1 Teaching and behaviour
The quality of our teaching inevitably has an impact on the behaviour of our students: a student who is busy learning is far less likely to think about misbehaving. Using a range of strategies, positive approaches and rewards will have a positive impact on behaviour on a day-to-day basis. However, one of the key factors in getting sustained good behaviour is ensuring that your students are fully engaged with the work that they are doing.
There are many factors that can contribute to misbehaviour in the classroom. A number of these are directly related to the quality of the teaching and learning experience that we offer, and include:
Boredom: because the work is not sufficiently interesting or engaging.
Disaffection: the feeling that school and learning is not relevant to our students' real lives.
Mismatch: between the work set and the students' ability, or between the type of tasks given and the students' learning styles.
As teachers, we obviously have a professional duty to ‘get through’ the curriculum, and to cover all the statutory areas. However, you may well have found that when your class is not behaving well and the students are refusing to stay on task, very little satisfactory work is actually done at all.
When considering your own professional development, there are various ways in which you can improve your students' level of engagement. In order to teach for good behaviour, we need to think about the format, delivery and content of our lessons. As well as re-engaging our students with the learning process, delivering quality lessons will also make your work a much more satisfying experience.