parents and carers read, listen to, are aware of news. They know that schools are presiding over a rising muddy tide of mental health problems caused by multiple factors. They know that also one of those factors is the relentless (does that word still appear in the OfStEd success criteria?) drive to push students up […]
Merry Christmas everybody! Isn’t it nice to be off work? I hope you’re all feeling as relaxed and refreshed as I am. I’m also feeling reflective. I’m thinking about praise; more precisely I’m thinking abut compliments. Be specific: I have talked about the importance of being specific in your praise of students rather than lavishing […]
Objective setting is one of those areas where official advice changes with head-spinning rapidity. And don’t get me started on learning outcomes v learning objectives. The strictly positive teacher wants students to know when they come in the room what they are going to learn, and to know that they have learned it when they […]
In our classes we are still dealing, effectively, with puppies. Puppies need to be exercised regularly or they will vent their frustration in a less positive way.
As teachers, although it may be counter-intuitive, we have to be positively aware that when every time we change position – standing, sitting, leaning, crouching, facing, beside or behind a student – we send out complex messages and influence the way our students behave. Our choice of position will depend on a number of factors: […]
Fear is of no avail in education…
Students don’t arrive at your door bright-eyed and bushy tailed, eager for the spark of learning to be ignited into a flame. They get there hot and sweaty from PE, redolent of Lynx to mask the smell, or angry because they’ve been excluded from a discussion about a party which will be happening this weekend, […]
I’ve talked quite a lot about the benefits of Positive Behaviour Management and about its effectiveness in the classroom, but I haven’t yet gone into details about the nuts and bolts of how it works. It is essentially simple, but there are many strands which work together; I’ll go through all of them in the […]
Everybody thinks that they are an expert on education because at some point in their life they spent the best part of at least 11 years in a classroom. It’s an easy trap to fall into – we can all think of education secretaries who have plummeted into it.
As adults, we all have experience of a childhood. This is rooted in the fact that we were all children once. We grew up in the same way as we watch our charges grow up. If we are parents we have a second experience of parenting a child and watching them develop.
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