Behavioural Management for Substitute Teachers

Using a handbook for substitutes provided by my district, I developed this scenario-based module to teach classroom management strategies for casual teachers. Here, I had to play around a lot with branching slides, multiple endings, and variables. The module starts with an initial scenario, and presents you with a series of question-and-answer slides. Throughout all of this, your responses are kept track of, and your choices determine the end result.

The Who: Designed for use by on-call teachers

The What: A module designed to teach classroom management strategies

The How: Articulate Storyline 360, GIMP

The Problem

Some K-12 students like to push the limits with substitute teachers. They enjoy making a fuss and seeing how far they can take it before the substitute gets fed up. They take advantage of the situation where their regular teacher, who has established the rules and expectations for the class and knows the personalities of each student, is replaced by someone who is unfamiliar with the standard classroom operations. This was one of the problems that my school district sought to address when it released a handbook for substitute teachers, which outlined several strategies that a casual teacher can employ to maintain high standards and good behaviour in their classes.

The Process

As I had access to this handbook, a lot of the heavy lifting had been done for me upfront; this handbook contained a list of strategies, contact information and other resources for staff to use to help create a more healthy learning environment. It was the information from this handbook that I condensed in order to include it in a training module.

Next, I began the process of storyboarding. I opted for a scenario-based learning experience; this can be a great way to get your learners to engage with what they already know. During this portion of development, a scenario was drafted with choices for the learner to select and different endings to the scenario depending on what was chosen. Once this was planned, I could move on to identifying the pieces of information from the handbook that needed to be included and figured out a way to group things together to make the module organized and easy to navigate.

A scenario-based module like this can get very convoluted, very quickly. I had to pay extremely careful attention that each selection sent the learner to the correct sequential slide, and that my triggers and variables all worked together to ensure that the learner would reach the correct outcome. This was the most intensive portion of the project; I previewed and tested each and every interactable object several times to ensure everything worked as it should.