ABSTRACT
We have seen in previous chapters that the thought of having to deal with ‘bad’ pupil behaviour tends to be seen as one of the main drawbacks of teaching as a career and one of the main concerns of those about to embark on an ITT programme. We have also seen that the ‘ability to maintain discipline in the classroom’ was one of the main skills that the student teachers in our research hoped to learn from their ITT. And we also saw in the last chapter that issues relating to pupil behaviour were at the root of some of the emotional ‘lows’ suffered, in the early stages of their ITT programmes, by many of the student teachers in our research. In this chapter we show that pupil behaviour remains a problem, for some trainees, further into (and, for some, throughout) their ITT programmes. But we also show that:
not all student teachers see pupil behaviour as a problem (do you?);
your ITT course tutors and mentors are there to help you to learn to deal with any problems that you do encounter;
there are a number of strategies that you can adopt both to help you minimise the likelihood of pupil behaviour becoming a problem in your classroom, and to help you to deal with bad behaviour when it does occur.
