ABSTRACT
In the course of your work with children and young people who have behaviour difficulties you will find that if you step back from working directly with the child and become a ‘fly on the wall’ you will get a lot of information about what is going on that will add to your understanding of what is causing the behaviour to occur. In practice, it is quite difficult to do this because in your normal role you will be very much engaged in conversation and interactions with a number of pupils and, should you choose to do an observation, you will be approached for help unrelentingly unless you make it clear that you are ‘unavailable'. You need to tell the pupils that they are to pretend that you are not there because you have to do an important job of watching the whole class and are not allowed to speak! Once you have managed to persuade members of the class not to approach you, you will be ready to do an observation of classroom behaviour.
