‘So now it seems that we have to teach behaviour explicitly. How do you go about it?’
Yes, so-called ‘effective and explicit classroom management’, which has long been popular in North America, has crossed the Atlantic, thanks in particular to the publication in French of the book by Steve Bissonnette, Clermont Gauthier and Mireille Castonguay.
This book disseminated the principles of this behaviour management method in France. I'll be writing a more general post on this subject soon. This book is written for teachers; it brings together research results on the issue of behaviour management, and I recommend that you read it.
In any case, it's not easy to manage behaviour in the classroom, and it's probably not as easy as it was thirty years ago, for reasons we won't go into here.
What I'm proposing here is that you present a situation to your classes at the start of the year. The idea is to present and justify the expected behaviours. This situation is inspired by the book ‘Réussir ses premiers cours’ by Jean-Michel Zakhartchouk, which I also recommend:
It consists of a table to be completed in class with the pupils. Zakhartchouck's situation table has two columns: ‘Behaviour to avoid’ and ‘Expected behaviour’. We have added a third column: ‘Justification of expected behaviour’.
Below are a few sample lines from the table completed in class with the students:
For the activity sheet, click on this link: https: //www.mathscours.com/espace-enseignants. You can find the preparation sheet for this situation in the ‘Classroom management training’ section.
’ Hey, I've got students too, you expect me to believe that a little situation at the start of the year will help you manage your class? ’
No, there's no magic formula, that's for sure! But it does allow you to discuss and legitimise the system of preventive and corrective behaviour management interventions that you're going to implement later on.
I propose three points for this post:
1. Where do you start when you want to explicitly teach expected behaviours?
2. How do you justify expected behaviours to students?
3. Session sequence
1. Where do you start when you want to implement explicit teaching of expected behaviour?
This is an introductory situation for a sequence of explicit teaching of expected behaviour in the classroom. It has two objectives:
- To agree with the class on a small number of expected behaviours in class;
- To legitimise the expected behaviour by means of values shared in the classroom with the pupils.
In the best cases, this is a team effort: the situation is implemented by the class teacher, and the expected behaviours are then shared by the class teaching team. This list of expected behaviours no longer corresponds to the expected behaviours of Mr What's-his-name's class, but those of all the teachers. Responsibility for the rules is therefore shared. If it's not the result of teamwork, it could be any teacher's first lesson.
The chart completed at the end of the situation is best displayed in the pupils' classrooms. Pointing to a display to stop a misbehaviour during a lesson is practical and avoids interrupting the lesson. You can choose to display only the expected behaviour column, or display two or three columns. Then there are other steps for explicitly teaching the behaviours, but that's for another post!
‘OK, but it's not the beginning of the year, I'm going to do it tomorrow with my class, they're really agitated.’
I wouldn't advise it, unless you want to lose an hour of class... Implementing this situation during the year to solve problems with disrupted classes doesn't work. In this case, the pupils will play with the expected behaviours; the discussion will have no value and will not allow explicit teaching of the expected behaviours to begin. It can, however, be used during the year in specific cases. If a class malfunctions, it is possible to bring in a third party with authority (head teacher, CPE, deputy head teacher, head teacher) and deal with the situation with this third party. But be careful: despite the presence of another adult, you must lead the session from start to finish. It's certainly not up to the third party to do it, if you don't want the pupils to perceive their presence as your inability to manage your classes.
‘But what if the class is difficult with all or most of the teachers?
Another way of putting this situation into practice is to have a class time with part of the teaching team who are prepared to share their expected behaviour.
‘But they've been at school for a long time, they know the expected behaviour by heart, they're going to recite it stupidly, without thinking about it’.
It's true that they know most of the expected behaviour by heart, but you can be surprised with some of them. In any case, with one exception, you're not wrong: the pupils will state the expected behaviours without too much difficulty. Stopping at the point where they say what they're going to do can make the students' contributions seem litany-like and leave the situation feeling unfinished. The real discussion is about the reasons the class has for adopting the behaviour expected in class. This discussion is then an opportunity for the teacher to agree with his pupils on a certain number of values that he and his class will share.
‘What are the values to be shared? Respect, responsibility...?’
2. How do you justify the expected behaviour to the pupils?
This is a question you need to ask yourself, but the values you mention are broad categories. In my opinion, they are not sufficiently anchored in concrete classroom situations for pupils to grasp them. As far as the concept of value is concerned, I rely on the explanation given in Olivier Reboul's book ‘Les valeurs de l'éducation’.
