Behaviour Management Strategies

Strange that it's taken me a whole term to fully notice, but my class dynamic seems to have produced a group of individuals who happen to be in the same class - rather than a group of individuals who work together as a team, appreciating one-anothers' strengths, abilities, and personalities.

This seems to have led to difficulties in managing whole-class teaching and discussions, with students regularly talking over, past, through, each other giving not much thought to the importance of a class of 30 individuals needing to work together, show patience, and respect one another.

So this term is a focus on working together as a 'team'. In fact, my purposeful discourse now includes the word 'team' a whole heck of a lot.

One aspect of my own ideology is that of promoting intrinsic motivation, so I have been slow to put in place behaviour management strategies that give external motivation. This is generally based on the overlying assumption that external motivation has a limited period of affect, and dwindles in power over a period of time.

All that being said, this week I started a 'marble jar' which has 30 marbles in it representing 30mins of games time on a Friday afternoon. Marbles come out and go in based on how well students (or how much time saved/wasted in) settling and working in ways that promote good learning habits - especially as a team.

So, from day one I have noticed students very responsive to the sound of me rolling marbles in my hand to signal a possible decrease in the jar, as well as indications of marbles going to be added. My only hope is that the students' work habits will become second-nature before the external motivation wanes in power.

Reading Contracts and Target Box under-way

Well, this week I started a couple of ideas from my Harry Hood professional development course.  Both are programmes that I will run for four weeks, then switch over for the second half of term.

The reading contract I have set up integrates with our energy/electricity topic study and has students generating questions to research and then present an interactive learning centre for other students to view.  I will see this group (of capable readers) once a week for a specific reading skills teaching session.  I have been impressed with their positive attitude and engagement in self-directed independent work.

The other group (of fairly confident readers) I have on a reading mileage programme called 'target box' where over four weeks they will be aiming to read as many (mostly short) books as possible.  They also have a list of possible follow-up activities to choose from, which they do on a 3:1 basis.  That is, they can choose one follow up activity for one in every 3 books/articles they read.

Both have got off to a good start, and I hope this will allow me time to focus some planning for the more regular teacher sessions I have with my other two lower reading groups.