This week I really felt for the young teacher (whose name I’ve completely forgotten). I do think there was a narrative the show really wanted to push (teacher struggles with behaviour, more experienced teachers help and then he earns the students’ respect by stopping shouting at them).
In my experience it was a very realistic portrayal of low level disruption and I’m glad the teacher spoke about how hard observations can be.
I actually think - trying to ignore the narrator and looking at the actual footage - that the behaviour in his class wasn’t that bad. Definitely not worse than other classes that are shown. While he did raise his voice quite a bit, I do think this is common and we repeatedly saw other teachers do the same during other clips.
I did notice in schools myself that there’s a bit of a double standard there. There’s often teachers (especially older males who have been there a long time) who raise their voice a lot and it’s seen as them being very strict and kids know not to mess around with them. Often they seem to be oddly proud of being the one who can be heard shouting down the corridor. However if a younger newer teachers do it it’s seen as them being out of control and not having any patience.
It’s funny because when we were watching the observation class with the boy who eventually got sent out, DH couldn’t believe how many chances he was giving him. He thought surely the observer will advise that he should have sent him out earlier. I said I bet it’s the opposite and I was right! She thought he’d escalated it too quickly.
I do think it’s a big challenge with teaching. The lad was being disruptive and it’s so hard for everyone else to learn when it’s like that. They were relatively small things but constantly and it wastes a lot of time.
Behaviour policies or at least how you’re asked to implement them often do seem to involve a lot of chances and warnings. It is one thing when it’s one student in the class but when you’ve got a difficult class of five, six, seven or more of them doing the constant low level stuff it can be difficult to manage.
I once witnessed a member of SLT completely reverse an after school detention (which would require ten chances - warning - b1 - warning - b2 - warning - b3 - warning - b4 - warning - b5) because the parent rang up and complained that the teacher hadn’t given the first verbal warning properly. They’d told the child to stop but hadn’t said the words “this is your first verbal warning.” They’d given the other nine chances but it was deemed unfair because the child “hadn't been given the proper opportunity to change their behaviour”.
In a 50 minute lesson with 30 kids, trying to teach and manage all this, on top of all the different accommodations needed for additional needs, it’s a lot. Then there’s massive pressure to get children making accelerated progress to meet expectations too.
Hats off to all of the teachers still there doing it and every day.