When looking to develop excellent behaviour management, it is a good idea to sit down and work out in advance what norms you want to see in your classroom and what values you feel are most important in the context of teaching and learning.
Having done this, you should rank these, to provide yourself with a clear sense of what is most important to you and why.
Some norms and values may be of equal importance to you, others may be relatively more or less important.
If you don’t know what norms and values you want to promote, it is harder for you to communicate clearly and consistently with your learners.
In addition, you may struggle to identify what it is you are trying to work towards.
Having a clear indication of the norms and values you want means having a sense of your ultimate goal: the behaviour you want to see in your classroom.
It is also important to rank the norms and values, even if this is only rough and ready.
Inevitably, there will be times when different norms and values come into conflict.
For example, you might value both independence and respecting the authority of the teacher.
On occasion, a situation might arise where these two values cannot both be fulfilled at the same time.
Therefore, you will need to prioritise one and use this as the basis of your decision-making.
Deciding in advance what is most important to you means you have a critical lens through which to make decisions.
While this cannot guarantee you will always make the right decision, it does increase the likelihood that you will.
This is because your judgements will be founded on a prior analysis of what matters.
As such, you can avoid the potentially damaging influence of spur-of-the-moment emotional reactions and feel confident that the time you took to analyse matters in advance does not need to be repeated every time a difficult decision comes your way.
Here are three techniques you can use to help specify your desired norms and values.
Visualise your ideal classroom
Think about what it looks like.
Ask yourself what the learners are doing, how they are working, what attitudes they display, the level of effort they put in, the characteristics of their behaviour, how they interact with you and each other, what the atmosphere feels like, the kind of work they produce, and the way in which they deal with setbacks.
Doing this gives you your norms.
It shows you what unwritten rules you would like your learners to follow.
Make a note of them, refine them if necessary, and then set about ranking them.
Consider the different tasks and activities that will happen in your lessons
Think about starter, main and plenary activities, about group, pair and individual work.
Think also about the times when you will be talking, the discussions learners will be having, and about the very start and end of your lessons.
In each case, your aim is to consider what you want, in an ideal world, in each of these situations.
Doing so will give you a collection of norms.
Some of these will be specific to certain lesson elements, others will be general.
Make a note of them, refine them if necessary, and then set about ranking them.
You can use this method as an alternative to the first technique, or in conjunction.
Sit in your classroom and look around the room
Imagine learners filing in and out of there during the year.
Ask yourself the questions:
- What do I want my learners to know is important?
- What values do I want to teach them?
Doing this in context helps draw out the importance of values.
It also makes it easier to connect essentially abstract concepts to the concrete reality of your classroom.
The process may take a bit longer than you expect.
This is for two reasons.
First, we take many of our beliefs for granted.
This is because they are so much a part of our thinking that they can easily fade into the background.
Second, articulating fundamental principles in which we believe and that we want to promote can be tricky.
Capturing such deep meaning is not always straightforward.
When you have your values, make a note of them and then rank them.
Finally, ask yourself how you want to share these with learners.
(As an aside, one technique for establishing the values underpinning your thought is to look at the norms you want and to work backwards from there. This involves examining the reasoning upon which the norms rest. In so doing, you will be able to draw out the values that give ultimate meaning to the norms.)
