Behaviour solutions
Understanding children, their needs, wants, and inner life before designing a behavior policy helps to make it effective. Behaviour policies in school are usually based on the assumption that rewarding good behaviours and punishing undesirable behaviours will deliver the tight system that everyone in school wants. But in challenging situations, a simple behavioural system (based on operant conditioning) is rarely enough to contain all of every class.
In these situations, successful schools run a tight behavioural system supplemented by techniques of classroom management and school-wide approaches to child management that draw on different understandings of the child. For example, some children from difficult backgrounds find it impossible to trust people in authority. This means that rewards for good behavior that are distant in the future have no hold on them. The Learning Challenge would like to sit down with your senior team and then go away to devise an effective policy designed for your school. It will not cost the earth.