The John Wallis Academy Behaviour Curriculum
Routines | 5 Steps to Success in the Classroom
Teaching behaviour through routines
Teaching behaviour through routines
New routines will always feel strange and artificial at first.
It is worth persisting so that they become the norm: the habits of everyday life that make boundaries clear and allow learning to be the focus of activity.
Don’t apologise for wanting the best from your pupils, just help them understand why it's best. You’re helping pupils do things that will cause them to thrive and be successful. That’s a good thing.
Behaviour, habits and routines need to be taught. As teachers, this is a part of our role, and we should approach teaching behaviour in the very same way that we would teach a topic within our specialist subjects.
Maintaining routines
A strong routine in September does not guarantee a strong routine in December.
Enforcement fatigue happens so it is important that we refresh, reboot and reset our expectations and routines regularly with our pupils. Everything past the point we accept anything less than perfect, is practising and ingraining bad habits.
To learn something, pupils have to begin to forget and then return to it multiple times. In the same way that we commit to running retrieval practice in our lessons to ensure pupils remember what we have taught them, we must commit to running retrieval of our routines.
Step 1 | Roll-out
Explain the routine
Make purpose explicit
Start teaching each routine with a short “roll-out” speech in which you explain not only the what, but the why. This should emphasise the purpose, not power. Pupils will be more invested if they understand the purpose of the routine. E.g. “We want to make sure to spend our time on more important things so we want to get organised at the start of every lesson quickly”.
"A teacher's control is an exercise in purpose, not in power." —Doug Lemov
Step 4 | Assess and respond
Check knowledge
Assess performance
Sweat the small stuff
Offer corrective instruction
We need to constantly assess routines and respond to areas of need by providing corrective instruction and asking pupils to re-practise if necessary.
Practising poorly only leads to the building of bad habits. When assessing routines, we have to sweat the small stuff and make sure practice is perfect.
Step 2 | Explicit Instruction
Outline the steps
Model and describe
Teach the signals/cues
Explain and show pupils how to do the procedure. Doing both gives pupils a visual roadmap that they can follow and establishes a common language around the procedure. It makes the difference between correct and incorrect more visible to pupils. This is especially useful for ‘pain points’ (parts of the procedure that often prove tricky for pupils) where you want them to see and understand especially well in advance.
Step 5 | Retrieval & review
Reinforce positively & regularly
Re-practise before it becomes necessary
A common mistake is to stop practising once a routine appears stable.
Routines require periodic maintenance to make sure they stay in ideal running order. Occasional feedback or a ‘Do It Again’ is important: “Whoops, we were a little slow getting started with our Do Now there. Let’s practise that again''
Step 3 | Deliberate Practice
Rehearse
Feedback
Repeat to perfect
Build complexity
To truly master routines, pupils need repeated practice with timely feedback on their execution. Far too often, teachers don’t ask pupils to practice enough before releasing them to execute procedures on their own. This sets pupils up for failure.
Step 6 | Transfer ownership
Acknowledge ownership of routines
Provide leadership roles
Only when pupils are able to complete routines reliably, give pupils a sense of accomplishment, independence and ownership over routines by giving some responsibility:
Acknowledge that they know what to do, and you are aware of (and appreciate) this.
Hand out leadership roles (e.g. leading signals/cues, monitoring or evaluating success, modelling for others, responsibilities etc.)
Principles of the Behaviour Curriculum
From Bennett, T. (2020) Running the Room: The Teacher's Guide to Behaviour
1. Behaviour is a curriculum
Being well-behaved is a combination of skills, aptitudes, habits, inclinations, values, and knowledge. These can be taught.
2. Children must be taught how
Being well-behaved is not an accident at birth. Pupils do not create themselves. We are the products of our circumstances. Pupils who behave well have been taught these things already. If they have not, the teacher must try to do so.
3. Teach, don’t tell
Behaviour cannot be modified in the long term by simply telling pupils to behave. The behaviour curriculum must be taught, similarly to how we should teach an academic or practical subject.
4. No single strategy will work equally with all pupils
You cannot punish pupils into behaving. You cannot reward pupils into good behaviour. You cannot tell, teach, trick, or nudge all pupils into better behaviour habits. Different people are motivated for different reasons. The wise teacher uses a range of strategies to reach as many pupils as possible.
5. Make it easy to behave and hard not to
Some pupils find it harder to behave than others. Remove any obstacle you can to them developing better habits. Provide support for them to achieve the expectations you have of them. Challenge low standards every time. Make good behaviour satisfying.
6. Good relationships need structure & high expectations
The teacher-pupil relationship is important, but it is built on trust. Trust is built on mutually predictable behaviour which requires sincerely-executed norms and routines. But we don’t expect pupils to only behave well when they have a strong relationship with staff - they should behave because it is the right thing to do.
7. Pupils are social beings
Our behaviour is strongly influenced by other people. Other people and their opinions matter to us. If you teach a class, you teach a group, and group dynamics are not the same as solo or pair behaviour.
8. Consistency is the foundation of all habits
Practice makes perfect. Perfect practice is better. Habits only last as long as they are performed. As soon as we stop practising, we start to lose that habit.
Teaching & Running Routines | Quick-Reference Companion & Guide
BC Teacher Guide (3mm bleed, no trim).pdf