Managing student behaviour

This week’s discussion relates to an article from The Educator magazine about student behaviour.

Key points

• Australian research found approximately 40% of students were unproductive in classes (Angus et. al, 2009).
• 43% of students surveyed said that they were in classrooms that were noisy and disruptive.
• When we look more closely at the data, we find that boys are responsible for at least 80% of these disruptions.
• The short term impact is that students in these classes lose valuable learning time, contributing to Australia’s declining performance in literacy and numeracy compared to other nations. The long-term impact of this behaviour is that we have a generation of boys who not only struggle to read and write to the required standard, but who are conditioned to see aberrant behaviour as ‘normal’.
• Fortunately, we know what is required for boys to grow into healthy men. A recent research paper published in Health Promotion International, suggests a framework to help boys thrive – it consists of connectedness, authenticity and motivation.

Read the full article

What you can do

• Explicitly teach staff your preferred management practices for classroom management and engagement.
• Provide system support to teachers that allow for recording and escalating behaviour.
• Clarify and promote your school values as a foundation of school behaviour. Teachers can refer to them in their management of students. For example, Ollie, that comment doesn’t fit with our school’s value of respect.

Dealing with behaviour management and learning challenges of your classes will be one of the topics covered at the Improving the Behaviour and Engagement workshop on 24 May in Melbourne, details below.

Happy coaching,