Behaviour Management

I have been thinking a lot about the behaviour we are seeing in our team at the moment and how we can manage certain behaviours to ensure learning is not compromised. The class has been becoming increasingly difficult to teach effectively when all together as the behaviour becomes very disruptive on the mat. We have met with parents of individual children and some improvement has been made by these children however there is still a large group of about 15 kids that are very disruptive during whole class teaching sessions. I feel that consistency and fairness are key to managing behaviour in the classroom and we need to re-evaluate how well we are doing this. Things I have brainstormed are:

- more student involvement when on the mat - I need to think about this more and how to manage these interactive sessions

- shorter times spent on the mat all together e.g. aim to be up and moving by 9.10 - do we need to work in smaller groups (this feels like it's going against what we are trying to achieve with collaboration)

- flipping the timetable - I think the children are spending too long at a time working on one subject. This is leading to disengagement and behaviour problems. Perhaps we could try running 30 minute slots with a brain break/run/change in between. Could we try breaking up literacy time more - perhaps start the day with inquiry (which tends to be where most of the behaviour problems occur after lunch) for 30 mins then move in to writing with reading in the afternoon?

-incentives - we don't really have a reward system running in our room at the moment, perhaps we need to bring in a very concrete, tangible reward system

- teachers being on the same team - model this to the children and make very explicit when dealing with issues

I will discuss these with my co-teacher and think about how we could implement some or all of these ideas.