It’s as easy as 1-2-3: The importance of contextualised behaviour routines and mentoring support for beginning teachers

Jessie is starting to assume more responsibility for her classes.  So far, she’s taught around 15 whole lessons, but hasn’t had to do any teaching completely independently.  Her mentor, Jasdeep, has always been on hand to step in if behaviour started to creep out of control or Jessie was struggling with curriculum content.

Last week Jessie and Jasdeep agreed to increase her timetable.  She was excited to begin teaching sequences of lessons and have a day teaching 4 lessons back-to-back.  She felt ready to take on the challenge. 

However, this week has been a disaster.  Jessie has prepared her lessons carefully and the feedback from class teachers about the lesson content has been pretty good.  The problem has been behaviour.  As Jasdeep and the other teachers have taken a less interventionary approach, Jessie has had to manage increasing ‘low level disruption’ in her classroom.  She knows what she should do – she’s practised it enough – but she just can’t find the will to do it.  How can she get the pupils to listen? 

But managing behaviour in a classroom is as easy as counting to 3, right?

Jessie’s story will sound familiar to beginning teachers and their mentors.  All too often the pressure of having to enact a lesson in its entirety means the carefully learnt and practised behaviour strategies, successfully implemented in their early weeks of teaching practice, seem to fade.  These beginning teachers know the theory of what to do to manage a classroom and they can replicate this theory in the context of low (or even high) stakes practise.  However, sometimes, in the reality of the classroom, the pressure of trying to remember and implement multiple aspects of the lesson can become too much.  In these instances, beginning teachers forget what to do in the moment or even simply lose the will to execute their behaviour strategies or employ the behaviour policy they’ve so carefully learnt to use.    

What do beginning teachers need to help them get back on track? 

As I explained in a previous blog, beginning teachers need to first recognise that low level behaviour challenge (continuing to talk over the teacher or fellow pupils when they should be paying attention, the rocking on chairs, the tearing up bits of paper and scattering them over the floor, the disassembling or incessant tapping of pens etc.) has a big impact on the classroom and learning environment.  This is a big hurdle; most beginning teachers start their teacher training with the belief that ‘a little bit of chatting’ doesn’t hurt, and it can take them time to notice and recognise the impact low level disruption is having on learning.  Once they’ve realised they need to act, beginning teachers then need to be taught strategies and techniques they can employ in the classroom and given opportunities to practise.  But, even then, it doesn’t always translate into their day-to-day classroom practice.   

Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about the importance of how the behaviour strategies beginning teachers learn and practise are used in context. For example, very often I see beginning teachers doing their 3-2-1 countdown, believing they are implementing the strategy and being flummoxed as to why it’s not working.  What they can’t see in the moment is that their countdown in the busyness of the classroom bears no resemblance to the way they did it in their low stakes or focused high-stakes practise. 

Instead of:

“Ok class, I’m expecting pens down and all eyes on me in silence in 3 – well done Bobby and Asif you did that really quickly – and 2 – great to see all of this side of the classroom sitting silently waiting – and [waits expectantly using hand signal until everyone is following the instruction] 1, thank you everyone” [launches into the explanation/ instruction etc.]

All too often I see:

“Ok class, please could you finish and be quiet in 3-2-1 [said so rapidly that very few follow the instruction, but the countdown continues], perfect” [40% of the class are still doing the activity or are chatting].

They might be using their toolkit strategy, but the application of that strategy has been lost in translation when under pressure. 

A further issue facing beginning teachers, is their tendency to swap to a new strategy when it does not immediately work, rather than giving the approach time to embed as a routine.  Having a range of techniques to draw upon in response to the situation is important, but chopping and changing the approach can become confusing for pupils.  Behaviour expectations need to be clearly communicated and taught – this takes time. Similarly, beginning teachers are prone to drawing on their toolkit without reference to the context in which they are working.  The most effective classroom management of low-level behaviour usually happens when the approaches being implemented work in accordance and harmony with the school policies – it is phenomenally hard for a beginning teacher to be effective when trying to implement their own strategies in isolation and against the grain of the rest of the school. 

What can mentors do to support their mentees to make their practise become part of their practice?

Help the beginning teacher to notice when to act without stepping in and doing it for them

I’m a big fan of supporting mentees to self-reflection through filmed lessons, but this obviously does not help beginning teachers to make live adaptations.  Another technique, to spur ‘in the moment’ action, can be to use a mini-whiteboard (MWB) as a sort of cue card for the beginning teacher.  When the mentor notices a low level behaviour problem starting to rumble, they write a prompt on the MWB to direct their mentee to act e.g. “RHS, chatting – give C1”.  They then display the MWB so it is visible only to the mentee, providing them with a prompt to intervene.  I’ve seen this work really successfully, although it can lead to cognitive overload for some beginning teachers.  The aim is always that support is suitable for the beginning teacher’s needs and gradually withdrawn. 

Help the beginning teacher to notice and adopt the routines of the school/ department/ supporting colleague

It’s important we help beginning teachers to work in accordance with their own teacher persona, but they usually experience greater success in managing behaviour when they adopt the routines and strategies of the context in which they are working.  Spending time helping them to identify when, where and how the strategies they’ve learnt in their teacher education programme are used in the context, modelling and explicitly unpicking the reason why these routines have impact in your classroom/ school, is incredibly important if they are to implement them for themselves.  Where classrooms are usually well ordered, behaved and focused, making explicit the micro-decisions and routines that have led to this effective behaviour management is crucial – it’s important beginning teachers don’t get left with the “well they behave for me” message and assume this positive classroom environment is unobtainable for them. 

Help the beginning teacher to select and then practise their key behaviour routine as a focused target

We can also help beginning teachers to understand that behaviour expectations are learnt and that they are learning these as well as the pupils!  This means they need to be insistent, consistent and PERSISTENT in their application of behaviour routines, going with it over and over and over again, using the systems until the behaviour expectation sticks with them and their pupils. This can take a long time.  Mentors can help their mentees identify their key behaviour routines and focus on practising these in the context of particular classes, and supporting with targeted observations and post lesson reflective conversations.  To reduce some of the cognitive demands on the beginning teacher trying to focus on behaviour management, the mentor can select lessons for behaviour observations where the mentee has high confidence around the subject knowledge or where they are teaching a lesson they’ve already taught to a parallel group.

Help the beginning teacher by focusing on more than behaviour

Importantly, for the sake of the mentee’s well-being, motivation and holistic development as a teacher, it is important their targets do not begin to feel like ground hog day.  Sadly, it is easy for mentoring conversations to become almost exclusively focused on behaviour – this is tough on beginning teachers who need time to develop. It can also detract from their wider development.  Allocating specific behaviour management targets needs to be balanced by targets focused upon curriculum, planning and pupil learning, as without these changing the behaviour serves no purpose anyway.

It’s as easy as 1-2-3

Jessie is going to be a great teacher.  Even in her ‘disaster week’ she has planned lessons which provided effective opportunities for pupils to learn.  With the support of her mentor she will begin to understand when, where and how to implement her behaviour management strategies.  It won’t be long before she’s saying it’s as easy as “Eyes on me in 1– 2 – 3”.