The importance of relationships for behaviour management

Aaron Williams, Co-Principal of Lloyd Williamson Schools (LWS), shares a model for successful intervention...

At LWS we believe in the importance of developing the children’s emotional literacy, supporting them to understand themselves, take account of others they come into contact with and make the best of situations they find themselves in. We aim for all children to benefit as much as possible from their school experience so that they leave us with a high sense of achievement, self-esteem and personal responsibility.

We encourage children to think, feel and behave in ways appropriate to the here and now reality they find themselves in so they can take responsibility for who they are and how they behave and learn in any given moment.

Children come to school with values and beliefs from a range of sources: home (their immediate and wider family), stories they read, television programmes they watch (or which may just be on in the background), popular culture they absorb both in ways we know and in ways we can only imagine. There are messages they have ‘swallowed whole’, and fully understood, as well as others they have swallowed whole but which remain not thought through. They bring in other ideas of their own, which are assimilations of how they think they are supposed to think, feel and behave. Often these values and beliefs are helpful in supporting them to make the most of their school life and to enjoy a satisfying enough experience; sometimes they are not, and they hinder their enjoyment and learning!

Here I would like to focus on behaviour as an interconnected product of thinking and feeling.

All children bring personalities as unique as snowflakes to their experience of school and we aim to support them to make the best of who they are, who they hope to be and to work out how to get there!

What we as teachers have in common with them is our own experience of childhood, and whilst for some (myself especially) it is firmly set in the days of black and white television and original episodes of Upstairs Downstairs, we all aim to understand life in the here and now as we experience it. There are social situations that children experience today that most of us did not have to face when we were growing up – the world is changing in ways that as an adult I sometimes struggle to understand – I try to imagine how it must be for some of our pupils and how they make sense of these changes.

At our school, we support the staff through training in self-reflection to understand themselves in relation to the children. In this respect we understand that education happens in relationship – not just the content of lesson plans and meticulously planned topics, but in the process of being together in a room with others, all of us learning something new about each other at the same time.

Whilst my main ethos of education evolved in the 70s and 80s through ‘child centred’ education, it was the head of my first school who taught me to understand the real value of relationship through teaching me to deeply reflect on “Who am I? Who are the children in my class? What will we learn together?”

This led me to explore my own sense of how I learned (how did I feel about my own experience of school?), what I learned (what did I know or not know? What were my passions and why?), how did I feel about myself (what parts of me had been allowed to emerge, or gone into hiding, which parts of me did I feel driven to show others and why?). In answering these questions I began to think about how I might either consciously or unconsciously influence the children in my care either in ways that would benefit them or otherwise. I realised that in order to understand them I had to understand me!

The main area this first came to light in was behaviour, and when faced with 38 children in my class I realised I needed to work on some common consensual ideas. What this turned into was a class contract. Not the first of its kind but a radical thought back in the early ‘80s when most behaviour management in schools seemed to me to be about the enforcement of rules and children adapting to them.

At Lloyd Williamson Schools we use a tool to support intervention in behaviour called the Awareness Ladder, which we have adapted from a Transactional Analysis tool called the Discount Matrix (Mellor and Sigmund 1975). It is based on four levels:

Level 1: Does the person know that what they’re doing is a problem? If not then the intervention must be at this level – there may be a cultural (perhaps between home and school) difference, or generational difference, or a developmental sense that they don’t understand that this is a problem and why. Sometimes an intervention at this level is enough to support the person to change what they are doing. This can facilitate a conversation between two children or the child and staff member involved to see each other’s perception.

Once Level 1 is achieved we can proceed, if necessary, to:

Level 2: Does the person understand the impact of what they’re doing? Once level 1 is achieved, we can help children to understand the effect they have on others and support them to de-escalate what they are doing and minimise the impact. To do this we need to understand the impact we in turn have on our children.

Level 3: Do they know what their options are to do something different? This might be about the child understanding their emotions and how they might be acting out, in which case how else might they process their anger, sadness or fear. There may be options to do things differently but some children have never been talked through these options. This may be a one-off intervention or a stage that needs a planned support period.

Level 4: How willing are they to invest in the changes they need to make? This is about motivation and readiness. This may be a tough one to crack. They may well know what to do; what is it about making the changes they are struggling with? Teachers need to have their own reference for this in order to have empathy.

Often teachers come in with a Level 4 intervention too early and think the child is stubborn, even when they are not, which is sometimes where the clash comes. We believe it is more useful to work through each level without presuming!

Pitching the intervention is crucial to challenging everyone’s perception about what is happening and why, and offering children a route towards making amends and understanding how to take responsibility for who they are.

Not only have we found this model a useful barometer in our everyday interactions with children, it is useful for us as parents and in our adult relationships and staff management.

Read more about Lloyd Williamson Schools...