I’m a teacher, and I recently took on a new role in a secondary school. Behaviour at this school is, overall, ok. The school has a good behaviour policy.
My issue is that a number of students across my classes that I teach are really disruptive and challenging. I relocate the worst offenders, issue detentions, but nothing changes. Certain students seem to enjoy making my classes an absolute misery,
I have been feeding back to my HOD and line manager. They are aware but all of their suggestions include things like “having a conversation with the student to try and improve the relationship”. I do talk to these students. It isn’t working. I have found my department to just be a bit rubbish at supporting me. Nobody ever asks me how things are going. I was supposed to have one of my trickier classes observed, nobody showed up.
i don’t like the culture of the school. It is incredibly negative and the children only ever seem to respond to punishments and the threat of a detention. The lack of any kind of meangingful interest from my HOD is making me wonder if it’s worth resigning and seeing if there is a more suitable school for me, or, should I stay and just suck it up? I’m aware that there are behavioural issues affecting schools nationwide at the moment, so I’m reluctant to change schools only to encounter the same kind of verbal abuse from students elsewhere.
Any advice welcome. I’m feeling so down at the moment, and just feeling like it’s such a struggle to get through some of my lessons because of all the challenging behaviour.