The school where teachers never shout at children. You can imagine the reaction across certain sections of the Express-reading/GB News/anti-woke demographic upon reading that headline.
I will leave the ‘what kids need today …’ conversation to your imagination because you’ll have heard it many times.
Thing is though, I was a teacher for 34 years, most of it in schools in some of Britain’s more challenging postcodes. For about half of that, I lived on my wits and responded to challenging behaviour with anything that worked. This included sarcasm, shouting, pointing, threats and other sundry attempts at crowd control but, as far as that went, it was so much the same as it ever was. Except that one day, I got sent on a course called Assertive Discipline with Lee Canter and my whole world changed.
Who is Lee Canter?
Canter, an American psychologist married to a secondary school teacher, had undertaken research into the types of behaviours observed in successful classrooms and unsuccessful classrooms. What he found was that the key determinant in changing the behaviour of the pupils was the behaviour of the teacher.
So, as a teacher, if you change the way you behave, their behaviour will change. Might sound obvious put like that, but actually it goes against all our evolutionary programming. It’s difficult. You have to have not one plan but two, and before that, you have to actually decide what you want.
So, if you want kids to be quiet, face the front and put down their pens, you have to instruct them to do just that. Actually, consciously, work out what you want. I’d spent years saying (or shouting) QUIIIIIET! Before getting sidetracked into put-your-pen-down-stop-chewing-look this way-put-the-gun-down diversions and going slowly bonkers.
Then you plan out what you’re going to say and do (1) when you get what you want and (2) when you don’t. Basically, you seek out the positive FIRST and get what you want by giving the kids who are doing the right thing the attention all kids (and adults) crave. This requires the teacher to develop a wide vocabulary of phrases and gestures to stop them becoming some sort of ‘praise-robot’.
And does it work?
When I tried this, somewhat sceptically, the effect was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen in a classroom, (except, of course for the dress sense of Ofsted inspectors). Immediately I thanked one pupil for doing as instructed (taking care to name what they’d done for added reinforcement values), another four or five sprang to attention as if hit by some invisible ray. Repeating the praise (with different phrases, obviously, plus the odd nod, wink or thumbs up), this phenomenon spread quickly and I had their attention.
If someone (and there’s always one, isn’t there?) still didn’t get it, I simply repeated the first instruction plus their name and hey presto!
Of course, this will only work up to a point, that point usually being what happens if someone persistently fails to comply. In such a case, Canter suggests a simple three-strikes-and-you’re-out series of warnings before a sanction (it doesn’t matter what, so long as you always do it), kicks in and the kids know you mean business.
In a nutshell, that’s it. Eventually, other staff got wind of this classroom voodoo and wanted a piece of it, particularly the bit where you got all the work done and weren’t nearly as tired at the end of the day and we all started doing it, eventually convincing the sceptical leadership team to make it policy. Happy days.
There are other systems, all pretty much variations on the same thing and they all work pretty well even, (Katherine Birbalsingh et al please take note), with rules about mobile phones.
If it’s so good a system, why isn’t everyone doing it?
So why doesn’t every school do this? Well, for a start, a lot of teachers get stuck on the idea that suggesting the kids’ poor behaviour might be down to them sounds like blame. My response to that was two-fold: First, I asked, what if I could show you a way to get kids to do what you want with less stress than what you get now? That got the attention of most. For the more sceptical, I used observations of staff who were well-regarded, no-nonsense staff and counted the number of times they either responded positively or negatively to student behaviour.
The numbers were astonishing. The more positive a teacher’s interactions, the better the behaviour. Simple as.
I’ll have me a piece of that pie.
I don’t know what Uphall Primary is like, but clearly what they’re doing is working.
Another reason people might dismiss such notions is that it doesn’t feel right: the belief that negative behaviour must be crushed with all available ordnance is an understandable one. Unless it’s my speeding ticket, obvs, in which case a debate on proportionality of responses is ergo de rigueur.
Parents and politicians love the idea that their solution is tough, no nonsense, and above all strict. When I did supply teaching after retirement, kids would sometimes ask ‘Are you strict, Sir?’ I would respond by saying that I had no idea, (and didn’t care what word was used to describe it), but that I was there to get people to learn and I knew how to do that.
The wonders of wokery
At the bottom of this are two notions which get lost amidst the noise of contemporary politics generally. One is that people spend their time listening to people on their platforms saying what they’re AGAINST but not what they’re for. The other is the notion of people in a given situation having to ‘deserve’ a solution in order for it to be applied.
Both of these ideas figured large when I spent years trying to convince staff to adopt ‘Assertive Discipline’ principles. Surely the point is whether or not a thing works, rather than everything needing first to conform to some vague, abstract notion that the interlocutor usually can’t define.
When I was discovering the effectiveness of Lee Canter’s ideas and successfully applying them, no one used the word woke. Instead, phrases like ‘soft’, ‘do-gooder’ and ‘bleeding hearts’ were the go-to responses of angry and stressed colleagues.
Until they tried them and it worked, that is.
