Thinking Out Loud: Pre-service Teacher Skills

27th January, 2016
  
Alex talks about the lack of focus in current teacher training courses on behaviour management, a skill he believes is crucial to starting out as an effective teacher

As I enter the fourth and final year of my teacher training course, I have begun to reflect on what I have learned and whether or not it has prepared me for my first year of teaching. While I will happily acknowledge that my time at university has developed my skills and understanding of pedagogy, especially in relation to the teaching of mathematics, I must admit that I feel there have been, in my view, several key elements left out. The one I wish to discuss here, and in my view the most important, is behaviour management.

One of the issues that seems to consistently arise when talking with recent graduates is the challenge with behaviour management. It is, in my mind, the most important skill for new teachers to have when they enter the classroom and I've heard various horror stories (directly and indirectly) of stressed teachers struggling to achieve order and function due to a lack of management skills. Thus it seems curious to me that I had to pursue an elective, under my own motivation, to develop an understanding of behaviour. None of the core (compulsory) units at my university covered the topic in any particular detail, nor provided strategies or research on how to master the classroom. I consider myself extremely lucky to have chosen the elective which looked in-depth at behaviour, classroom management, community creation, and crisis control. I learned a vast amount of practical and theoretical information which has shaped and improved my behaviour management skills. However, many of my fellow peers have not had the chance to engage with this unit and may not be able to before the end of their final year. I fear for my friends as they enter the workforce with skills that may be inadequate to deal with the challenges they face. I can't imagine a stressful and frustrating first year of teaching will inspire any loyalty to the profession. Thus I can't fathom why a topic as fundamental as behaviour management is not covered rigorously over the first few years of our teacher training - when it is, perhaps, at its most crucial.

I believe this lack of a core behvaiour unit results in two serious issues; firstly the lack of development of an essential skill. As I mentioned before, various teachers have told me how important having strong behaviour management skills are, and I think there are many pre-service teachers graduating under-prepared into the work force. This sees them struggling in their first years of teaching to deal with issues that they simply do not have the skills to successfully resolve. This in turn results in the second serious issue; a reliance on ineffective and negative management techniques.

As I progressed through my placements I took on the behaviour management strategies of the associate teachers I worked with - simply because I had none of my own! I was a blank slate with no comparative concepts of management and classroom set up. Now I have engaged with the behaviour management elective I can see that some of the tactics and strategies used by teachers I have viewed are extremely negative. They are short-term, authoritarian and destructive. I have also seen some extremely positive and long term behaviour strategies. However, I think many pre-service teachers are leaving university with little or no behaviour management skills, and the ones they have are not best practice. If you know no alternative to yelling, then that will be your behaviour strategy. And the tragedy is that after a few years whatever behaviour practices you use will become habit. I believe that many pre-service teachers are graduating with knowledge only of negative, authoritarian behaviour practices.These will destroy any chance of positive relationships with your students and ultimately cause them to dislike you, and dislike school. Children and teachers deserve better than this.

Every pre-service teacher needs the chance to develop their behaviour management skills. They need a compulsory unit where they can learn about behaviour, its functions and causes, as well as how to manage behaviour in a positive way. I believe as teachers we model the different ways that our society and culture functions. It seems paramount to me that every student is engaged in a pro-social, democratic classroom environment with a teacher who can help children learn how to self-regulate their behaviour. At the moment I believe too many teachers are graduating with insufficient skills to make this happen. There needs to be a change. Best practice of behaviour management is essential to being an effective teacher, our teacher training institutions should reflect this and modify their curriculum accordingly.

- Alex