It can be easy to fall into the trap of giving your first attention to the learners in your classroom who are displaying negative behaviour.
In today's video, behaviour management instructor Paul Dix asks educators to shift this behaviour policy and instead focus on the behaviour of the majority of learners who are doing the right thing.
‘We're going to focus on the 95 per cent or the 98 per cent, because those are the children that come every day, do the right thing, they are well mannered, polite, determined, resilient – those are the children that deserve your first attention,' he says.
‘We are going to do that in classrooms, we are going to do that through the awards system, we're going to do that through the positive recognition system and recognise those children first who are going over and above.'
It's important to remember that this doesn't mean teachers should ignore poor behaviour, but rather, they should focus on those children doing the right thing, before they deal with the trickier students.
WATCH VIDEO
As the founder and lead instructor of Pivotal Education, an education training consultancy working with teachers and school leaders across the globe, Dix has five published titles on behaviour and assessment.
In what ways do you recognise and reward good behaviour in your classroom? Could you be doing more to acknowledge this behaviour more frequently in this classroom?
Reflect: How often do you ignore poor behaviour in your classroom? What are the implications of this? How does this affect the learners displaying good behaviour?
Make sure you don’t miss out on our Teaching Tips series from Paul Dix. Subscribe to the Teacher email bulletin to see them first by clicking on the sign up button in the top right-hand corner of this page.
