“One of the mantras in teacher training is that good lesson planning leads to good behaviour,” says Sam Strickland. “That just isn’t true.”
Strickland is a principal with decades of experience, and he says ensuring students behave in every lesson is a possibility, but it’s not enough to just plan a quality lesson. You also have to plan with behaviour in mind - and this is something that not enough teachers currently do.
“Explicitly planning for good behaviour is a big gap in the profession. You need to spend just as much time on it as you do on curriculum and subject knowledge,” he says.
Time for planning positive behaviour, says Strickland, should be factored into a teacher’s planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time. However, he doesn’t think teachers should tackle this part of the job alone; they need to be led by the school leadership team.
“The school needs to take responsibility, first and foremost, for laying out the parameters and behavioural expectations the school community are working towards,” he says.
“Behaviour is the bedrock upon which everything else is built. If behaviour isn’t in place, you can’t deal with positive culture, teaching and learning, or pedagogical approaches, because, ultimately, none of it will work.”
Having a strong whole-school behaviour policy in place is one part of the puzzle, then. But every teacher also needs to be proactive in setting aside the time to plan for positive behaviour within their lessons, Strickland says.
“Once the door shuts, it’s you and 30 pupils, and very rarely is there anyone that’s going to come in to help you,” he explains. “If it all goes wrong, and that happens five times a day, every day, it can become quite an unpleasant existence as a teacher.”
Planning for positive behaviour: the key steps
So what does planning for positive behaviour actually look like? Strickland says it’s something that should begin at the start of the year.
Either alone, or as a department, consider your classes, and ask yourself key questions (see box below) around the expectations you have, and how those will be realised in the classroom. At the centre of every teacher’s approach, he says, needs to be a key set of routines.
When executed well and applied consistently, these can ensure the behaviour of the whole class stays on track, says Strickland. He gives handing out equipment as an example.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for pupils to misbehave when you’re handing something out very slowly,” he says. “Instead, have all the equipment on desks, ready to go, before they even enter the classroom.”
He also urges teachers to think about routines around entrance and exits, and how long you give to transitions like packing away.
“In terms of entrance routines, staff should consider standing at the threshold of their classroom to welcome pupils to their class/lesson and use positive language to welcome pupils, for example: ‘Good morning Masie, it is lovely to see you, let’s give 100 per cent again today. We are going to have an amazing lesson’,” he says.
“The teacher should then consider what happens in the lesson. For example, use a ‘Do Now’ or retrieval practice starter, which the pupils can instantly engage with. The key here is to avoid wasting lesson time and make sure they get stuck into the learning.”
Strickland also suggests devoting the last five to seven minutes of a lesson to an exit routine: in the first two minutes, pupils should pack away their books and equipment, and then stand behind their desks. For the remaining five minutes, the teacher engages the pupils with a Q and A session or gets the class to chorally chant key knowledge delivered in that lesson.
“This allows the teacher to check for understanding,” he says. “The class should then be dismissed one table or row at a time, to allow for an orderly end to the lesson.”
It’s really important, Strickland adds, that if you’re a secondary teacher, you use the same routines for behaviour across all of your classes, to maintain consistency.
“You have to have sky-high expectations about your routines that apply to all your classes,” he says. “If you start to dampen them for different groups of pupils, you’re actually lowering the bar of expectation.”
The key to making sure this works is what you put in place around the routines, he says. A lower-ability class, for example, may need a lot more praise and encouragement than a higher-attaining class.
Strickland also recommends planning to use specific routines within your lessons that pupils will become familiar with.
“When you’re checking for understanding, you ask a question, and it’s usually the same three or four pupils that respond, and by default, the other 26 pupils become passengers,” he says.
“How do you know that the other 26 pupils in the room actually understand what’s being discussed? You need to ask them for the answer, too - you may hear the same thing repeated 30 times in a class, but that’s really important because you want to make sure everyone is engaging in the learning.”
“I would personally also ask students to chant at points in time,” he says. “If there are three key pieces of factual knowledge you need your class to know, I’d get them to chant those definitions seven or eight times in that lesson. The more they verbalise it, the more likely it is to sink in.”
These kinds of formulaic teaching techniques, he says, lessen the time and opportunity pupils have to misbehave.
Of course, not every teacher will agree with Strickland here. There are those who see these techniques as being too prescriptive, or not inclusive enough, as some students may struggle to follow strict routines.
However, Strickland pushes back against these criticisms.
“Routines are seen in some quarters as restrictive, inhibiting teacher autonomy and teacher freedom. However, these criticisms miss the point behind routines for learning. Routines provide both staff and pupils with certainty, time, and space and allow for teachers to take more risks and be more creative with their teaching. Routines instil in pupils a sense of order and consistency.”
How to maintain your momentum
It is hard, he admits, to always maintain your momentum with these routines, though - especially during certain points of the year. He’s noticed that mid-November, the end of January and the end of June are common times where behaviour wanes.
“It’s about recalibrating your expectations at those times, reinforcing what it is you want to be communicating. Sometimes you have to take a pause in the lesson, and retrain the pupils,” he says.
“Inevitably, there’ll be points where those habitual behaviours will ebb and flow, where you’ll need to redirect and correct behaviours that you don’t want to see to sustain the culture that you want in your classroom setting.”
Getting to grips with planning for positive behaviour takes time and may require some specific CPD.
But the best first step any teacher can take, Strickland says, is to ask themselves the following questions: what do I want for my class? How do I want my lessons to flow? What does the overall environment need to look like?
The Behaviour Manual: An educator’s guidebook by Sam Strickland is out now
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