TeachMeet Plymouth #tmbehaviour

Last night was my first TeachMeet, and as a first year student I didn't really know what to expect from the evening, except for it being a good opportunity to learn a little bit more about the topic of behaviour management.

It started with the opening slide of the hash tag #tmbehaviour, so I also got involved on twitter to share the opinions given during the evening. The Plymouth Education Society (who had organised the whole evening) started by introducing themselves to everyone, and spoke a little about TeachMeet. Then they got started, pulling a name from the bag as to who would talk first. It happened to be one of one the PES organisers, but she started with a quote from her lecturer recently, "If you have a well planned lesson where the children are engaged there won't be behaviour issues". And led this to an open discussion from us in the audience which was a great way to get started, and involve everyone. There were so many opinions on this topic, some people disagreed as 'you will always get children who find it difficult to engage with lessons', so even if you did have a perfectly planned lesson those particular children will still struggle to concentrate. Another comment was that teachers, in their planning, should plan around specific pupils with certain behaviour issues to engage them in what the class are learning. So many people had experiences of this idea from being in schools, which was really interesting as I haven't really looked at first hand behaviour management techniques yet.

Next out of the bag of names was Oliver who had made a little presentation of the starting with 'why' when making behaviour management decisions. He discussed a book he had been reading, 'Punished by Rewards' by Alfie Kohn in which he discusses how rewards such as stickers are not effective, and that they stop children wanting to work for themselves. An exciting condequence of Oliver's talk though was the discussion it caused afterwards. Everyone was getting involved with so many stories with the good things and bad things about the use of rewards and stickers.



Lots more views on the reward system, things such as a good job sticker, "does that mean that the children who don't get this sticker are doing a bad job?" Another person suggested something she had seen in schools, where the class have to fill up a jar of glass marbles. The glass marbles were given to a child when the teacher felt that they had done something really well and slowly, through a class effort the jar would fill up and they would all get a treat. I quite liked that idea of reward as it benefited the whole class' behaviour.

Later on in the evening the topic of 'ways to get children's attention' came up which was really good. This again became an open discussion with methods people had seen or used, which were effective. An idea that I hadn't heard of before was "I heard somewhere that children don't listen to the first 3 seconds of what a teacher says so shouting isn't always effective". I posted this on twitter at the time and got a couple of interesting responses.




Ideas of counting to ten, wiggly fingers and use of a tambourine came up of methods to quickly gain the whole class' attention. I did learn a very inventive idea last night too, of a train where the teacher says 'woo wooo' and the children reply with 'shh shh'! So clever!

In reply on twitter another lovely idea!


So yeah last night was amazing, so many passionate teachers contributing to the discussion which I loved. Everyone was so enthusiastic about all the topics raised and I learnt lots from the way people contributed with their experiences from in schools. Can't wait for the next one now!


@HannahSheltonTT