Creating a Calm Classroom Environment: Strategies and Resources for Teachers

1. What attributes help teachers to secure a calm, purposeful and cooperative working atmosphere in the classroom?

2. What will be most helpful in enabling you to get better at it? • Practice- doing it in the classroom • Watching experienced teachers doing it • Advice from hardened “combat veterans” • Reading about it • Lectures and seminars • Talking about it with fellow students

3. Initial teacher education and pupil behaviour – what next? TDA’s NQT survey -2006

4. TDA’s NQT survey -2007

5. Haydn, T. (2009) Initial teacher education and the management of pupil behaviour • What experiences, resources and interventions do students find helpful? In Innovations and Development in Initial Teacher Education: proceedings of the 2008 ESCalate Conference: 153-59. • Online at: http://escalate.ac.uk/5618

6. ‘Impact’ learning • Not just a question of giving it more time/slots etc. (Bramble, 2007.. You could devote whole course to it and still there would be some….) • Inputs can be • a) helpful • b) ‘neutral’ • c) worse than useless • Plus – they forget stuff.

7. Joe Elliott, B4L Conference, University of Warwick 24 May 2007 It’s about a set of complex and sophisticated skills which can be learned if you are intelligent, open to learning and conscientious: Composure (‘Coping’)(*r/eye)/Awareness (‘keeping an eye out’)* Handling ‘overlapping’ (‘trafficlighting’)* Positioning*/Eye contact/Body language Coming into the room/Beginnings of lessons/ Transitions/Endings/Sending clear messages*/ Voice/Verbal interaction with pupils*/Timing (‘pace’)/Planning/Warmth-distance continuum/ Understanding strength of your position in different circs*/ Initiative with resources/sense of audience*

8. The ontology of managing pupil behaviour – what is there to think about? • Planning for learning – stirring and settling activities, interplay of high and low value activities • Skills of interaction with pupils – tone, manner, confidence • Subject pedagogy – ability to motivate and engage pupils in the subject, differentiation, broad grasp of purposes of subject • Understanding pupils (Holt quote, Frasier extract) • Literature – Rogers, Cowley etc. • Understanding of school contexts and systems • Control skills – adroit use of rewards and sanctions • Learning from other teachers (differences within as well as between schools) • Reflective practice and self-awareness (it’s not genetic - Joe Elliott B4L Conference Keynote 2007) • ‘It depends’ – no easy, universal formula (‘moving pupils’ and ‘getting class quiet’ extracts)

9. Impact resources…(‘It even made me cry when they showed that bit from the Unteachables video’.’) • Problematising issues and stimulating thought and discussion, not ‘giving the answers/solutions • 10 point scale: the working atmosphere in the classroom (see handout) • DVD extracts • Well chosen texts/quotes (Heafford, Cowley, Maclennan, Holt) • Pupil testimony

10. A ten point scale for thinking about the working atmosphere in the classroom – see handout. Level 3? Level 5? Some Level 10s

11. Teacher testimony… • ‘Getting them quiet….’ • ‘Coping…’ • ‘Sending pupils out…’ • ‘Moving/seating plans…’ • Stenhouse idea: the purpose of educational research is for teachers to test ideas out against their own experience. • Joe Elliott: complex set of sophisticated skills that you develop over time….. • (Plus a place for instruction/advice…) • Use of metaphors – are you a hobnob or a rich tea biscuit?