Behaviour for Learning: Creating & Maintaining Conditions for Effective Learning

Aims

In order to maximise the effectiveness of our teaching and our students’ learning in lessons we believe that:

  1. All teachers and students deserve classrooms that have a positive, orderly and efficient culture that respects the primary importance of academic learning.
  2. High behavioural expectations of every student, in every lesson, is the key that unlocks academic progress.
  3. Excellent student behaviour and class routines in lessons should be explicitly taught, just like our subject content, so students are very clear on what excellent behaviour is and what it looks like. We then need to be proactive and maintain these routines (just like a person, garden or a car needs regular check-ups/maintenance to stay healthy).
  4. What you permit, you promote: managing student behaviour is a ‘team sport’ and requires consistency across our teaching staff.
  5. It is important for all staff to develop and share their expertise in dealing with low-level disruption quickly and effectively in order to maximise our students’ time spent learning and mastering subject content.

The 5R Framework

After a lengthy absence due to COVID 19, the 5R framework, in partnership with the Wilmslow Way rewards and sanctions system, will help us develop the key elements of managing student behaviour in lessons with relationships, routines, reactions and responses forming our initial focus:

  1. Relationships: building trust and mutual respect by knowing our students well
  2. Routines: explicitly taught, universally known
  3. Reactions and responses: calm and firm
  4. Rules: consistent application by all staff members
  5. Role Model: model the exemplary behaviour we expect

Three Visible Student Classroom Behaviours - Every Lesson, Every day

  • To support and encourage excellent behaviour from or students we will be explicitly sharing three basic rules for students to follow in every lesson to help with their transition back to school. The three rules will be visible in every classroom, at the front, in poster format
  • Teachers will also have a copy in their T&L start of year pack

Please take every opportunity to re-visit these three statements as much as possible. The key is to establish them so they are known, understood and enacted consistently by your students in your classroom

Behaviour for Learning Teaching Techniques

In order to establish and maintain a calm and purposeful classroom, in this section you will find a variety of techniques explained, with over 50 video examples, so that you can use  and adapt them for your classes. 

*These can be found by clicking on the 16 tabs at the bottom of this page*

Many of the techniques may seem basic, mundane and unremarkable and, indeed, you might be thinking ‘I use that’ (which is great). However, whilst studying the techniques, you will pick up little details that can make a big difference in the effectiveness of their deployment in your lessons.

Finally, the techniques outlined below, as well being appropriate for teaching under normal circumstances, can be applied in our current non-proximate ‘teaching from the front’ conditions where our movement will be limited.

Overview of BfL Teaching Techniques

  • Many of the low-level behaviour issues we deal with in classrooms are predictable and repeat themselves across the course of a teaching day.
  • The techniques outlined here provide solutions to these predictable behaviour issues that are specific, concrete and actionable in a manageable way and reinforce our high expectations of the students.
  • You will be able to incorporate individual techniques into what you already do without having to redesign your entire approach.
  • Names have been attached to each technique in the interest of developing a common, school-wide, vocabulary so that we can analyse and discuss these techniques to refine and improve them.
  • How we each deliver the techniques might differ but there will be common elements of each technique that need to be understood so that you can use them in a way that you are comfortable with and matching your teaching style.
  • Teaching is a complex art and these the techniques outlined here will require constant refinement and discretion in their application in order for them to be effective and for a teacher to master them.
  • The techniques can ultimately be improved upon by any teacher and, in a few cases, ignored because not everything can be right for you.
  • However, these techniques provide 'best bets' for us all to use in our classrooms with the ultimate aim for these techniques to be applied in the service of increased student achievement.

Please click on the 15 tabs below to access each technique's explanation and videos