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                                           The Behaviour Guru, 2010





                                      Not Quite a Teacher, March 2011




Popular posts from this blog

Good schools help children behave

Schools need to teach behaviour, or the most disadvantaged suffer twice
This is a tale of two students. The first student is lucky. She comes from a close extended family, two affluent parents with spare income and time to invest in their child. She is read to on a daily basis, and reads to her parents and other family members. Because her family has time (and the inclination to do so), she is carefully taught millions of micro-behaviours that comprise the messy field of positive social interactions- she is taught how to speak confidently to adults, how to resolve disputes without aggression, how interact with her peers, and so on. When she misbehaves, she is patiently retaught what she should have done. By the time she gets to school she has already acquired a huge amount of cultural and social capital. She is already in the top quarter of the class for reading, writing, comprehension, arithmetic, and so on. She rarely gets into trouble because she understands the habits of formal gro…
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Impressively wrong- why Alfie Kohn’s advice on running rooms is not great

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Enough is enough- it's time to stop taking bad advice about behaviour when children's futures are at stake


Years ago I waited tables in TGI Fridays, where they used to run competitions for staff to see who could sell the most sticky, smoky meat and goldfish bowls of margaritas. Until one day the good times stopped rolling and the managers decreed there would be no more. The reason? One of them had read a book: ‘Punished by rewards’, and claimed that it described how people shouldn’t be incentivised by something so gaudy as an incentive. The author was Alfie Kohn. Years later when I became a teacher I discovered his advice was following me around like eyes on a painting in Scooby Doo. Kohn has become one of the most influential writers in education. His books have found homes in libraries from Beirut to Bearsden. Sadly, rarely have trees been so needlessly pulped.

I frequently hear him described as a behaviour expert. But I find this strange, because surely one of the defining …
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Perfect isolation. Why the hysteria about removal rooms misses the point.

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Every now and again a story about schools finds legs and I have to read it twice to understand if I’ve missed anything. Recently you might have seen a minor uproar as it was announced that ‘’schools are using isolation rooms to punish pupils as young as five years old’ and that this practice (‘dubbed barbaric’) is used ‘across the country.’ I’m certainly glad I was sitting down to read that ‘youngsters can remain there for up to one day,’ and I gasped to read that it was a ‘sign of an institution giving up.’(1)

I felt like I was taking crazy pills reading it, which was then picked u across a few more outlets, before exploding onto social media in a glorious firework display of ill-temper and scalp collecting.

Because using isolation booths is a perfectly normal, useful and compassionate strategy that is so common across the school sector that anyone expressing shock to discover it has, I can only assume, sent very little time actually working in a school. I can only imagine what they…
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