Arts On The Move – for all your drama needs… Arts On The Move
JORVIK Viking Centre boosts its lockdown educational offer JORVIK Viking Centre
Teach KS2 STEM with VEX Go from VEX Robotics VEX Robotics
Teach KS1 STEM with VEX 123 from VEX Robotics VEX Robotics
Team GB and Aldi recruit Kevin the Carrot to inspire healthy eating in schools with their latest primary resources Aldi
Oxford University Press Courses
If you can’t get your class to be quiet and listen, crack open a can of dog food
Arts On The Move – for all your drama needs…
Frenck KS2 lesson plan – Near future tense and new year resolutions
Michael Morpurgo Month 2021 – 10 of the best teaching resources for KS1 and KS2
KS2 Shakespeare Week activities – Explore identity
It’s the night before the school year begins. You wake up at two in the morning, drenched in sweat. Your heart is thumping like a drum. The last remnants of the nightmare flicker around the edges of your consciousness. It was the nightmare about school – the same one you have every year. The one where, no matter what you do or say, no matter how loud you shout, or what dreadful punishments you threaten, the worst thing you can possibly think of happens. You walk into your classroom and not a single child will listen. Over the years I have worked with a lot of teachers to help them build their behaviour management techniques. And when I ask any group what worries them most – what low-level behaviour problem they would really, really like me to help them solve – the answer is always the same: “How do I get my children to listen to me?”
It is reasonably easy to get one child to listen to you. It is fairly simple to get two, or three, or perhaps even four children all listening at once. But once you get up into double digits, and you need 30 children to listen simultaneously, that is when the trouble begins. The first thing to consider is the methods that you use to get their silent attention in the first place. These are many, and varied, and sometimes amazingly creative. While a hand in the air or a finger on the lips will often do the trick, you can be a lot more adventurous.
One teacher showed me how she uses her ‘spirit fingers’ to gain silent attention – imagine a cross between a magic trick and an interpretive dance routine, and you’ll get somewhere close. Another revealed how he gets the children to take their pulses, on the basis that they cannot count their heart beats and talk at the same time. Then there was the teacher who bought a circular rug in IKEA and designated it as her ‘silent spot’. Now all she has to do is step onto it, and her children settle down to listen.
Of course, it’s not just getting them silent in the first place that’s tricky. It’s keeping them silent long enough to finish saying what you want to say that’s the real challenge.
Imagine this: after a bit of a struggle, you have finally managed to get the entire class silent. You take a deep breath, and open your mouth to begin your explanation of the lesson. At that precise moment, one of your children breaks wind and the whole class collapses into giggles. Does this sound familiar? Don’t worry, because you are not alone. Many years ago, I received an email from one of my readers. The email went something like this: “Thanks for your behaviour book, Sue. I found it really helpful. But you know where on page 9 you say that you should ‘wait for silence’? Well, I waited for silence for half an hour and they still weren’t listening to me.”
We should never underestimate the power of the pause in getting silence, especially in a school where the children are generally well disposed to behave. However, simply pausing is often not enough. If you constantly waste lots of time waiting for your children to settle down at the beginning of a lesson, then consider whether you need to get them quickly on task, rather than always doing your lesson introduction at the start. On the other hand, if you find it totally impossible to get your children to settle down, then you may need to consider shock tactics instead. As the saying goes, there is more than one way to skin a cat (or, in the case of the story you are about to hear, to feed a dog). So it was that one day a colleague of mine went into his lesson and discovered that, as usual, the children were not intending to listen to him. Instead of wasting his energy trying to get them to listen, he sat down on his desk, opened up a can of dog food (filled with mashed up jelly and Mars Bars), and began to eat. As you can imagine, this very quickly got their attention, without him having to say a word.
Sue Cowley is an author and teacher trainer. You can find her at suecowley.co.uk and follow her on Twitter at @Sue_Cowley.
In partnership with
Make sure your assessment is effective with these expert insights.
Teachwire
Arts On The Move believes that creativity is what gives society its heart. Everyone has...
Arts On The Move believes that creativity is what gives society its heart. Everyone has some creativity within them and the joy of exploring and discovering can be unparalleled. At the...
Arts On The Move believes that creativity is what gives society its heart. Everyone has some creativity within them and the joy of exploring and discovering can be unparalleled.
At the...
Cover the near future tense and new vocabulary with Dr Amanda Barton’s new year resolutions lesson. This lesson starts with a quick look at French culture through an important new year tradition...
Cover the near future tense and new vocabulary with Dr Amanda Barton’s new year resolutions lesson.
This lesson starts with a quick look at French culture through an important new year tradition...
Use Shakespeare Week in March to help pupils explore their own identities. Do you wear your heart on your sleeve? Are you sometimes the green-eyed monster? Although Shakespeare wrote over 400...
Use Shakespeare Week in March to help pupils explore their own identities.
Do you wear your heart on your sleeve? Are you sometimes the green-eyed monster? Although Shakespeare wrote over 400...
Make a date in your diary for February for Michael Morpurgo Month 2021, and start...
Kat Howard and Claire Hill examine the importance of sequencing when it comes to effective...
This Tuesday 9 Feb use Safer Internet Day to educate children about being responsible online,...
If you want to distinguish the truly great teachers from the merely competent, there are...