Sanctions - the other side of the coin!

I have had a brief conversation with a fellow Twitterer (@PoliticsTeacher) about my earlier post explaining the rewards system that I had developed in my previous school as Headteacher. The question posed was what I felt about "the penalty systems for the little ones". In a later Tweet the use of detentions for children as young as seven.

As educators our 'front end' conversations tend to focus on being how we positively manage children's behaviour through intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We rarely discuss the sanctions (a word that I prefer to 'penalty') that we use in schools. Most schools will have some form of agreed system of sanctions that are available to class teachers and to the Headteacher. In the current political climate this is likely to receive more public attention in coming months as Mr Gove has repeatedly stated that one of his key objectives is to ensure good discipline in classrooms.

In my school, we spent a considerable amount of time consulting with three main groups when developing our approach to the use of sanctions. With each group the aim of the process was to identify which behaviours they saw as being most disruptive to learning, which they considered to be the most serious (not always the same) and what sort of sanctions they saw as appropriate to be applied in school.

As you might expect there was some variation in opinions. For example the pupils rated consistent chattering in lessons as being very serious and disruptive, whilst teachers saw this as having a manageable impact on learning, and parents were more concerned about physical violence (which was actually very rare). I am not offering an opinion as to which of these groups is right – other than to say the all are.

The challenge as a school leader was to take the information from the consultation and to make some decisions that would consider these views. The result of the consultation was a ladder of behaviours with a ladder of consequences. I use the word consequences deliberately. The consequences included from the teacher dealing with the instance by talking with the child, removing Golden Time allocation (part of the rewards system), recording repeated behaviour in a record book, removal of play time and other more serious sanctions.

Parents were very concerned about the physical safety of the children, and wanted acts of violence dealt with very severely. There were a significant number who would have been happy to see exclusions used regularly. However, the system that we adopted followed a principle of 'proportionate response'. If tempers had flared and both parties needed to accept some responsibility then the sanction would most probably be less than if someone had acted unprovoked.

Training is the most important plank in ensuring that the behaviour and sanctions systems work. Everyone should understand the system. Once a system is agreed on, all staff in the school were expected to work within the system. The pupils had the right to know how they would be dealt with if they chose to behave outside the system. The parents had a right to know the system, and to have faith that it was being applied.

However, a well defined system must have some flexibilities and tolerances. Personally I have never believed that any child comes into school with malice in their heart, and this informed my processes and decision making.  Understanding the causal effects on behaviour is crucial when choosing to apply sanctions. At the less serious end of the scale a teacher makes decisions about when to inform parents that there has been bad behaviour. At the more serious end a Headteacher or Senior Leader has to make difficult decisions about exclusion from a classroom or even exclusion (often publicly called expulsion) from school.

Parents have often told me that they would like to know as soon as something happens. This is not practical or even desirable. Consider the time that it would take to have three conversations every day to discuss each low level transgression of a classroom rule. Teachers would become so overburdened with this duty that they would lose time to plan and resource high quality learning experiences (which would result in more instances of low level transgressions). It is not desirable because behaviour management relies on more than a paper trail system. It relies on relationships between the staff and the learners which are built on trust and respect. If a teacher is talking to parents every time a child transgresses, I don't believe that a good working relationship can be developed. The child will have no respect for the teacher, nor will they develop a trust in them.

Teachers make good choices about when to involve a parent. They use professional judgments all the time about when to involve a parent in the process. Our system had guidelines, but ultimately I trusted my staff to make the right call. Where a decision about parental involvement was not clear then they talked to me or a Senior Leader and were given advice based on and guided by experience. One certainty was that if a teacher had to talk to the parents of a child who had been on the wrong end of poor behaviour, then they would always talk to the parents of the perpetrator – avoiding parents finding out from each other.

Going back to my belief about children's inherent goodness, I believe there is a need for a coherent system of sanctions that is understood by all, including the flexibility that teachers and leaders have in applying this. However, I also believe that it is more important that a policy focusses on the promotion of positive behaviours through intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Value the positive, and the positive will value you?

Rewards Systems - Square pegs and round holes

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I'm trying to fit a couple of square pegs into round holes at the moment. Rewards systems have been occupying my thinking for the last couple of days. The reason for this procrastination has been two separate conversations. One was with my seven year old son, and the other with my wife.

I picked the children up from their childminder at the end of the day, and went through the usual run of questions (did you have a good day? What did you do at school? Did you learn anything exciting? etc. etc. etc.) when he said something about the rewards system in school. Now, I thought I understood the school's rewards system, which is basically positive rewards with an indicator of how well the pupils had done during the day through a sliding scale which the children's names were pegged to. The system has been in use for a couple of years, and it motivates my son. My son's biggest fear has been that he would ever be placed on the 2 places on the scale that indicate that behaviour and performance was not good. As we had our conversation, my son (7 years old) talked about the lucky child that had pulled the raffle ticket out of the jar. The raffle tickets are the new reward for doing something good.