‘But respect and responsibility are values that feature strongly in the book L'enseignement explicite des comportements. Is that the book you recommended earlier?’
You don't have to agree with every line in a book to recommend it, do you! It seems to me that his use of values is a translation of a feature of American public school culture. This use of values is not based on research, unlike much else in the book. Public schools in the United States are supposed to choose two or three cardinal values, and then all the expected behaviours are based on these values. So I'd like to suggest a different approach: start with the behaviour expected of students and justify it in terms of classroom values.
'What do you mean by ‘classroom values’?
I think it's useful to share with pupils values that are specific to the teacher's role in the classroom. It's because of these missions that the institution, the pupils and the parents recognise us as educators. And a teacher's primary mission is to help all the pupils in his or her classes to progress in his or her subject(s). This is in itself a value whose principle is not questioned by pupils, unlike the affirmation of other more general educational values, even if they are no less fundamental. This is why, in the example below, we have chosen to base the behaviour expected in class on the pursuit of the following value: respecting the conditions for learning and progress for each pupil in the class. And this progress for each pupil requires cooperation between pupils and respect for the learning conditions of others; this implies that pupils keep quiet at many times so that everyone has a chance to understand, wait calmly for sheets of paper to be distributed, don't automatically give your answer even if you're proud of it, don't comment out loud on what you hear, don't get agitated when the teacher explains something to pupils, etc. What's more, ‘helping each of our pupils to progress’ is often not considered by our pupils who are experiencing difficulties at school to be our mission as teachers - Unfortunately! It's always good to reaffirm this, even if it means proving it in practice!
‘OK, but does your thing work?’
This situation is the first phase of explicit teaching of expected behaviours. To be effective, it must be combined with a whole range of preventive and corrective behaviour management interventions. Conducting it will not prevent the rules from being broken; on the other hand, we can hope that it will convince the pupils of the validity of the behavioural expectations by legitimising them in their eyes. In short, if you think that implementing this situation will spare you any disruption, you'll be disappointed!
Below is an outline of the session.
3. Course of the session
Preparation
- Draw up a table with three columns. In the first column, write down some behaviours to avoid. The younger the pupils, the fewer you need to avoid stretching the situation. From experience, 5 behaviours to avoid makes the situation already long in 6th and 5th grade. The ‘Expected behaviour’ and ‘Justification’ columns should be completed with the students. However, it is important for the teacher to have prepared in advance what he or she would like to read in these columns, in particular to find language appropriate to the class level that expresses the justifications for the expected behaviours. Blank lines can be left at the end of the table if any pupils wish to add a relevant behaviour to avoid.
- The table is distributed to each pupil in the class. It is stuck in the notebook and kept in the binder. This table (or just the ‘Expected behaviour’ column) is best displayed in class.
Implementation
The pupils share the results line by line, just after they have completed a line, so that all the pupils have the opportunity to grasp the principle of the situation by doing it.
Teacher's instructions
"In the “Behaviour to avoid” column, I've written down some behaviours that annoy me in class. Why do they annoy me? Because they prevent the class from progressing as it should. Because of them, you are not as intelligent in [subject] as you should be at the end of the hour. I suggest you write in pencil in the ‘Expected behaviour’ column the expected behaviour corresponding to the behaviour to be avoided. This expected behaviour should enable us all to learn well together. As you are proposing an expected behaviour, write in the right-hand column ‘Justification of expected behaviour’ why it is essential to adopt it in class.
Correction
Accept the debate; it will emerge that the behaviours to be avoided are human and that they are perhaps not to be avoided in places other than the classroom. Even adults adopt them, but we can still try to overcome them.
The blackboard completed in pen must be the result of a class consensus, in terms of both content and wording. The text must be the same on all the pupils' boards; it's a collective class commitment.
If you feel up to it, the situation can lead to another discussion about the behaviour expected of the teacher:
‘What motivates you? What are the teacher's attitudes that help you learn?
From this discussion, we can see that the behaviours to be avoided have their counterparts on the teacher's side. For example
- Comparing students with each other, which is detrimental to their progress;
- Poorly organised, illegible boards and documents;
- Rushing, which prevents proper learning.
N.d.A.: I'm not saying this every time so as not to make the text too long, but that's just my opinion...
Bình luận