Catch Them Being Good

During my PGCE, my tutor would often say that to address bad behaviour, you had to “catch them being good”. I struggled with this advice massively because I interpreted it to mean “catch the student who is doing the wrong thing being good”. I had some classes where some students were rarely doing anything that could be considered good. And so I did the wrong thing – I lowered the bar to try and find something, anything at all that could be considered good.

• “Well done for bringing a pen”
• “Excellent, you’re sat in your seat”
• “5 merits, you’ve started the Do Now”

This created a disparity between students in the room as I was holding them to different accounts. And this is really wrong for everyone involved.

Enter Teach Like A Champion.

The power of this book, in my opinion, is that the techniques have really clear and obvious names. I don’t agree with all of them. I don’t use all of them. But it’s abundantly clear what they mean. And yes, “we already do that”, “it’s just good teaching” but being able to share a technique and give feedback quickly through a simple name is so powerful.

Narrate the positive is the TLAC version of catch them being good and it helped me to see that I shouldn’t be trying to scour my lesson for brief moments where specific individuals (the tricky ones) were being good – instead I should be catching moments when anyone is reaching the high standards that I should be holding for the entire class. And then broadcasting it, clearly.

This has the effect of slowly changing the social norm of the class. The first time I did it (after seeing a tweet about it from Lee Donaghy and his excellent blog about Brighten Lines) it was like magic. Full on, wingardium leviosa magic.

So, sorry to my tutor for not understanding catch them being good, I get it now.