Running the Room: The Teacher's Guide to Behaviour

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Be organised and plan ahead so that it is easy for students to behave and hard for them to misbehave. After reading the book, I am more confident that these routines support my students’ learning. I’m going to go further this term and trial practising the routines more regularly. So instead of going through them at the start of the term, going through them at least twice a term. The book emphasised that routines need to be taught, practised and re-taught BEFORE a problem occurs. Don’t wait for an issue to arise to re-teach a routine. However, some of his anecdotes can drag on, particularly when the point and example already perfectly illustrated it. Regardless, what he says is spot on and does work if one perseveres at using his methods in the classroom. Tom writes and speaks beautifully and with flair, and can make any topic come to life with humour and flow. This is very much the case in his latest book, “ Running the room”. Where his DfE behaviour report was about the behavioural principles at a whole school level, there is more focus in this book on what goes on inside the individual classroom.

This seems like a reasonable strategy to some extent. If you are a professional who knows a good deal about history or arithmetic but little about running a room (or worse, you don’t know that it’s a skill set at all), then it’s perfectly reasonable to do the thing you are good at, and crucially the thing you believe you are being paid for. Like all teachers, I’ve kept students in for detentions, called parents for misbehaviours and placed students on behaviour contracts. These things are bound to happen. Running the Room recommends planning and scripting how you will do these things BEFORE you have to do them. The purpose is to have a basic scaffold of what you are going to say and how you will respond in these situations. If you are an early career teacher, you can try role playing and practising what you are going to say to students/parents with a more experienced teacher. They need to like you. It’s great if they like you, but we’re not here to be liked. We’re here to teach them, and if we make their liking us the aim instead, we will sacrifice their learning for our relationships. The best part is that if you teach them well, they probably will like you.His point about how it really is a 'two school' experience is so correct it stings. Some mentors can even struggle to realise that and might not properly equip the trainee to teach a classroom with the non-model students and simply remark "you'll learn as you teach". While that's fine when the mentor is in the room and, through their reputation, the more disengaged pupils keep quiet, this doesn't work once that trainee teacher is left alone, without them to help. The trouble starts: talking over the teacher, the turning round, the throwing of paper planes, the refusal to work, getting out of seats. Only once a trainee teacher teaches without a mentor in the room can they truly realise how difficult teaching can be. And Bennett knows that and he's wrote a great book to help new teachers and perhaps even more experienced teachers too.

Students need to know that if they take a risk and try in lessons, they won't be punished socially by the teacher or their peers. They need to feel that trying will be rewarded rather than stigmatised, no matter how well they do. This is an excellent book for teachers to read and reflect upon. However, it is also (arguably) overly long in places. For example when the author admits that he used to smoke, a footnote then occurs containing the words ‘I know I know’ (61%). Do notes like that really add anything to the book? Some of the material also seemed repetitious, as reminders about the importance of ‘consistency’ seemed to recur in several chapters. Whilst a certain amount of repetition is part of good teaching, perhaps there is a trade-off in printed format where conciseness is also important (?). Absolutely, you, as long as what you want to do doesn’t doesn’t clash with school behaviour policy, then you add what you like, you know, and the beauty about this is that the school behaviour policy probably doesn’t make her manage people. So for example, you might have a school policy on, you know, working on the left hand side of the corridor, the right hand side of the corridor, but there won’t be anything to school behaviour policy for an art teacher, about, you know, where to where to store your masterpieces, or how to distribute equipment at the beginning of the lesson. That’s fine. You create your own rules and norms and routines, those types of things as long as they could here with the whole school systems. And he is also the Department for Education’s “Behaviour Advisor”. In this role he has carried out a number of projects, including a r eview of behaviour management in schools that culminated in his report “ Creating a culture: how school leaders can optimise behaviour”. Classes will not run smoothly unless we think clearly and explicitly about what behavior we need to succeed, and how to direct the minds of children towards it. The classroom project is a microcosm of the great project of society and civilization. Because they are both communities. And they both need to be run. Leaders and teachers need to make the weather.

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Children do not behave well by default, and nor do we. We, as adults, need to make sure that our conduct is of a high standard, otherwise how can we expect children to change their behavior? Over the past year or so, I've started pushing myself on both those problems. I still want to hold true the convictions I have around control / school-to-prison-pipeline, but I want to better flush out what actual solutions can look like in real schools, and helpful people are teaching me the value of *SOME* traditional management practices in progressive school settings. Excellent in every regard! Not only does Bennett skillfully combine practicality with the theory and research behind it, he does so in a whimsical and humorous way! I laughed out loud multiple times and read several paragraphs to my wife. Bennett (2020) mentions very informative and interesting methods for different types of behaviors and how a teacher should respond. For example, he states that there are specific steps or measures a teacher should take when bad behavior occurs. A few listed in the book is how to prevent negative behavior first, focusing on positive behavior as redirecting, and the removal strategy. Bennett (2020) states that one misbehavior occurs, it is imperative to be prepared for an intervention.

Like equipment is always one, right. And then you can get you can get the extremes where you’re in a detention for forgetting your parent, and you get the other other extreme where it’s just a teacher just dishing out equipment left, right and centre. And it’s very easy to get kind of hung up on this. But I guess without putting words into your mouth, follow it following the school policy feels important. Try not to disrupt lesson time in the moment, but also having that kind of follow up. So so the kids kind of know what the rules are, and what are what would that be fair? It's no use dwelling on the tragic absurdity of children behaving in ways that ruin their life opportunities. It's not absurd to them, at that point" They need to run the room… If the teacher does not run it, the students will, because power abhors a vacuum. And if you permit students to do as they please, then ask how you would have behaved in such circumstances as a child?” But all too often teachers begin their careers with the bare minimum of training – or worse, none. How students behave, socially and academically, dictates whether or not they will succeed or struggle in school. Every child comes to the classroom with different skills, habits, values and expectations of what to do. There's no point just telling a child to behave; behaviour must be taught.

Running the room

In 2009 he was made a Teacher Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. From 2008-2016 he wrote a weekly column for the TES and TES online, and is the author of five books on teacher-training, behaviour management and educational research. In 2015 he was long listed for the GEMS Global Teacher Prize, and in that year was listed as one of the Huffington Post’s ‘Top Ten Global Educational Bloggers’. During the October school holidays, I read Running the Room: The Teacher’s Guide to Behaviour by Tom Bennett. As indicated in the title, the book is on managing student behaviour in the classroom. I’ve been teaching for nearly 13 years and I don’t think I have nailed classroom management (but I don’t think any teacher can say they have perfected any part of their practice, in any stage of their career). Classroom management is complex and this book offers lots of evidence-informed and practical strategies for all teachers, regardless of their experience and career stage, in a non-preachy way. The key messages I got from the book are

In my first ten or so years in education, I became increasingly convinced of what I did *NOT* want to see regarding classroom culture / management. I had felt (and still do) that too much emphasis is placed on controlling students, and that the school-to-prison-pipeline is deeply problematic.Tech: "what access to smartphone, tech or other distractions are you permitting them? Oes this task need to be done on the computer or are you only stipulating that to amuse them, or to pretend you are teaching them more innovatively? Create a class culture where it is the norm for students to behave in a way that lets them and others learn. It wasn’t the world’s funniest joke even then, but the humor rested on the then well-understood premise that New York was a violent and often dangerous city. At the time, it was famous for its muggings and inner-city unrest. The “gag” was that New Yorkers were legendarily brittle and cynical.