Teaching Behaviour

New Zealand Education has a false dichotomy between Learning and Behaviour, as though Learning is something to be taught and Behaviour is something to be disciplined. In the past it was assumed that Behaviour was something learned at home (mostly by discipline) and that Education Learning was the job of the school.

It is abundantly evident that not all the necessary behaviours for learning and socialisation are acquired in the home (nor were they ever), and that behaviour needs to be taught just like any other learned thing at school.

To this end, Pt England School has a policy that we teach behaviour and that in order to do so we integrate this into the life of the school as well as into our planning for learning. We use the School Values and the Key Competencies as vehicle for this planning and learning and we integrate this into our Inquiry Units of learning. Teachers should always be conscious (as should the students) of the behavioural outcome being sought through any unit of work.

Time spent prior to any piece of work or activity discussing how we will work and how we will behave while we work, will be time well spent and is just as important for our students' success as all the time spent on the delivery of skill, process and content in the academic domains.

When students are consistently referred to Special Needs Committee for behavioural issues, one of the early things we will be looking for