ABSTRACT
Having a school-wide behaviour management policy in place is an essential component of effective behaviour management. It is not, however, the cure-all for problem behaviour in a school. In most schools there will be times when some students will misbehave, sometimes badly. This echoes the point we made earlier about the need for good discipline to begin in the classroom with the thinking and actions of the individual teacher. It is important to remember that good discipline isn’t only about regulating students’ behaviour, it is also a lot to do with the self-discipline of the teacher. The nature of human beings is that we are sensitive creatures whose behaviour can sometimes be erratic and even contradictory. In order to establish good discipline, however, teachers need to work very hard at ironing out some of those inconsistencies. This is not to say that good teachers are like robots. On the contrary, effective teaching and learning often involves exploiting the unpredictable outcomes that emerge from two or more people engaging in a genuine transaction of thought and action (Cooper and McIntyre, 1996). But just as it is (probably) impossible to engage in a really thoughtful and effective discussion about the use of metaphor in Shakespeare’s sonnets while sitting in the middle of a football field, during a game, with a crowd of 200,000 yelling at the tops of their voices, so it is impossible to engage in that same discussion (properly) in a chaotic classroom. Effective discipline is unobtrusive, it takes care of those aspects of classroom life which could detract from the real business of classrooms: teaching and learning. However, teachers are human, and the following section lists some of the ways in which teachers the world over commonly slip up and inadvertently undermine their own lessons.
