While there are many aspects of effective teaching, when you are working with a new class, or struggling to gain control of a tough class, it is critical that you attend to these core points.
Expect Your Students To Learn
It is true that students who behave well achieve better results. However, it is equally true that students who are pressed to do well academically behave better in class. Teachers who expect their students to master the material have fewer issues with behaviour than teachers who accept mediocrity.
Some students have more challenges than others. However, with a little hard work, all students can experience genuine success. Research shows that struggling, non-engaged students later wish that their teachers hadn’t given up on them or allowed them to get away with not working hard.
You must believe that your students can make real progress and that such progress requires hard work. You must also communicate this belief to your students – and do so with both words and actions.
Clear Learning Goals
Learning goals clarify what it is that your students must know, understand and be able to do by the end of each lesson (or unit or multi-lesson task, etc.). They turn vague expectations of learning, into concrete indicators of success.
How do you know if your learning goals are good ones? The best way is to consider how easy it is to tell whether each individual child succeeded or failed to reach the goal. If it is easy, your goal is clear. If it is difficult, then your goal needs to be clarified and reworded to clearly show what ‘successful achievement’ entails.
When it is clear whether or not students succeeded or failed to meet a specific goal, they are motivated to work hard and behave well. It also helps you to focus the various parts of your lesson on high-impact, meaningful activities. When students see the purpose behind what they have been asked to do, they are more likely to engage in the activities you set them.
Reframe the Meaning of Failure
You don’t do students any favours when you protect them from failure. Success does not come easily, and sometimes, even after working hard, you still don’t succeed. This is a simple reality of life.
However, it does help to reframe the meaning of failure. Failure is not a permanent thing. You acknowledge it, you learn from it, you try again, and you keep repeating this process until you succeed.
If you are truly want to challenge your students, and if they are sincerely willing to stretch themselves, you (and they) must expect to make mistakes and fail along the way. You (and they) must see this as okay and a normal part of real learning.
Offer Appropriate Instruction
Students are far more likely to misbehave when they don’t know enough to successfully complete a task that you set them. You must ensure that:
- You explain the task clearly
- Your students have sufficient knowledge and skill to complete the task
And this means you need to give them appropriate instruction before sending them off to work on their own (or in groups). This may sound obvious, but I have worked with large numbers of teachers to help them with their behaviour management, and the majority of them don’t do this. Rather, they send their students off with vague directions, insufficient knowledge and inadequate skills to perform activities they are not ready for.
Routines can help you to keep your lesson running smoothly. You need to take the time to explain how you expect students to enter the room, how you will gain their attention, how you want them to hand out materials, what you consider ‘working noise’ and how they should transition from one activity to the next.
While explaining your expectations is essential, it is not enough. You need to have your students practice them, reminding your students of the expectations beforehand and correcting them along the way. Once your expectations are habitualised, every lesson becomes so much easier.
Students have limited attention spans, and misbehaviour flourishes when their attention begins to wander.
While it is important to tell your students what they need to know and show them how to do the things they must be able to do, you must keep these ‘instructional inputs’ brief and to the point. Teacher-delivered instruction should never be longer 10-15 minutes.
After you have taught the students new things, you will need to let them practice and engage with what you have taught them. Your own level of preparation can also affect the pace of these activities. The more organised you are, the less time is wasted, allowing you to move through the activities at a quicker pace.
You also need to get students used to work quickly. Yes, you need to give them enough time to think and work things out, but you need to keep this time as short as possible. You should push your students to work quickly, while ultimately letting their levels of understanding dictate the pace of the lesson.
Judicious Group Work
Many teachers love group work, and new teachers feel obligated to use it straight away. It’s understandable because group work can be a very effective way of helping students achieve better results in class.
However, this is only true when group work is done the right way and at the right time.
Group tasks must be tasks that all students have gained a reasonable level of proficiency in. Otherwise certain group members will do all the work, while others sit back and do nothing. Typically, this means that you must have students do enough individual practice before asking them to complete similar tasks in a group.
Furthermore, it is better to get to know your students and let them know you are watching them before you start to personally work with individual groups. This means that initial group tasks should require minimal, if any, assistance from you. This leaves you free to monitor and address student behaviour in all groups.
The aim of behaviour management is not merely quiet compliance. You want them to be engaged and working hard.
Sadly, research shows that 20% of students are compliant, but totally disengaged from the task at hand. These students need you to ensure that they do more than being passively amenable, and you can do this by holding them accountable for the work that they produce.
You can do this by checking and sometimes commenting on their work at the end of each activity. Students need to know you care about how much work they do and the quality of the work that they have done.
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