How Do Teachers Ever Control Classes?

Given the recent report on record school expulsions, this must be what outsiders wonder most about. It certainly was when I thought about teaching. You’d see youths lurking on buses or outside McDonald’s and think: ‘Christ, imagine being stuck in a classroom with that shower. You couldn’t pay me to!’

It’s not helped by unrealistic impressions from TV dramas like Waterloo Road and documentaries such as Gobshites in the Classroom; oops, I mean Educating Yorkshire/Essex (much as I like both counties).

Teachers work closely with perhaps two-hundred plus people, the majority children. Some of them – at least in the school environment – are very annoying and a few are actively horrible. The work is highly emotional, with every side of the teacher’s character potentially exposed, including those they were unaware of. An often ignored aspect is the way it forces you to subconsciously relive experiences from your own schooldays.

Other jobs share some of these characteristics, but I think the combination of huge numbers with the need for detailed involvement is unusual. It demands simultaneous crowd control and individual focus. For the former, techniques of ‘behaviour management’ – or in Newspeak ‘optimising attitudes towards learning’ – have been developed. Most of these are useless, though inadvertently funny to see rigidly applied with diminishing returns. They’re never simply bolt-on, as any NQT (Newly Qualified Teacher) learns.

The problem is, schools are wedded to Skinnerian behaviourism, treating pupils as machines to be programmed through rewards, shaming and sanctions. This replaces the subtle moral framework that used to exist, however imperfectly. The very idea that it existed was enough, and that’s gone now. This is hugely damaging to pupils. It’s small-wonder bullying is so ineradicable and behaviour is often unmanageable.

There’s little interest in building pupils’ characters and instilling a sense of right and wrong, which would be regarded as a return to the 19th-century and British imperialism. Instead, they’re hectored with dogmatic social-justice slogans on diversity, racism, equality, respect, difference, transgenderism…you name it. Everything is linked to social issues around creating a fairer society, at the expense of resolving individual problems. It ensures the very worst types of virtue-signalling box-tickers advance into management and perpetuate the system.

Anyway, these are my six most dodgy techniques for behaviour management, all of which I fell foul of:

1. The seating plan

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be used; they help with getting names right and show a group one has prepared.  But as so often, one is flagging a target for disruption. Many a failing teacher attempts endless rejigs, trumpeting them or using them as threats, in a doomed cycle of increasing futility.

2. Pointless battles to ‘avoid backing down’

This is the pitfall of many, including those with years of experience. It’s especially common over trivial uniform infringements, mobile phones and demands for absolute silence. We’ve all been there. Sometimes because the SLT (Senior Leadership Team) demands particular stands, other times because we slipped into it.

3. The whole-group bollocking

This alienates the many whilst leaving the intended few unmoved. Too often it feels cathartic for the teacher but ensures sullen dislike from the entire class. Pleading with them: ‘I’m only talking to a few here’ adds to the impression that one’s scared to take on the true trouble-makers.

4. Standing in silence and expecting quiet

An absurd idea that’s still recommended! I’ve seen many an NQT waste an entire lesson trying it. On one occasion, the poor sod came to my room in tears having stood there until bombarded with sweets and rolled up graph-paper. I went in and explosively terminated the teacher’s silence.

5. Overpraise of appallingly behaved pupils when they have a ‘good lesson’. See number 3.

6. ‘Was that a good idea, Ryan?’

This links to the liberal fantasy that pupils are reflective and willingly ‘take ownership’ of their behaviour and learning, as rational and reasonable individuals. It’s an easy cop-out for some serial-killer of lessons to readily agree, expressing anguished regret – until the next time.

So what works then?

The vital thing is to feel and seem yourself but maintain enough of an act to achieve emotional distance. This only comes after going through so many disasters, upsets and apparently irretrievable situations that immunity develops. There’s an enormous churn of dramatic events in teaching, so a lot vanishes downstream.

Using humour – if necessary sarcasm – and being able to act (but not actually be) furious are what experience brings. The adage – ‘Be reasonable, but don’t reason’ – is the only advice I was given that works. Don’t justify what you’re doing but make sure it isn’t horribly unfair.

All easy to say but just try it, when thirty Year Elevens are slipping into riotous mutiny, last period on a rainy Friday. It’s only possible if one’s been through it before and survived.

I’ll illustrate with an example, from my first year of teaching.

Taking over a GCSE group in Year 11 is ‘challenging’, to use the educational euphemism for horrific. Especially so for an NQT, and double-especially so for teaching the lowest set actually doing GCSE. Also ‘challenging’ was how they were sitting English Language (the vital one) early, in November, so if one of them went completely off the rails before the summer of Year 11, they might have this qualification when expelled – as two were.

This meant I had barely two months to get them ready, whilst also starting their modern novel for English Literature – Of Mice and Men – which I can now almost recite word for word but always loved teaching. To be fair, it was to my advantage that everyone thought this timetabling was nuts; the explanation being that I was male, tall and had a strong voice.

‘11b5’ was – as are most bottom sets – small, at eighteen pupils. But what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality. Twelve boys, six of them wannabe football hooligans obsessed with films like Green Street and with their own daft version of its gang – the ‘Sheep Street Elite’ – named for the grotty chain-pub area of Bicester. From my experiences at a fairly rough comp in the mid 1970s, I sometimes found this an oddly nostalgic throwback.

The five girls were well-behaved but intimidated (or foolishly impressed) by the louts. Two of them were horribly bullied by the twin-boys who I fought constant battles with – once inadvertently calling them scumbag cowards. This landed me in serious trouble, though their mother eventually relented, and I survived.

I actually enjoyed this group and learned a huge amount. My first lesson was riotous – one of them squared up to me – which only happened twice in my career. A stroke of luck, as Sean had a history of carrying concealed knives on the school-bus and spent every lesson shouting out ‘alphabet soup.’ It put a marker down that couldn’t be denied.

Within two weeks, he was banished to the ‘bungalow’. A legendary building on the school’s periphery, it served as a penal colony for those incapable of being in classrooms but not quite qualifying for expulsion – a hurdle requiring crimes of near unimaginable depravity.

Oddly, I never truly dreaded lessons with this lot. All bets were off and I set myself the simple (in terms of scope) but daunting task of getting through the material and responding to the constant intimidation. Every lesson saw at least three pupils ‘on-called’ – removed by the off-duty staff waiting to pick up the impossibly disruptive.

With the worst I did this very promptly, often pushing its ‘fairness’. This made me a hate-figure to some (and worsened their behaviour) but I make no apologies; I was determined to get a GCSE C-grade – a pass – for those desperate to gain this qualification. I’m proud to say that fourteen of them did – better than the predicted 50%.

Needless to say, whenever I was observed with this group I was bombarded with advice by those who’d made damn sure they weren’t teaching them. Such is the norm. Indeed, my favourite fellow-teacher was a Sudanese chap who was routinely given only bottom sets, where his teaching was constantly undermined.

He taught for years without complaint, before being quietly forced out without a word of thanks (or even a goodbye) from the school. Such treatment typifies how left-liberals often behave.

Paul Sutton can be found on Substack. His new book on woke issues The Poetry of Gin and Tea is out now.

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