Effective rules need sanctions.
These are the consequences learners face if they transgress.
Alongside sanctions sits praise, which is always of crucial importance.
Here, we’ll just look at sanctions, keeping our focus specific.
Sanctions are various in nature and include:
- Telling off a learner
- Showing displeasure through body language
- Removing a privilege
- Giving a detention
- Showing disappointment
- Moving a learner to sit somewhere else
- Giving a learner different work to do
- Involving another member of staff such as tutor, head of year or senior leader
- Removing a learner from the room
- Calling home to speak to parents
The severity of a sanction should reflect the severity of the incident.
You should always leave yourself with somewhere to go.
Starting off with severe sanctions makes life difficult as you are removing your room to manoeuvre.
Getting upstream of negative behaviour is always advisable.
A look or a quiet word early on is usually more than enough to prevent negative behaviour turning into something that is harder to deal with later in the lesson.
It is often worth defining your sanctions in advance, particularly if you are a new teacher of if you are having challenges with behaviour management.
This involves doing a bit of work outside lessons, to decide what consequences will follow from different types of behaviour.
You should think carefully about this as it is imperative you are able to follow through on your sanctions.
If you can’t, or if you don’t, learners will quickly realise they are hollow warnings.
This removes the risk associated with sanctions from any cost-benefit analysis learners conduct in their minds about whether breaking a rule is worthwhile.
The result will be a higher incidence of rule-breaking alongside a sense of powerlessness on your own part as the sanctions you seek to employ do not have the effect intended.
Sanctions gain their effect from the following:
- Being consistently applied
- Being carried out in full
- Being proportionate and tied to behaviour
- Being applied fairly
- Being applied calmly, politely and assertively
The reasons for this are self-evident.
If a learner refuses to change their behaviour in accordance with a sanction, you can escalate matters by applying a harsher sanction or by involving your school’s wider behaviour system.
In the latter case this could involve calling for help or putting the matter to one side and dealing with it after the lesson in conjunction with a senior leader.
Whatever approach you opt for (and it may depend on the quality of the behaviour management system in your school) the important thing is to ensure that the sanction is applied, even if this takes time and effort on your part.
Never forget that sanctions play a significant part in maintaining rules and creating a sense of consistency.
If you give up on attempting to apply a sanction for unacceptable rule-breaking behaviour, then you are communicating the message that the rule can be broken without any negative consequences.
Similarly, if you apply sanctions to one learner but not to another, the inconsistency diminishes your authority, as well as the inherent authority learners accord to the sanctions.
A difficult situation that can arise is when multiple learners break a rule, but you only catch one in the act.
This means you can only apply a sanction to the learner you catch, because you have no evidence regarding anyone else’s behaviour.
The learner in question may argue that this is unfair – after all, they weren’t the only one who was behaving wrongly, they just happened to be the only one caught.
This is hard to argue with.
If true, the learner is right.
Therefore, avoid the argument.
It will be hard, if not impossible, to win.
Instead, use the metaphor of a referee.
Explain that you can only call what you see, like a referee in a football match.
You saw the learner in question misbehaving and you are obliged to apply a sanction.
You do not doubt that other misbehaviour may have occurred, but you do not have any evidence of this and therefore cannot act in relation to it.
This approach helps defuse the situation.
It acknowledges the learner’s position while also reminding them that they were in the wrong.
It draws attention to the fact that you are acting as fairly as possible given the evidence at your disposal, while not questioning the integrity of their argument (which may or may not be true, but which it serves no benefit to challenge).
In my experience, this usually dampens any ill-feeling and helps the learner understand why they are getting a sanction, even if some of their peers have managed to avoid one.
