Research School Network: If consistency is key, how can we achieve it?

The recent EEF Guidance Report on Improving Behaviour in Schools makes six recommendations for how to improve student behaviour based on the best available evidence.

1. Know and understand your pupils and their influences
2. Teach learning behaviours alongside managing misbehaviour
3. use classroom management strategies to support good classroom behaviour
4. Use simple approaches as part of your regular routine
5. Use targeted approaches to meet the needs of individuals in your school
6. Consistency is key

It’s hard to argue about the importance of these recommendations. Some might place greater emphasis on relationships, whilst others might attach more weight to systems, but there is likely to be little dispute about recommendation 6: the role of consistency in establishing and maintaining good behaviour.

What’s happening in the best classrooms needs to be happening in every classroom, regardless of levels of teacher expertise, seniority or personality. A good behaviour policy helps establish core behavioural expectations and effective leadership provides high levels of support, training and, where necessary, accountability.

Most instances of inconsistency when dealing with behaviour in the classroom are not deliberate or wilful. They happen because amidst the maelstrom that is teaching, things get missed or misapplied. Teachers make mistakes and under pressure can forget what they should be doing or how they should be doing it. Sometimes the message itself is not clear enough.

So, how can we support teachers to be more consistent in the way they apply the principles of the school’s behaviour policy and/​or deploy the strategies they have learned in their training? How can we help behaviour teachers in different classrooms be more consistent with each other and with themselves?

Assuming that the policy itself is sound and has been communicated effectively, there are a number of things that can be done at school and teacher level to improve the way that policy is enacted in classrooms on a daily basis. Some of these are the responsibility of the school’s leadership, others are the responsibility of the teacher.

High quality training

High quality and ongoing training is extremely important in ensuring behaviour is managed consistently across the school. The guidance report recognises the benefits of more extensive forms of training, suggesting that training which takes place over more than 4 days and lasting 10 hours or more is likely to be the most effective.

Wider evidence on professional learning also suggests that iterative and responsive is better than an all in one hit. A number of schools adopt this mantra and provide ongoing whole school coaching on behaviour management as part of their CPD programmes. Think a telegraph model, where key strategies are continually practised and refined, providing opportunities for mistakes to be made and grey areas to be clarified.

Nudges and prompts

One of the simplest and most powerful strategies that teachers can adopt for themselves is the use of nudges, such as the checklist. Prompts like these can help remind teachers what should come next in a given situation, guiding them through tricky moments when their minds are busy juggling the content of the lesson with managing the behaviour of the class.

For example, a few bullet points on a piece of paper stuck to a computer could help remind a teacher how to start their lesson in a calm fashion, helping them to establish a routine. Such a sequence might include a) meet and greet b) set task c) take register d) equipment check e) hand out books. It’s a simple but very effective nudge, particularly for new teachers.

Peer observation

We all have our blind spots. Even the most diligent of us can forget certain things, or think we are doing things one way, when in fact we are not. If there is a particular technique or strategy that a teacher is working on, they might benefit from inviting a second pair of eyes and ears in the room to give them some useful, ​‘objective’ feedback on it.

For instance, a teacher might be working hard on their positioning in the room. They might then decide to ask a colleague to pop into their lesson for 10 – 15 minutes to see whether they are standing where they think they are standing, or whether they are still moving around too much and not acting as a presence in the room. Feedback like this from peers can be really powerful.

Reasonable adjustments

The guidance report draws attention to the value of meeting and greeting students as they enter the classroom. On the surface this sounds pretty straightforward, but in some schools, where teachers have to move around a lot and don’t have their own classrooms, this might be problematic and lead to inconsistency. These problems can be taken into account quite easily.

As a school might make ​‘reasonable adjustments’ to the way a behaviour policy is applied to some students, they might also make reasonable adjustments to the way some teachers are asked to enact whole school strategies. Meet and Greet may need to look slightly different along a busy corridor or where the teacher is a nomad without a classroom to have set up and ready.

What does this look like in practice?

In the same way students learn from models, teachers also require exemplification of abstract principles and strategies. Most people are familiar with the clip of an American teacher greeting each of his students with a personalised fist pump as they enter his classroom. Whilst entertaining, this is not really what the guidance has in mind and is unlikely to be sustainable or desirable across a whole school.

What is needed is a clear and replicable example of what a given strategy – in this case meeting and greeting – should look like in practice. This model can be used as part of the training alluded to earlier, perhaps with multiple examples of teachers enacting the procedure in their classroom context. It’s also here to name these strategies so there is a shared language amongst staff.

As with many areas of education, in school variation is often the greatest barrier to achieving the things that make a difference. What is happening in one classroom or corridor is often very different to what is happening elsewhere around the school. And so is true of behaviour in lessons – even in schools deemed by the inspectorate to have high levels of poor behaviour, it is very unlikely there is poor behaviour in every classroom.