Today we are going to be talking about consistency in behaviour management and why it is absolutely crucial in your management of the classroom ? Now before I go any further make sure you subscribe or follow on wherever you are tuning in on and give us a like or a comment if you are enjoying the content. We would love to hear from you.
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Consistency, why is it important ?
Consistency basically means that you enforce the rules for all students in the same way, being really careful that you are not showing preferential treatment or not showing a targeted approach to one or a few students in the class. This is really important for a couple of reasons.
Maintain Consistency for all Students.
The first one is this, when students misbehave and get caught out, if they believe that you are being unfair in the way that you are managing them, you are more likely to get big escalations. You are more likely to get arguments and disrespectful behaviour if they feel an injustice has been done. They feel that they need to right it so they will try to vehemently oppose what you are doing. However, If they feel you are being consistent and dealing with behaviour in the same way with everybody, then they are more likely to cop it on the chin.
It is also important to be consistent if you need to correct some good students who are well- behaved most of the time. Do not postpone corrections or ignore them. Correct them just as promptly as you would a chronically misbehaving student. If you are consistent, what you will find is that it does not take many times to pull them back into line. If you let their behaviour slide or you give them preferential treatment for whatever reason, what you will find is sometimes that misbehaviour can grow and become a problem for the class and by the time you actually do address it, it becomes quite hard to manage.
Let me give you an example. When I was a behaviour advisory teacher, all the students who were being exited from the class would be sent down to me. They would get what was called a red card because the teacher felt that they were no longer able to participate in the class. So they would come to me and then I would have to figure out what had happened, whether they would be returned to class, sent to the principal or stay with me. One of the most regular situations that occurred was, the habitually naughty kids would very frequently be sent down to my office and one of the first things they would always say was, “I do not understand why she gave me this red card, there were three other students in the class doing the same thing as I but they never got disciplined for it.”
So the sense of injustice for that student was very acute. When I had conversations about restoring the relationship, apologizing or going back to class, the student was usually very very reluctant.
So that would lead to a broken relationship between the student and the teacher. Well, the next time that student went into the class, he would be gunning for the teacher and looking for ways to disrupt the class and make it more difficult for the teacher. If you are being inconsistent and just targeting one student, what you are going to find is that in the long run, it is going to backfire on you. It is going to come back to bite you because that student will come back to get justice for the injustice that they perceive. So that is why it is really important that you maintain consistency in the way in which you deal with students.
Don’t be too quick to jump on the Kids who are “known to be naughty”
The other thing about consistency is that kids who are frequently disruptive or frequently off-task or misbehaving, are already on your radar and you are already hyper aware of their tendency to misbehave. So sometimes it can become very easy for you to just jump on it because you see it really quickly, you know you have already seen their behaviour before it even starts. Sometimes because you are hyper aware, there is a tendency that you will target them more often than say somebody who is normally a good child.
If you have got a student that finishes all their work but they talk non-stop and disrupt the other kids, your tendency is to say “Oh well they did their work I can’t really punish them”. Not so. If you have got a rule about talking, you have got to give them some kind of consequence. You have got to follow through with that because it sends the wrong signal to the kids that get into trouble for talking, but it also sends a wrong signal to them because they see that the so-called good students are not respecting everybody else in the classroom.
Just because they finish their work does not mean they get to disrupt everybody else and so just really think about maintaining consistency. You have to watch yourself, you have to pull yourself up because it is easy to jump on the child that is on your radar and it is very easy to forget or overlook the child that is not normally on your radar. If you want an environment where all the kids trust you and all the kids have a good relationship with you, then you need to maintain that consistency at all times.
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