Research School Network: When the Adults Change, Everything Changes: a review. The central themes should have everyone in agreement, even if we might quibble the details.

The last book I read on behaviour in schools was Sue Cowley’s ​‘Getting the Buggers to Behave’, which was swiftly followed by ​‘How to Survive Your First Year in Teaching’, which should give you an indication of the educational mindset in 2003. Now 16 years on, Paul Dix’s guide ​‘When the Adults Change, Everything Changes’ rides a similar wave: teachers still struggle to manage pupils in the classroom and beyond, thus behaviour ​‘manuals’ are ever present across the years; however – like Cowley – his ideas don’t feel that seismic or arguable.

Dix advocates 5 pillars of practice which he details through the book: consistent, calm adult behaviour; first attention for best conduct; relentless routines; scripting difficult interventions; restorative follow-up.

Through these 5 pillars, he manages to walk the line between opposing behaviourist movements in education: ​‘ban the booth’ versus no excuses. It is a very difficult line to walk, and he falls off it occasionally. Early on, he states that ​‘for everyone’s benefit, some children and some adults need to go elsewhere’, but in a later chapter spends pages exhorting against exclusion and sanctions, without repeating his previous sentiment of it can’t work all the time with all children. It does feel like a salient truth that sanctions don’t manage behaviour for all students, and he makes the terrifying comment that ​‘sanction-orientated behaviour systems’ are being imposed on the ​‘poor’, which brings absolute shudders. He might be right.

The central notions of consistency and certainty will warm the cockles of any staunch disciplinarian’s heart, although Dix tempers this with concepts such as ​‘visible kindness’ and ​‘deliberate botheredness.’ He advocates meeting and greeting at the classroom door to set up a level of kindness about the entrance to classrooms, quite rightly advocating relationships as key to seeing behavioural improvements in pupils. He also focuses on consistency in his first chapter, which echoes everything evidence-based educational research would concur with, particularly the EEF guidance reports on Improving Behaviour in schools and also the Implementation guide.

The level of certainty which he goes to extends to the idea of creating ​‘micro-scripts’ so that responses to poor behaviour can be removed from a teacher’s emotion reaction, and also sets up a consistent response. Although Dix seems to be aiming his book at teacher level, there are schools which have taken micro-scripts whole-school to ensure consistency – the chapter on routines is also clearly aimed at the classroom teacher managing their own context, which all feels bizarre for him not to extend to explicitly encouraging whole-school consistency.

Amongst his ​‘keystone classroom routines’, Dix starts to delve into the world of teaching and learning in a couple of his suggested routines. Of course behaviour and T&L are linked, but there isn’t going to be enough time in a tome about behaviour to expound the virtues of ​‘reflective questioning’, and I am not certain about his next one: ​‘eliciting success criteria’. The notion seems sound, but his description of sitting on the floor with the children above him calling out their ideas whilst he writes on an A3 piece of paper makes it start to wobble more than a little bit.

There will be some features of his thinking which will upset some people: he doesn’t like names on boards for negative reasons but turns the idea on its head and only advocates using boards for positive recognition. There are schools who have a system-wide policy of using the board negatively, and feel they have classrooms where good learning takes place because of that.

He also calls most reward systems ​‘token currencies’ which are ​‘corrupt’ due to the inconsistency with which the rewards are given out. He’s got a point with that one – as he says, even within one teacher there can be inconsistency in handing out rewards: What day is it? Have you had a coffee recently? Did you get so into teaching and the pupils were so engrossed that you entirely forgot, but then remembered the following lesson and so ​‘to make up for it’, handed them out like smarties (whatever ​‘them’ is in your reward currency), thus devaluing the whole thing?

Yeah, that. As I say, he may have a point.

Where I think Dix may well be particularly difficult for some school leaders to swallow is in his discussions of the teacher not passing on the ​‘tab of responsibility’. Quite a few schools now have centralised systems which remove the ​‘load’ of behaviour from the teacher in whose classroom the behaviour occurred in the first place. He rails against systems such as these, stating that if the teacher where the behaviour occurred doesn’t address this with the student, then the relationship will never be repaired.

Whilst everyone may not concur with me, I think there is a middle ground which schools can adapt to their context, managing to support teachers and middle leaders from the time-consuming nature of the mechanisms of behaviour responses, whilst also enabling those staff to manage their own classrooms and maintain positive relationships with the students in it.

The central themes of When the Adults change should have everyone in agreement, even if we might quibble the details. The aspects of certainty and consistency which Dix advocates should run central to anything and everything that is implemented in an educational establishment – and you can’t argue with that.

By Ro King