First published in Teach Primary Magazine in February 2009.
Erasing labels and rejecting a culture of blame
SEAL skills are modelled, sign posted and caught, not simply taught. For your school to be emotionally literate your staff must be well trained in managing and modelling emotional literacy in all areas of their work....even in the staff room.
I am not usually prone to right-wing thinking but there are a few things that I would like to ban. Just some phrases I would like to make illegal and perhaps the cleansing of certain thoughts. I know I am shaky moral ground but bear with me. I propose making the phrase, ‘He doesn't behave like that for me', an arrestable offence! Banning the assumption that being good at managing behaviour is more to do with DNA than it is to do with learning new skills. Organising a lynch mob for those caught using the phrase, ‘It's just a personality clash', or, ‘You won't get anywhere with him'.
Schools who succeed in managing and motivating tricky children, while protecting the sanity of their teachers, are schools where behaviour is talked about as openly and honestly as learning. They separate behaviour from identity with their pupils just as they separate behaviour skills from personalities with their colleagues. Staff rooms where labels are allocated and reinforced, where people are afraid to speak out through fear of judgement and where blame is discussed in preference to practical ways forward, are not places of refuge and support for colleagues who are struggling. Supportive staff rooms resist the temptation to consider who is to blame and refuse to reinforce negative labels on children. In such a staff room colleagues who offer nothing but instant judgement are confronted with their destructive behaviour.
At the centre of institutional change is a staff room where teachers refuse to defend inappropriate behaviour with easy short cuts, ‘Those children, from that area with those parents'. A much more productive and supportive atmosphere is borne out of an understanding that the problem is the problem and not the child or their parents or their home environment. In teaching you play the cards that you are dealt. You manage the behaviour of the children in front of you without deferring blame for their behaviour on to areas of their life that you cannot control.
Of course there are thought crimes in the staff room as well as speak crimes. The inner or private voice that we all use for mapping our own understanding of the working world is often where our preconceptions stir, our prejudices seed and the process of labelling begins. Labelling damages your relationship with the pupil, the pupil's self-perception and your ability to manage your own behaviour. It perpetuates undesirable cycles of behaviour and leaves your language littered with negatives. If in your head you are thinking, ‘Year 5 are loonies, book-munching headbangers, if Chantelle Adams is in today it's all over before I open my mouth', you are unlikely to reach that positive and assertive attitude that you will no doubt need for the next hour or two. Neither will it allow you to examine the strategic changes that need to be made to your practice rationally. If you catch yourself using negative labels or not challenging them in the staffroom there are some compelling reasons why you need to check your own behaviour.
The teacher who tries being positive in the classroom only to broadcast negative stereotypes among colleagues will not be able to sustain the separation of attitudes for long. Staffrooms often reinforce unhelpful labels of children/classes/year groups too easily. The joking seems harmless enough at first and relieves the frustrations of a few. But there are dangers lurking. As the jokes are repeated they become common parlance. Groups of staff begin to refer to certain year 3 as ‘little buggers' and a small group in year 6 as ‘the benefit squad'. It begins to affect how you view individuals and your expectations of certain classes. It also begins to change how colleagues view you. Just as the children make judgements on your consistency, fairness and integrity so do your colleagues. What from the inside seems like harmless banter is open to a wide range of unenthusiastic interpretations of your character. Wise professionals stay clear of public and even private stereotyping of pupils. When they are confronted by negative labels and stereotypes they seek to challenge them with care, as they would in the classroom.
Deciding that we will attack the behaviour and not the child or teacher shifts the focus away from the emotionally driven witch hunt, ‘Whose fault is it, who is to blame, let's weed out the ‘weak'...' and back to the rational, ‘What strategies work, what can we try, how can we break this cycle of inappropriate behaviour'. Try posting up a list of ‘Strategies that work with Trevor on the staffroom notice board so that colleagues can make positive, considered contributions. Make expectations for adults in the staff room as clear as they are for pupils in your classroom: ‘The problem is the problem, not the child', ‘Behaviour skills are learned and not passed down in DNA', ‘Careless Labelling Costs.' Take black and white photographs of your trickiest children looking angelic and blow them up poster size for the front entrance hall to challenge preconceptions.
A culture of blame and labelling, of them and us', eats away at the consistency everyone wants. The culture in the staff room is at the core of a genuinely consistent approach. The aim is to ensure that colleagues are not just performing as socially and emotionally literate adults in the classroom but also in the staffroom. Although it may be tempting to issue banning orders or call in the thought police there are more subtle strategies that might be more inclusive and less Orwellian.