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I went off-piste last week by writing about the lessons I learnt about home schooling in the first few weeks of lockdown. The idea of this blog is to introduce one point about behaviour management each week. Week one we talked about staying calm and this week I will talk about why relationships are King.

Think back to when you were in school, for some it may not be that long ago but for me it was a lifetime ago, yet I still remember the good teachers (and the bad ones). I have forgotten most of what I learnt but I do remember one thing, how they made me feel!

By developing a relationship with young people, you develop a trust and build up ‘credit’. What I mean by credit is when you do have to ‘challenge’ a young person, either about their behaviour or by taking them out of their comfort zone, you have earnt relationship credits. You have got to know their name, maybe asked them how they feel that day, got to know their favourite football team, asked what they had for dinner? All this will help when you are trying to get young people to reflect on their actions because self-reflection is hard, challenging yourself is hard and changing behaviour is hard and you need to TRUST the person who is trying to help you do that.

Unfortunately, there is no quick fix, just time and TRUST, to develop a RELATIONSHIP, oh and a bucket load of patience. When I started teaching, an ‘old hand’ once advised me that ‘you need to respect them before they will respect you’. He was right. Over the years, I stopped shouting so much, got to know them better, praised them when they did well more, ignored the unwanted behaviour and generally enjoyed being with them more. Give it a go and I’ll share some more words of wisdom next week….