‘What do you need from me?’: An overview of effective behaviour management in the primary classroom from a teacher’s perspective

Coral Huby, Curriculum Developer, New Horizons Children’s Academy, UK Introduction Behaviour management is taught widely across every point in a teacher’s career in the classroom. We have all come up against those classes, groups, children that push the boundaries to avoid something: learning, interaction, perhaps truth. But consider the language used there – ‘come up against’. In the black and white of teaching, we should know what knowledge needs to be imparted, know how to convey that knowledge, ensure that the knowledge has embedded into long-term memory and repeat the process. However, often we don’t give enough weight to the fact that we are in the privileged position of working with extremely complex human beings, especially following an unprecedented two years of complete disruption to the ‘normal’ learning journey. Any teacher of any length or breadth of experience will have a plethora of anecdotes regarding how learning was disrupted by a singular behaviour,