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I spent my career in selective schools with good behaviour systems and was fortunate enough to rarely have to deal with badly behaved classes. I was able to teach with a smile, have an occasional laugh and get lots done. When I encountered disruption I was pretty mean, actually, and pupils were wary of crossing my path or interrupting the lesson. I didn't mind that. But even in the grammar schools I taught in, I can assure you there were teachers who struggled and required help. Students who are sweetness and light with one teacher can be a pain in the proverbial with others.
So, after that preamble, this post is aimed particularly at the many language teachers who encounter behaviour problems in their classes. It's actually an adapted extract from Chapter 1 of my handbook Becoming an Outstanding Languages Teacher. (That was a plug, if you hadn't guessed.)
Keeping them on task
Creating a successful learning environment is the
number one priority for teachers of any level of experience. Learning won’t
occur if students are inattentive and misbehaving. Where behaviour is already
good and supported by an excellent school ethos and behaviour policy the
challenge is to stretch classes to the limit with engaging and challenging
activities. Many classes, however, take a good deal more management and
effective teachers use a range of strategies to generate the right environment. For a detailed discussion of behaviour management I would recommend
any teacher to read Classroom Behaviour
by Bill Rogers (2015) and Teach Like a Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov (2015).
Elements of good classroom management are neatly
summed up by consultant and writer Tom Bennett as follows:
Three Rs of classroom management
Routines: embedding
habits of conduct and learning that maximise the good of both without the need to constantly create them on
the spot. This means rules and consequences, but also “micro-behaviours” like
how to scaffold essays, work in groups, or speak to a visitor.
Responses: the
strategies that work best to restore order, promote a return to learning and
deal with crises when they occur.
Relationships:
interpersonal skills, body language, for example, but also the appropriate use
of prior data, personal well-being, and working with parents, carers,
etc. These are intimately tied up with cognitive and affective empathy.
Great teachers often use humour and a competitive
element, e.g. dividing the class into teams for activities. They respect every
student in the class, act promptly on low level disruption, minimise
confrontation by taking the sting out of situations and show empathy with
students, grasping what they may be finding hard or threatening. They use eye
contact and facial expression to communicate feeling, employ techniques such as
tactical pausing and take-up time (allowing students to take in an instruction
before they act on it). They rarely shout; indeed they may speak deliberately
quietly to gain more attention. They’re well-organised, business-like and
punctual. They’re not over-bearing, but employ what can be termed “relaxed
vigilance”. All of this is part of what it means to be assertive. Teachers new to the profession often don't realise how much power they can wield if they just do it.
They make effective use of their physical presence,
e.g. they don’t always stand or sit in the same place in the classroom. They
move to the back when all the class is focused on reading aloud from the board,
creating the feeling that the class and teacher are working together. They
sometimes place themselves near unsettled students or they gently move towards
students who may be at risk of going off-task, having a quiet word in their ear
rather than making a fuss in front of the class. They don’t create a
distraction by moving around too much.
Great teachers sometimes award points or certificates
for positive behaviour and achievement, tracking them over a period of time.
They don’t praise in a routine way, but selectively and often confidentially,
beyond the hearing of the class. They always show respect and never belittle
any student. If they feel the need to criticise a class for poor behaviour or
work, they quickly move on in a positive manner. They try not to let a bad
lesson get them down; the students will forget it more quickly than the teacher.
They’re usually “authentic”, i.e. when they show disappointment, anger or
pleasure it’s because these feelings are genuinely felt. In general, they have
a “no excuses” attitude, with a degree of flexibility, showing that they care
by expecting the highest standards.
The best teachers are aware of motivational theories
such as self-efficacy, i.e. the strength of one's belief in the ability to
complete tasks and reach goals. They manage to create in their students the
self-belief they need to persist with activities. They do everything they can
to build confidence and remove anxiety in students. Equally they know how much
students are driven by instrumental goals, e.g. getting a good grade in the
exam, as well as, for some, integrative goals such as wanting to be part of the
TL culture and community.
A sense of responsibility and pride can be engendered
in students in a number of ways, e.g. as we’ve seen, you can get individuals to
lead the class, or they can run a club, teach a partner or a younger student.
You can send a postcard home to parents praising an achievement, relay a message
to a class tutor or nominate someone “student of the month”. You can use
exercise books as a privileged, confidential means of communication, praising
or requesting improvement where needed. You can write a personal note to
students and request a reply. Class exchanges, study trips, Skype sessions,
Facebook groups and email exchanges can all enhance students’ integrative
motivation.
Crucially an effective teacher has highly-developed empathy
skills. What does this mean?
Cognitive
empathy
This is
the capacity to understand another's perspective or mental state. In teaching
we can say that it refers to the teacher’s ability to marry every level of
their teaching (e.g. planning lessons, classroom delivery, feedback provision,
target-setting, homework) to their students’ thinking processes. We could break
it down as follows:
1. An awareness of the cognitive challenges
posed by language learning in general and by the specific language items you’re
teaching. For example, knowing that the learning of adjective agreement is
tough for English-speaking students because the concept doesn’t exist in
English; or anticipating that direct and indirect object pronouns in French
will be especially hard because of the word order problems they create; or
being aware of the challenges posed by the German case system.
2. An
understanding of how students respond to such challenges. This involves an
awareness of how cognition in a language learning context is affected by
individual variables, e.g. age group, gender, personality type, culture, etc.
For example, younger students usually find it harder than older ones to apply
grammatical rules taught explicitly. Some topics appeal to some groups more
than others, depending on the make-up and background of the class.
Affective
empathy
Also called emotional
intelligence, this is the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion
to another's affective state. For the teacher this can work at a whole class
level (feeling the general mood) or at an individual level (sensing at any
moment how a student might be reacting emotionally to the task they’re doing).
Effective teachers seem either to do these things
instinctively (the so-called “natural teacher”) or have learned to exercise
them through reading, training or experience. Teachers who begin their careers
very successfully enhance their skills with time and deliberate practice, while
others who initially find the classroom hard can turn into excellent
practitioners.
Learning aspects of cognitive empathy is easier for
most teachers than mastering affective empathy, since you can, by contrasting
English and the TL anticipate what will be easier and harder. For example,
adjectival agreement, gender and tense usage are bound to be issues for English-speaking
learners of European languages. A sound knowledge of second language teaching
methodology is also easy to acquire, namely understanding the principles of natural
language acquisition and second language acquisition theories.
Showing social and emotional intelligence requires
observing and listening to students carefully, picking up any visual or spoken
clues to their mood and detecting any relationship patterns between students.
You can help the process along by effective assessment for learning (formative
assessment) techniques, e.g. asking students how they feel about what they’ve
learned, what their attitudes are to language learning, specific activity types
and non-English-speaking cultures. Teachers with well-developed cognitive and
affective empathy are able to avoid confrontation, be positive, make students
feel cared for and self-assured, while not becoming over-anxious when things
don’t go as planned. Anxiety spreads anxiety. Some teachers are, of course,
more compassionate than others, but in general the more a teacher is able to
look out to others rather than look in to themselves, the better.
It comes down to something Bill Rogers (2015) has written
about: when students talk about their
teachers they may mention subject-related matters, but they’re more likely to
talk about the kind of teacher they have, whether they teach well and
interestingly, and whether they’re fair, considerate, patient and have a sense
of humour. Above all they talk about whether their teachers care.
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