There’s no difference between kids and cars? What does this mean?

I didn’t have room to explain fully in the heading. I mean it but it’s only how you learn to manage children’s behaviour and how you learn to drive your car – not how both look! Learning the skills are much the same and if you don’t learn correctly the results can be very damaging.

If you want to be skillful in any area, you have to be taught what to do, go off and practise and then keep doing what you’ve learned. Put simply – learn about the skill, practise until it’s second nature and use the techniques consistently.

Think about what happens if you don’t follow the simple rules of skill building when applied to driving your car. If you stop driving and steering the car either stops or doesn’t go where you want it to go. If you don’t have the right level of skill then you could crash and cause mayhem. If you have started learning the skill but fail to carry out the rules consistently, again chaos will reign. The same applies to managing children in the classroom.

Many people are having trouble managing children’s behaviour. Why? Simply because they aren’t being trained to manage behaviour effectively. Experienced teachers, student teachers, support assistants and other staff – even head teachers and managers haven’t enough knowledge or skill to manage behaviour confidently.

An added problem is those offering advice on behaviour management. What person would be best equipped to teach you to drive a car? Perhaps someone who drove a car each day, taught others, and had the skill? Or a person who couldn’t drive or hardly ever drove a car, hadn’t the skill to show you how and knew no more than you?

Ridiculous as it sounds, I see so many reports with inaccurate advice about managing children’s behaviour. I have to tell schools to ignore it! It’s as bad as having the non-driving person trying to teach you to drive – it’s dangerous. It causes car crashes and misery. The health of children and adults is being damaged by lack of skills in behaviour management techniques.

What do I do that’s different? Every day I do the job of managing children’s behaviour. I’m observed by teachers and students. They receive my help in their classrooms. They asked me to write it all down and that resulted in Behaviour Bible. They’ve generously commented on my techniques and how they’ve been helped to manage behaviour.

The message is that classrooms shouldn’t be chaotic and that you can learn to manage children’s behaviour, exactly the same as you learned driving skills ….

Learn more about effective behaviour management. Stop by Liz Marsden’s site where you can find out all about classroom behaviour management and what it can do for you.