All behaviour communicates information, whether intentionally or not.

Some of this communication is a direct result of what the person does.

Some of it is a result of how the person who experiences the behaviour interprets it.

Much behaviour has the intention of communicating messages.

For example, I might stand up to greet you when you enter a room, communicating respect and friendship.

Or I might cross my arms when someone is telling me something I don’t want to hear, communicating displeasure and a closed-off attitude.

However, we are not always aware of the messages our behaviour communicates.

This is particularly true of children and young adults who are still learning about how to behave.

And it can lead to problems.

A learner may behave in a way they think communicates a certain message, whereas their behaviour may be interpreted quite differently by the teacher who sees it.

Alternatively, a learner may engage in certain behaviours without even realising the kind of messages they are giving off.

We can illustrate this as follows:

A Year 9 learner is bored and wants the teacher to know this, so they put their head on their desk.

The teacher sees this behaviour and interprets it as a direct challenge to their authority.

This is because they see the learner behaving in a way that is completely unacceptable in adult life.

Now, I am not suggesting that it is necessarily OK for the learner to communicate their boredom (as adults, we know that boredom is a fact of life that must be accepted at certain times).

Yet, what we can see from the example is how, because they are learning about behaviour, learners can sometimes fail to understand the actual content of the message their behaviour communicates.

In addition, we see here an illustration of the earlier point about the interpretation of behaviour.

When we act, we are not in complete control of the communication those actions convey.

This is because communication is always a two-way street between audience and producer.

You are reading this blog and making your own interpretations of its content, just as I am writing it with the intention of communicating my own thoughts to you.

Two points follow from this:

• First, we need to teach learners what their behaviour communicates.
• Second, we need to be careful to moderate our own interpretations of learner behaviour.

A different example will serve as further demonstration.

Let us imagine we are teaching a class of Year 3 children.

In this group, one child takes a resource from another child without asking.

They snatch it away, wanting it for themselves.

Here, we can see evidence of this child’s lack of appreciation of an important norm underpinning group behaviour: we don’t take things from others without asking.

In dealing with the situation, we would naturally consider it important to explain to the child why what they have done is wrong.

In this process, we would be demonstrating (implicitly or explicitly depending on our use of language) that their behaviour communicated an inappropriate attitude, as well as a lack of consideration for other people’s rights and feelings.

Equally, we would know to moderate our own interpretation of the child’s behaviour.

Experience tells us that children of this age are wont to do things like this, do not act with the same volition as older children, and need to be regularly guided in terms of what is and what is not appropriate.

We would also know that it is part of our job to correct their actions.

So, in the context of the classroom, the communication expressed by children’s behaviour needs to be analysed and responded to in specific ways.

When doing this, we should always keep in mind:

• That behaviour is learned.
• That behaviour can be changed.
• That part of the teacher’s role is to be a teacher of behaviour, helping learners understand what is and what isn’t acceptable as they grow.