Plain Sailing In Schools

Many schools are today realising that they need to do much more to encourage pupils to want to learn. Some schools have adopted a system called promoting positive learning (PPL). This system relies on mutual respect between staff and pupils and on staff working positively with pupils to encourage good learning outcomes.

Where PPL is used, staff are encouraged to use as much positive praise as possible to reinforce good behaviour and ensure that maximum learning occurs. I have just today come back from visiting a trainee teacher on a placement, and positive reinforcement was a major topic of our conversation. I have seen so many teachers get totally consumed by the negative behaviour of certain individuals in their class. Not only does this take up valuable teaching time for those who want to learn, but it is also very stressful and draining for the teacher to have to be constantly nagging. Far better is to focus on the pupils who are behaving appropriately and positively.

As a guideline for PPL, it is suggested that in any lesson, a teacher should try to use positive praise at least three times more often than they use negative comments. Many schools offer rewards to pupils for sustained good effort and learning outcomes. Many primary schools offer stars or stickers on a chart, or in their exercise books. When they have been awarded a certain number, they are then given a prize. In some secondary schools, funding has been found to award special merit prizes of a bike, or a DVD player. Other schools also have a commendation system where staff identify pupils who have worked well and receive a letter home to their parents highlighting their achievement.

This notion of giving rewards has raised many questions recently, so I ask you:

What are your views on offering stickers, stars, stamps, certificates to children for behaving correctly or working hard?

Many people believe that too many rewards lead to a culture of young people who always expect to be given something back in return for doing the right thing. Many years ago, we used to call this bribery!

As is the case with many systems like this, schools will adopt and adapt a system that best suits their own ethos and needs. I know one secondary school where the merit system is used for the first three years, and then in Years 10 and 11, pupils are awarded credits in card form. At the end of each term there is a prize draw, so the more credits a pupil has, the higher their chance of winning the star prize.

Pupil planners are also being used more in schools as a way of keeping parents informed about behaviour and merits or awards received. Pupils are given a diary for the year, which has additional room for comments which parents and teachers sign each week. In the diary, parents can record reasons for absence and teachers can record merits awarded or information about behaviour, concerns about homework, and so on.

Does your school allocate pupil planners?
If so, how successful are they?
Are they used effectively?
Can the system be abused by older pupils?

Home/school agreements are a statutory contract between pupils/parents and the school, outlining what each party agrees should occur throughout the year. In some cases, these are built into the pupil planners, including information regarding the school’s expectations about the conduct of its pupils.

How does your school promote positive learning?
What systems work well in your school and why?

It would be good to hear your views, so please feel free to leave a response here.

A report by the Independent Schools Association out today in the UK states that many children are living in a “prison-like environment” surrounded by technology.

John Gibson says that such experience does not prepare children for adult life and schools should challenge this.

Playing conkers and mending bikes helped children in later life, John Gibson told the ISA’s annual conference. Recent research suggests 5 to 16-year-olds are spending up to six hours a day online or watching television.

Mr. Gibson, who is head of Stoke College in Suffolk, said “playing out” as a child and taking part in activities such as putting an oily chain back on a bike, or playing conkers, exposed children to emotions such as disappointment which would prepare them for adulthood.

In his speech to the conference, he said: “When your life is lived through images constructed by a technical genius from Silicon Valley played on high definition screens, I just feel it will be more difficult to experience those important rehearsals for life.”

He went on: “When William Wordsworth wrote 150 years ago that ’shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy’ I believed he was talking mainly about school. But today’s prison-house is just as likely to be the home, a seductive, comfortable prison for boys and girls whose nimble fingers are adept at working their mobiles and computer games, but have never used them to play conkers.”

He told ISA members – heads of independent schools in England and Wales – that they should offer children a diversity and excellence of experience to challenge the culture of technology in which they live outside school.

In doing so, they should always pay attention to assessing risk, while preparing children for the world they would grow up in, he added.

In a survey by Childwise research agency last autumn, 1,800 children were asked how much time they spent either watching television, on the internet or playing on games consoles.

The survey suggested the children were spending 2.7 hours a day on average watching television, 1.5 hours on the internet and 1.3 hours on games consoles.

A casualty of this amount of screen time had been reading, it suggested. The children questioned were spending just over half an hour a day reading. In particular, older boys were resistant to reading, with 42% of 11 to 16-year-olds saying they never read books for pleasure.

However, playing sport still appeared to be a major part of young people’s lives, representing nearly five hours per week.

What are your views on these findings? Are you a teacher who has noticed the impact on children’s learning. Please leave a response.

There has been a lot in the news recently about how narrow the primary curriculum is in England, especially with the emphasis in recent years on teaching the basics in literacy and numeracy. There are now plans for a major shakeup of the curriculum.

The author of a recent Cambridge University report warns that too much emphasis on testing the basics could “impoverish” learning in areas such as the arts. Professor Robin Alexander says this could mean a “deficient” education.

The report says inadequacies in the primary curriculum stem from a mistaken belief that breadth in the curriculum is incompatible with improved standards in the “basics” of maths, literacy and numeracy. History, geography, science and the arts have been “squeezed out”, it argues. The report’s authors suggest learning in primary schools is skewed towards subjects which are formally tested in the national tests, used to draw up league tables.

The review suggests the primary curriculum should be “re-conceived” with 12 specific aims, which it arranges in three groups:

• The needs and capacities of the individual: wellbeing; engagement; empowerment; autonomy
• The individual in relation to others and the wider world: encouraging respect and reciprocity; promoting interdependence and sustainability; empowering local, national and global citizenship; celebrating culture and community
• Learning, knowing and doing: knowing, understanding, exploring and making sense; fostering skill; exciting the imagination; enacting dialogue.

These aims would be achieved through eight “domains”, rather than a small number of subjects. The domains would be: arts and creativity; citizenship and ethics; faith and belief; language, oracy and literacy; mathematics; physical and emotional health; place and time (geography and history); science and technology.

This seems to me to be quite similar to the framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, along with its’ six areas of learning – the Early Learning Goals. I have always found this to be a very effective model for curriculum planning, and lends itself to a more thematic or ‘topic’ approach, which is how things were done in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It seems fundamental to me that children do not view their learning, or the world, in terms of separate compartmentalised units. In contrast, they need to see that everything is interrelated.

What are you views on this? What impact will it have on teachers?

Schools should band together to provide social workers for unruly pupils and support groups for parents, according to the government’s “behaviour tsar”. The proposals will be among a number of suggestions included in Sir Alan Steer’s report to ministers in April.

Teaching unions say teachers need better support and fewer targets to enable them to better manage behaviour. Sir Alan said the vast majority of pupils are well behaved, despite society’s “negative” perceptions of children. But he believes more can be done earlier to prevent unruly behaviour becoming a serious problem, such as through primary schools jointly funding social work professionals.

Teaching unions have welcomed the idea, providing it does not burden them with more work, but say the real problem is that staff are ill-prepared to deal with bad behaviour. NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said “Behaviour management training is inadequate both in initial teacher training and when teachers are in the job in schools. What’s preventing a lot of teachers from actually being able to manage behaviour effectively is the current school accountability regime which drives teachers to reach numerical targets, to teach to satisfy inspection.”

Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said three in 10 teachers leave the profession in the first five years and unruly behaviour was the main cause.

Sir Alan says a more intelligent approach is needed to combating bad behaviour in the classroom. “If we can extend into schools some other services to support children, to help those children who struggle then we are far more likely to have success,” he said.

What procedures does your school have for dealing with disruptive pupils? Have you got a story you would like to share? Do you think that initial teacher training programmes should build in strategies for behaviour management?