CPD Review - Behaviour Management in the Classroom

On Saturday 8th February 2020, Prospero HQ hosted the next session of our 19-20 CPD series: Behaviour Management in the Classroom.

This session is always incredibly popular and it’s not hard to imagine why – who hasn’t experienced challenging behaviour in the classroom? It’s one of the top stressors of teachers and TAs, and great behaviour management is a highly coveted skill by many schools.

The brilliant Katie Hind began this session with a role play where participants played a class of students. Some of our “students” started giggling, some didn’t want to line up, and some carried on talking at the beginning of the session. It was quite eye opening to realise how easy it is to slip into disruptive behaviour, and it helped our participants to understand and empathise with some of the reasons behind poor behaviour.

Katie, an experienced teacher and published children’s author, then led an analysis of the role play to help identify simple strategies to start lessons off right (for more tips on lesson starts – check out this blog).

Our participants role playing difficult behaviour, while one brave participant applies one of our strategies for behaviour management.

Some discussions were had to help identify what qualifies as unacceptable behaviour in the classroom and how to recognise it. Once they knew how to recognise unacceptable behaviour, the participants work-shopped some ways of managing it. They identified ‘proactive’ strategies looking at effective planning, rules and routines for creating a positive environment. This was a great opportunity to share experiences with colleagues and get feedback on the success of different strategies.

They were then challenged to tackle some scenarios in front of their peers, putting into practice the strategies they had learned. It can be a bit nerve wracking to ‘perform’ in front of a crowd, but the participants were reminded that they are teachers – they really do this every day in class! The group was incredibly supportive and along with Katie, gave really useful feedback on the scenarios.

Despite the seemingly daunting topic, our participants did a fantastic job and walked away much more confident in understanding and managing bad behaviour in the classroom – not to mention having had a lot of fun being cheeky students for the day!