The second conversation was with my wife, who is a Deputy Headteacher in an urban primary school. One of the staff at her school had been to a conference hosted by Shirley Clarke at the end of last term. I have read several of Shirley Clarke's books about Assessment for Learning and I have been quite heavily influenced by much of what I have read. The link to rewards is that at the conference Shirely Clarke talked about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how assessment and rewards systems can reinforce the process of extrinsic motivation and that this can actually close down aspirations for learners. Therefore, as well as marking without grades, rewards systems should not be used to influence extrinsic behaviours.

So, square pegs and round holes. My son is motivated by rewards. He is, depsite all our best efforts, extrinsically motivated. Praise is enough. He needs to know that what he is doing is a) right and b) pleasing you. Therefore we use rewards regularly at home when something has to be done! I believe in Shirley Clarke's messages about assessment without grading and that we should encourage the development of intrinsic motivation. These two don't go together!

Another square peg and round hole. I have used positive reward systems in my class and in the school that I was Headteacher of. They worked. They showed pupils that we valued their contributions and they showed the parents that we valued their contributions. I am going to write a separate post to explain the system we used in our school. However, I really have a passionate objection to raffles. To me they reduce a reward to pure chance with no relationship between the effort put in and the reward received. A child only has to get one raffle ticket to be in with a chance of winning. The child who gets ten tickets has a better mathematical chance of being drawn, but how many times have you bought lots of raffle tickets and left the room without a prize. Here's the square peg bit. When I talked to my son, he was very motivated by the raffle system - and actually said that it was better than what they did before. Ouch. (It might be that he got seven tickets in his first week, and sometimes went a whole week last year without moving his peg - different teachers, and I rated last years teacher highly by the way!)

I would be really interested to know your views, and to collect some examples of reward systems that are in place. I would be even more interested to hear from schools that are successfully developing intrinsic motivation methods. Please do add your comments.

Having Fun

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Wow! I've just taken part in my first #ukedchat on Twitter. If you don't yet know what that is, I have attached a link to Ian Addison's blog which explains the concept very succinctly. The topic for this evening's discussion centred around making learning fun.

The discussion spent a lot of time focussing on a definition of 'fun' and it seemed to be agreed that 'fun' should not be used in the flippant sense of larking around, but more in terms of being engaged, motivated, stimulated and energised to use but a few words. Personally I am a big advocate of 'fun'. I don't think there can be enough 'fun' in the classroom, or in any learning - and in defining 'fun' I would agree with  the words used earlier in the paragraph.

Many of our children bring baggage to school with them. This ranges from a minor dispute with a sibling or parent, to the rabbit dying, to far worse things that we all know happen in the lives of the children we work with. School should be a haven, where the baggage can be left at the door, a place of trust and balance. Each individual needs this - and I include staff in this thought.

So, assuming emotional stability is achieved what is fun? In developing our curriculum at my previous school my one requirement of staff was that they had fun planning and teaching it. (well, apart from covering the curriculum, and being at least good in quality of teaching and learning, and ...). Why? It comes from my own experiences. I know that the best teaching I have ever done has been when I have really enjoyed the content and topic. I know that these made for the lessons that pupils described as their most memorable, and that they remembered what we had been learning.

It's a lofty ambition. However, through collaboration, commitment and consistency we were able to arrive at a curriculum that our pupils regularly called fun. Were they larking about all the time? No. They most definitely weren't. Standards in the school improved dramatically in two years (both measurable through data and softer measures such as behaviour and attendance).

One of the most significant factors in developing fun was to change our pedagogy. We worked very hard to develop strategies that allowed us to act as a Guide On The Side (GOTS) more often than we acted as Sage On The Stage (SOTS). When acting as a SOTS teacher there is a danger that we act as the fountain of all knowledge, and that our voice and thoughts dominate the learning time. Where SOTS teaching takes place more frequently than GOTS I have noticed that there is less involvement in the learning from the pupils. That is not to say that they were unmotivated or unenthusiastic. They weren't. They just weren't committed to participating in the learning. As the ratio of GOTS teaching increased, so too did the enthusiastic involvement of the learner. The GOTS teacher provides prompts, facilitates discussion and intervenes at well judged and carefully planned moments. However, the learners feel more in control, and at the same time more challenged.

As time passed, our learners became more enthusiastic in and out of the classroom. They became more involved with decision making in the school, and their pride in our school increased dramatically. As a result the school became an even more exciting place to be, and the enthusiasm and passion became an ever increasing circle. Parental engagement with the curriculum increased dramatically, and the parents also took on greater shared repsonibility for the learning. Partnership started to be a true description of the teacher-pupil-parent partnership.

This is a very simplistic description of four years of hard work. There were many stumbling blocks and several near disasters. But reaffirming the work was the desire for everyone to have 'fun' - but not just in the sense of larking around!

Ian Addison's explanation of #ukedchat - click here.