During the past two years I’ve been on a rapid learning curve in my role as a basketball mum. I am still learning the rules of the game so this week, as I found myself watching a professional league basketball match, I was still having to seek clarification about refereeing decisions and turns in the play. However, I needed no support in understanding the mood of the court. From the moment I walked in I could feel the heavy febrile atmosphere – that same feeling you get when a thunderstorm is approaching. This was new. The game the previous week, and those I’d seen before that, had not felt like this. Something was about to kick off.
Then I realised. I knew this because it was reminiscent of the feeling that hangs in the air when you are lucky enough to teach Year 8 on a Friday period 4, after a lunchtime in which words have been exchanged and the overtures of a fight have occurred. This was going to be, at best, a 4 on The Haydn Scale. My companions looked at me quizzically as I said this: How could I predict the nature of the match on a feeling about the so called ‘atmosphere’? But the row behind me erupted with cries of agreement. I later discovered they were all teachers.
Explicitly Teaching Behavioural Noticing and Intervention
It occurred to me that, rather like my companions, beginning teachers often don’t sense a change in the weather of the classroom even when it seems really obvious to their mentors because this instinct is something that comes with experience. A cross word exchanged as pupils pass in the corridor, subtle elbowing in the line outside the classroom, a bag slammed down on the desk, or a chair noisily pulled back from the table, can all foreshadow a difficult lesson to come. However, until you’ve understood how teachers anticipate and intervene to prevent such situations from bubbling over, it is really hard to spot them yourself and take the pre-emptive actions required to nip these issues in the bud.
Sure enough, the basketball match was exciting and fast paced but also predictably volatile and heated. It included more fouls, with a number of players actually being sent off (including an ejection, for those of you who are basketball minded), than any other game I have previously watched.
“How did you know it was going to be like that?” my companions asked on the way home.
“The same way the teachers behind us knew – we could feel it because we’ve seen it before”, I replied.
And then I explained, the differences I’d observed. The chanting and banging of the spectators was louder and more edgy, the players’ body language as they came out on the court had more swagger, the marking was more intimidating from moment of tip off, and the celebration following each basket that was more exaggerated than I’d seen in these professional matches before.
Sensing the changing the weather of the classroom is a really important skill for beginning teachers to develop. Mentors might be rightly proud of their own classroom management skills and the near perfect behaviour and learning environment they have achieved as a result. However, if a mentor finds behaviour management a walk in the park, they might not actually be helping their mentee; this often doesn’t actually help the beginning or early career teacher to understand how they can achieve this too. Beginning and early career teachers need to observe, in real life situations, how classroom management is deliberately employed to create purposeful learning and stop challenging situations bubbling over. And they need their mentors to narrate and teach them about behaviour explicitly, rather than expecting them to understand instinctively or simply pick up as they go along.
Teachers will usually get better at spotting, anticipating, and taking appropriate actions to pre-empt and deescalate behaviour challenges, as their experience develops, but they also usually need explicit training in classroom management to get them there. With the right kind of support, they too will be able to sense a change in the weather.
Becoming a History Teacher 