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  • Support for early career teachers
  • UCL
  • Year 1: First half-term: enabling pupil learning
    • Autumn week 6

    Mentor materials

    Managing behaviour

    Learning intentions

    Your ECT will learn how to:

    Develop a positive, predictable and safe environment for pupils by:

    • Using consistent language and non-verbal signals for common classroom directions.
    • Using early and least-intrusive interventions as an initial response to low-level disruption.
    • Responding quickly to any behaviour or bullying that threatens emotional safety.

    Build trusting relationships by:

    • Responding consistently to pupil behaviour.

    Topic introduction

    In their self-directed study session this week, your mentee revisited learning on how to manage behaviour – this was first introduced in week 3 (Establishing the learning environment). Your mentee wrote vignettes about (a) an event where they had managed behaviour effectively and (b) a situation in which they found it tricky to manage behaviour. By reflecting on these two events, your mentee was able to draft a checklist to help them manage behaviour well in the future.

    In this week’s ECT mentor meeting, you will work with your mentee to review their vignettes and checklist. You will then agree on a focus for a developmental lesson observation next week when you will observe your mentee with a focus on one or more aspects of the Module 1 content. You will spend some time in your meeting today helping your mentee to prepare for this observation.

    Meeting activities

    Throughout the session, try to refer explicitly to the Learning Intentions, and encourage your mentee to record key points in their Learning Log. Tailor your use of the Theory to Practice activities below in response to the Review and Plan sections of this session.

    Review: 5 mins

    • Start this session by briefly following up the actions that the mentee set at the end of last week’s session. Ask your mentee to summarise
    • what they did
    • the impact of this on pupil learning (including how they are evaluating this)
    • what they will do going forward to build on these actions
    • Clarify the Learning Intentions for this session with your mentee.

    Plan: 5 mins

    At the start of this module, you looked at all of the learn how to statements for Standards 1 and 7 and conducted a module audit with your mentee: in some areas, they will already be confident and skilled; in others, they will want more practice and support from you and others. Look back at this audit now and use it to help decide how you and your mentee will make the most productive use of the suggested Theory to Practice activities below.

    Theory to Practice: 35 mins

    1. Analyse artefacts/discuss with mentor Invite your mentee to talk you through the vignettes and checklist they drafted in their self-study session this week and to share what they learned from completing these activities. Use your knowledge and experience to highlight strengths in your mentee’s reflective thinking and suggest ways to make the most of their learning from the activities as they put their checklist into practice. To support this discussion, you could:
      • connect your mentee’s checklist to your school’s behaviour policy to ensure that the two are aligned
      • highlight strengths in your mentee’s current approach to managing behaviour on which they can build
      • note any areas for development which your mentee has not included in their checklist, but which you think should usefully be addressed
    2. Discuss with mentor Module 1 has introduced a range of approaches to behaviour management, many of which your mentee will now have put into practice. As part of next week’s ECT mentor meeting, you will observe your mentee using some of these approaches. Based on your mentee’s development needs and the challenges they are currently experiencing with their pupils, agree with your mentee which class you will observe and the focus of this observation. The observation is allocated 20 minutes of your meeting time for the week. Use the notes made by your mentee in their self-study session and the outcomes of the first activity in this session as a starting point for some collaborative planning. Work with your mentee to plan how they will incorporate into their teaching, in the coming week, strategies for developing pupils’ resilience, self-regulation and motivation. Agree with your mentee:
      • which lesson you will observe
      • which 20 minute part of the lesson you will observe
      • the focus of your observation, drawn from one or more of the sessions for Module 1
      • the success criteria for this observation, contextualised for your mentee’s stage of development and the characteristics of their pupils Note: this observation should not form part of your school’s performance management process or NQT statutory induction. To clearly differentiate this developmental observation from these formal processes you may wish to record your observation notes on paperwork not associated with these processes.
    3. Collaborative planning Spend some time with your mentee planning their lesson for the agreed observation next week. Make use of research and practice summaries from previous weeks in this module, as appropriate, to stimulate ideas for the lesson. You might also use scripting and/or rehearsal if this suits your mentee’s needs.

    Next Steps: 5 mins

    As your mentee is preparing for the developmental observation as part of next week’s ECT mentor meeting, there is no need to set further actions arising from this week’s session.

    Note the date of your next mentor meeting. There is no ECT self-study in week 7, as this is replaced by an ECT online learning community.