Professor Tom Bennett on stage for his Running the Room presentation at Merici College: Teachers are just not being trained enough to handle human behaviour. Photo: Ros Parisi.
The open plan classroom has been the stupidest idea in education – “and it’s a strong field” – says classroom behaviour guru Tom Bennett, who spoke to Region ahead of presenting his Running the Room workshop for teachers at Canberra’s Merici College.
“Focus is what we’re very much in the business of and open classrooms are the biggest distraction ever,” Professor Bennett told Region.
Professor Bennett said they were based on a completely faulty understanding of how kids learn.
“Every school I have ever seen that’s had an open plan footprint always goes back to closed classrooms, walls and doors, because people cannot think when there’s all that stuff going on around about them.”
Professor Bennett is sharing his expertise with teachers across Australia on a national tour. He is the School Behaviour Advisor to the UK Government, the author of multiple best-selling books on classroom behaviour, and has worked with over 900 schools in 15 countries. He also ran challenging classrooms for 14 years.
He said that in most countries he had visited, there had been a crisis in the classroom bubbling away for decades, but for a long time, nobody really talked about it, and teachers had been ill-equipped to deal with poor classroom behaviour, despite years of academic training.
“Kids are going to always act up and some kids will really act up but for a long time now the Australian, the New Zealand, the British system, a lot of systems, haven’t really faced up to this and nobody really talks about it, and teachers know it, but it doesn’t really break through into the mainstream consciousness,” he said.
That changed with the rise of social media and more media attention generally, and the pandemic lockdowns that have made things worse, with many children becoming desocialised after spending so much time at home out of the classroom.
“If kids are at home for a year or longer, they lose the habit of going to school, and the kids who come from the most vulnerable situations tend to fall back the most,” he said.
Many teachers were left to work it out as they went along, “which is a really terrible way to ask anyone to do anything complex and professional”.
Professor Bennett said too much theory and not enough practical training about managing human behaviour meant teachers were sent into the classroom without the tools to be successful.
He said it wasn’t rocket science or even his ‘method’, but what he had observed from successful teachers around the world and what good teachers had done for centuries.
This involved ground rules and boundaries, consequences for breaking them, predictability and responding confidently but without anger or malice.
“Children learn their behaviours from their own situations, so what we can do is we can teach the behaviour curriculum to children at school, and it really helps them know what to do in order to be successful,” Professor Bennett said.
“Kids need boundaries, and those boundaries often have to be accompanied by low-level but really consistent penalties, not because we like giving penalties out, but because we don’t want them to do the thing that causes the penalty.
“It’s kind of like a parking ticket, something small but predictable.”
Professor Bennett said there had been an international movement away from that, in the belief that it was cruel, mean and tyrannical.
But it was only cruel if it was done cruelly, he said.
“If we focus on teaching great behaviour, then kids love being successful, and we only have to use these penalties on very rare occasions, but they do need to be used, and teachers need to be confident with doing that,” Professor Bennett said.
But teachers had to stick to their guns.
“That’s why I call it running the room because you’re basically walking into the room and saying, my room, my rules. I love you, but they are my rules,” Professor Bennett said.
Professor Bennett said teachers made crazy mistakes, such as trying to be students’ pals and mates instead of establishing proper relationships.
“Kids love it, and they love feeling safe, and they love knowing that there’s a grown-up in charge of the room who cares about them,” he said
“None of this sounds like rocket science, and it isn’t, but you’ve got to say it really clearly and simply sometimes to get past all the crazy that passes for orthodoxy in education these days.”
Professor Bennett said the kids who needed this consistent and predictable approach came from the most chaotic circumstances, difficult homes and special needs such as those with autism and ADHD.
“So this isn’t all about, you know, trying to make things hard for disadvantaged kids. This is about making it easy to learn for everybody,” he said.
Violence can’t be countenanced, and was usually the product of a chaotic classroom or home environment or deeper issues with a child or family.
But teachers had to deal with it, including using suspension and even expulsion.
“I always want to try and make sure the kid takes responsibility for throwing a punch, because even if you’re having a bad day, even if you’re having a bad life, it doesn’t justify punching someone or stealing from them or telling the teacher to F-off,” Professor Bennett said.
Some parents could be problematic for teachers, but they could also be their greatest allies if schools were upfront about the rules and cultivated healthy relationships.
But there was no doubt that poor behaviour could stem from what was going on at home and that a minority of parents could not be won over.
What reassures Professor Bennett is that wherever he went in the world, childhood behaviour and the issues facing teachers were universally the same.
“So if teachers are struggling, they don’t need to feel alone,” he said.
Professor Bennett was encouraged by a groundswell over the past two or three years towards better classroom management, saying it could be learnt in a few weeks and, if applied, teachers could become really good at it in a matter of months.
He said schools had started waking up to this, but many teachers were still not being trained in it enough.
“In a sane world, there wouldn’t be a place for someone like me to come along and have to talk about these basics and so on, but we don’t live in the sane world, we live in this one,” he said.
