Once the classroom becomes the place for oppositional behaviour from a significant number of young people the game is up. Teachers will find themselves faced with dissidents, passive observers and, occasionally, the odd supporter/sympathiser.
There are few worse places for an adult to be than the classroom when self-esteem is consistently attacked by a group of young people. It happens quite often in my view but it is avoidable, even in a school (and there are some) where oppositional behaviour is the norm.
What creates positive classroom relationships? Google ‘climate for learning’ for the big picture; you’ll find stuff like, “A positive, caring, respectful climate in the classroom is a prior condition to learning.” John Hattie, ‘Visible learning’.
Creating that climate starts with your induction programme with a new teaching group and the first few lessons which model relationships and shape expectations.
Most schools have some sort of induction programme. At secondary level they focus on easing transfer and establishing the school’s expectations of new students, which, sadly, usually means rules.
There should be a subject induction too of course at secondary level and, personally, I don’t think it’s a great idea to start by emphasising hard work and loading kids up with homework.
It’s worth spending a lot of time on induction (planning and delivering); think of it as an investment.
Here’s one set of activities which are worth trying for sharing expectations and winning hearts and minds. Activities like this might mean the classroom is a place to enjoy rather than a place which you struggle to control.
A Couple of Ground rules:
- They have pretty well all chosen to sit with one or more friends because new schools are scary. That’s fine but explain that, over time, everyone in the room will be working with everyone else in the room (including the teacher);
- in these lessons everyone in the room helps everyone else. That doesn’t mean there’s no competition; it means everyone in the room (including the teacher) is competing against their own past best performance and helping everyone else in the room to do the same.
Aim of the lesson: to work out what we want from school and how to get it.
Activity 1: Put a few near desks/tables together to form work groups of four or five. On a piece of scrap paper each pupils/students jot down four things they need to get from school and four things they’d like to get from school. They don’t talk about it with others in the group, just spend time thinking about it.
The teacher and 1 of the groups will do the same task from the teacher’s point of view rather than the pupils’, i.e. what four things the teacher needs to get from school etc. The teacher has pre-prepared his/her aspirations to show later.
Activity 2: Pupils/students pass the papers round until everyone in the group has seen all the answers, then group discussion and questioning around what has been written. Each group builds its composite list.
Activity 3: Having agreed a composite list, pupils/students work individually then as a group to produce a composite list of what they have to do and what has to happen if their first list is going to be achieved.
Activity 4: Whole group sharing: each group in turn offers 1 point not already given to build a composite list from activity 1-3 and activity 4. Leave space for comment and discussion. It’s a good idea to leave the teacher list till last; first take the group’s ideas and then share your own.
What you’ll end up with is a two-way contract (make something of it!), a collaborative rather than an oppositional classroom and some identified strugglers with awkward attitudes or self-evidently low self-esteem. If you’re not one of the ones with the low self-esteem you’ll know how to help these young people along with the rest of the group.
