From my first few years teaching physics in a comprehensive, to life in a selective independent school to my time in special schools, my experiences, successes and failures have steadily shaped my views on behaviour. I am not ashamed to admit that I have changed my mind many times.

For example, ever heard of proximity praise? I cannot remember the precise time I learned of this idea, nor can I remember from whom I learned about it, but I do remember thinking it was a good thing. I don’t now. I hate it, in fact.

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Proximity praise goes something like this - Liam, Hannah and Reece are sat at a desk and Liam and Reece have done exactly as you asked. They have their books out and are busy working.

Hannah is not. She’s swinging on her chair and talking loudly to her friends on the desk behind.

The wrong approach to behaviour

Instead of dealing with Hannah directly, proximity praise tells you to point out Liam and Reece, and to thank them, for doing the right thing. Hannah is then supposed to have a Damascene moment and see the errors of her ways, chucking in the towel of disruption because she wants some of the praise that is being doled out to Reece and Liam.  

I can’t work out, from this distance in time, why I liked this approach - it was at odds with much of what I did in those days and I’m now of the view that this is an approach that is highly unlikely to succeed.

Yet at the time, I adopted it completely uncritically - and this is a significant problem in our profession.

Thinking it through

James Pembroke (@jpembroke) talks extremely persuasively on how we do the same with assessment - we invent spurious numerical frameworks to feed the insatiable data machine so we can show how all our students seemingly make smooth, linear progress.

We should be far more critical, as teachers, when looking at different approaches to improving behaviour. I see time and again ideas, policies and gimmicks rolled out without enough thought as to how they align with the values of the school, if at all.

We know for sure that lasting behaviour change takes time, so something shiny that catches your eye on Twitter on a sunny Sunday morning won’t magically work in a classroom on a wet Monday afternoon.

Jarlath O’Brien works in special education in London and is the author of Better Behaviour - a guide for teachers