Breaking the cycle of challenging behaviour

16 / FEATURE ➜ TEACHING G& LEARNING

Breaking the cycle of challenging behaviour

Joel Beeden, SENCO at Duckmanton Primary School in Derbyshire, believes that active learning can be a game changer when it comes to managing behaviour in class.

t is apparent throughout my school that children who I have recently returned are undergoing a period of readjustment. Settling into the new routine has been a bit of a shock to the system.

Some students are experiencing grief for lost loved ones. Many have had their home life affected by financial worries as a result of the pandemic.

These challenges are particularly exacerbated in my area, which is a small, remote ex-mining village with high unemployment and deprivation levels. At my school, over half of the children receive free school meals and more than a third have special educational needs.

There is no doubt that the changes are having an impact on emotional and behavioural difficulties. This was also borne out in a recent study by researchers at the Universities of Essex, Surrey and Birmingham.

LACK OF ACTIVITY

More than two thirds of UK parents have said that their children became less active during the pandemic. Hundreds of hours spent sitting in front of screens during lockdown and the general lack of physical activity are known to be key contributors to challenging behaviour.

For children with SEND, this has been compounded by the lack of routine and regular support they had before Covid struck.

As a SENCO and a sports lead in our school, I see a direct link between physical activity and SEND pupils’ improved wellbeing and behaviour. As a result, we will be incorporating more physical activity into our school day to help children adjust as we creep back to normality after all the disruption.

A PHYSICALLY ACTIVE CURRICU LUM

A physically active curriculum has been the cornerstone to improving behaviour at our school for some time now. This is not about doing more sport – although that is also important. Instead, it means getting all children up and moving about during their lessons most days of the week.

We decided on this approach as we began to notice the positive impact that PE lessons were having on many students. Some of our pupils with SEND who were disengaged and disruptive in the classroom became model students during PE. They

BIO

J O E L B E E D E N

Joel is a SENCO, sport, mental health, wellbeing lead and promoter of active learning at Duckmanton Primary School in Derbyshire.

THE IMPACT

Some of our pupils with SEND who were disengaged and disruptive in the classroom became model students during PE.

There is no doubt that the changes are having an impact on emotional and behavioural difficulties.

After using active teaching throughout the school, we have seen an improvement in behaviour as well as more enjoyment in class.

This is particularly the case for children with SEND and learning differences, who find the active lessons inclusive and accessible. Confidence in maths and English has grown, as has independence within lessons, as pupils relish the opportunity to learn through active sessions that they can confidently engage with.

The best measure of progress was a 98 per cent pass rate in the SPAG test in the year before the pandemic struck. This let us know we are on the right track, and now active learning will be central to our approach to improving behaviour and filling any gaps in learning as a result of the lockdowns.

We have seen so much success in managing challenging behaviour thanks to physically active learning that we decided to set up an annual active learning day for the cluster of schools in the local area. We used all available space and committed to spend at least half of the day doing active lessons outside.

Each year, this initiative has continued to grow, and it now includes all schools in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, with hundreds of children of all abilities taking part.

The initiative sees outdoor class areas be set up so students can jump, hop, and skip their way through active lessons. Going by previous years, there’s no disruption or challenging behaviour to be seen anywhere.

loved taking part in the sports activities and were focused and well-behaved.

So, we thought, why not take the element of physical activity, and apply it to other lessons, like maths and English?

We started to incorporate activities into lessons with ready-made active lesson plans from Teach Active, which made it far quicker to adapt to the new style of teaching.

With this approach, instead of teaching fractions in class, we can take pupils out to the football field where they run around sorting groups of objects into halves, thirds, quarters, or fifths and placing them in hoops.

Alternatively, we could set up a number hunt, encouraging children to use a map to navigate the playground to find hidden fraction cards with a problem they need to solve. They are asked to calculate the responses as quickly as they can before the stopwatch beeps, adding a sense of urgency and fun to the task.

An element of competition can be added to the learning experience too. In an English lesson, teams can race against one another to find the correct answer to a comprehension question or play charades in the classroom to act out the meanings of new words.

Children don’t necessarily realise they are learning when you encourage them to become dictionary detectives and spot misspelt words dotted around the room, but the results have shown us the learning is definitely sticking.