Australian media is saturated with reports that our schools are some of the most disruptive in the world. The issue has even reached federal attention, with the Senate having referred an inquiry into the issue to the Education and Employment References Committee.
While this inquiry is ongoing, the teacher crisis in Victoria continues, with reports on teacher shortages offering little hope of respite. Student and parent behaviour is no doubt one key factor for many leaving the profession.
So why are things getting worse? Theories about the causes of this situation are diverse and inconclusive, and the solutions sit on a vast spectrum with little agreement about what schools should do to combat these issues.
Some schools have “gone back to basics” with a focus on routine and procedure to facilitate calmer, more regulated environments. However, this approach also receives criticism, with some in the profession asserting that it is an overly militant and potentially even regressive approach.
In my own context - a large government school in the south-east suburbs of Melbourne - we have experienced this increase in disruptive and challenging behaviour, particularly following the Covid-19 lockdowns. Students returned dysregulated and uncertain about their world, and some of our most at-risk students fell into cycles of multiple suspensions.
Our most significant challenge, though, was that students had forgotten how to behave in a classroom, which highlighted the gaps between those teachers with strategies to manage these behaviours and those without.
SWPBS: a framework for positive behaviour
To address these concerns, like many schools in Victoria, we have adopted the school-wide positive behaviour support (SWPBS) framework to shape our renewed approach to behaviour management.
This framework reinforced two key principles for us. Firstly, SWPBS is a problem-solving framework. As stated by Professor Tim Lewis, of the University of Missouri, it forces educators to acknowledge that we cannot make kids behave, but “we can create environments that increase the likelihood” that they will.
Secondly, we came to understand that good behaviour is aligned with good pedagogy, and the two complement each other to create a calm and productive classroom environment.
Implementing the SWPBS framework has involved two main improvement strategies. One focuses on reviewing our school rules and establishing the processes that support staff to manage behaviour. The other was to include behaviour management strategies as part of our other pedagogical professional development in professional learning communities (PLC).
We began by redefining our school rules and created Five Expectations for Learning. However, we needed to support staff to establish the expectations by teaching students the behaviours that align with them. Therefore, we’ve spent the beginning of 2024 establishing whole-school routines.
These four whole-school routines include students lining up before they enter the classroom, standing behind their chairs at the start of the lesson, every classroom being laid out in rows facing the teacher in preparation for direct instruction, and students standing behind their chairs after packing up the room prior to dismissal.
This work focused on effectively designing the physical space to support teacher movement around the classroom and active supervision, and also to ensure that all students are facing the teacher for direct instruction.
A focus on routines
Our choice to introduce routines was guided by the work of Bill Rogers, whose book Classroom Behaviour emphasises the importance of teaching routines as a preventative strategy for poor behaviour.
Additionally, contemporary approaches to behaviour management such as trauma-informed practice emphasise the need to create predictable, structured classrooms through established routines and procedures.
This model contends that not all students enter the classroom knowing what is expected of them, where the boundaries are and how to succeed. These must be explicitly taught and outlined for students to adopt this as their normal behaviour.
Our approach has had a noticeable and visible impact, with teachers quickly adopting the routines. Upon reflection, one colleague stated that this was a “vast improvement from last year…we have seen a massive, and positive, shift in school culture in only a couple of weeks”.
Our other key improvement strategy builds on the work established by my colleague in our PLCs. This body of work seeks to make strategies permanent through frequent engagement with colleagues and practice in the classroom, and avoid the failures of singular, one-off professional learning sessions that are quickly forgotten.
Our PLC model is supported by the work of Tom Sherrington’s WalkThru strategies, in which key pedagogical practices are broken down into five steps for effective implementation.
We organised strategies into two clusters, with one focused on questioning and feedback and the other on positive behaviours. Staff select one strategy from one cluster, such as Keeping on Task, and observe and coach one another in the implementation of this single strategy across a term.
Improving learning boosts behaviour
Offering strategies that improve learning alongside strategies that improve behaviour further emphasises the role of both in creating optimal conditions for learning.
Moving forward, our next steps are to continue building an instructional approach to behaviour. This includes three main areas of focus: explicitly teaching staff preferred management practices, providing system support that offers opportunities to record escalating student behaviours, and then continually promoting our school expectations so that teachers can refer to these in their management of students.
We are also beginning to support staff to link behaviour management techniques to learning routines, so that they see preventative behaviour management as more than simply a preventative measure against poor behaviour; rather, they see it as a direct influence on improved learning.
In some respects, our school has adopted a back-to-basics approach. However, we have coupled this with a modern behaviour management philosophy. As a framework, SWPBS is supported by research in student behaviour that goes back more than 20 years.
As our school moves forward on this journey, the words of Bill Rogers have become a constant anchor for us: “You establish what you establish.” A positive and productive learning environment requires the combination of school processes for addressing behaviour and improving teacher practice for managing behaviour.
Perhaps, to move forward with behaviour management, schools need to look back to the past to remind us that sometimes something as simple as asking students to line up is just as effective now as it was many years ago.
Skye Brennan is positive education leader and senior school curriculum leader at Elisabeth Murdoch College, Victoria
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