‘How I survived the first year of teaching’, blog by Laura McInerney, 23 March 2013. I thought that this was a very powerful piece of prose which makes the important point (which cropped up in many of the interviews I did with teachers) that it takes time and perseverance to establish excellent working relations with groups of pupils, especially with schools working in challenging circumstances, with limited parental support, and many pupils either disaffected from education, or who find learning and being in classroom difficult. https://lauramcinerney.com/surviving-the-first-year-of-teaching-nqt-teachfirst-trainee-pgce-survived/

Rebooting behaviour after lockdown- Advice to schools reopening in the age of COVID-19, Tom Bennett, Blog, 15/05/20 I thought that this was a very helpful piece, lots of good advice. I particularly liked the point that although it is helpful to try to be consistent, all rules have exceptions. https://behaviourguru.blogspot.com/2020/05/rebooting-behaviour-after-lockdown.html

Is consistency even possible?: Dan Worth TES 28/2/20. Behind TES paywall but a useful reminder that saying ‘Just be consistent’ to student teachers and NQTs is often not very helpful. As the article explains, it’s often very hard to be perfectly consistent with all pupils in every respect, and may not even be desirable in some respects. It’s partly about making intelligent judgement calls in complex situations. https://www.tes.com/magazine/article/behaviour-consistency-even-possible

‘The nature of teacher authority and teacher expertise.’ Julian Elliott, Support for learning., 24 (4). pp. 197-203. Elliott unpicks and explains the complex and sophisticated skills that teachers develop which help them to become expert at managing pupil behaviour. Elliott sees the skills of the individual teacher as an important variable in levels of classroom control, and given the prevalence of ‘in-school variation’ in classroom climate, and teacher testimony from my own research, I agree with Elliott that teacher skills have a big influence on pupil behaviour. Think of your own experience of being at school – teachers make a difference.

http://dro.dur.ac.uk/6329/

No-excuses discipline changes lives, Jonathan Porter, in K. Birbalsingh (Ed.), Battle hymn of the tiger teachers, Woodbridge, John Catt: 67-78. Porter eloquently makes the case that strict school systems, where a fundamental principle is that pupils with problems do not have the right to spoil learning for pupils who want to learn, can also be of helpful to pupils with are difficult in terms of their behaviour, and these pupils often benefit as much as anybody from school systems which protect ‘the right to learn’ for all pupils. Of course, this raises the question of what happens to those pupils, and parents, who do not support, or cannot abide by these strict systems. There is ample research evidence that if pupils are permanently excluded from schools, the outcomes are a) very poor, and b) very expensive.

Writing on the classroom wall was ignored, Nick Davies interview with Peter Mortimore, The Guardian, 14 September 1999, online at https://theguardian.com/education/1999/sep/14/educationincrisis.uk2. Peter Mortimore was Director of the Institute of Education, University of London, and one of the leading researchers of the school effectiveness and improvement movement which argued that what schools did could make a difference to pupil outcomes. Here he argues persuasively against the idea that pupil intake has no influence on pupil outcomes and the idea that if schools are not high performing, it means that they are necessarily failing schools with useless heads and an incompetent teaching staff. It is a strong argument for not using successful schools as a stick to beat the others with.

Creating a Culture: How school leaders can optimise behaviour, the Tom Bennett Independent review of behaviour in schools, London, DfE, online at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/behaviour-in-schools. This is one of the most recent reviews of behaviour in English schools, with an up to date section reporting on the extent to which there is a problem in English schools (pages 14-21) and clear and succinct findings and recommendations (pages 6-10).

Mr Pigdin

I think this is a really good ‘impact resource’ to show what a massive impact teachers can have on their pupils. The Arsenal footballer Ian Wright meets, and talks about, meeting Mr Pigdin, one of his former teachers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omPdemwaNzQ

The right to learn      (declaring a position) I wrote this in the ‘Polemic’ column in The Observer in 1994. I had not long finished working in a challenging inner city school in Manchester where for several years the working atmosphere in classrooms was a real challenge, and it was difficult even for experienced and accomplished teachers to get a classroom climate where all pupils who wanted to learn could do so free from the noise and disruption of difficult pupils. I then worked in teacher education in London, visiting many schools on my placement visits, and realised that my former school was not the only one which struggled to establish ‘the right to learn’ for all pupils. It was quite common to observe classrooms where some pupils were limiting the learning of others. Many of the teachers I interviewed for the research echoed my feelings of frustration in feeling that you were letting down a lot of pupils when you were not able to get to at least level 8/9 on the 10 point scale. PDF of article