Helping Hands

Description

A Year 2 teacher is struggling to keep her Key Stage 1 pupils on task. Behaviour expert John Bayley provides practical support in this classroom-management resource.

Liz Pope is very experienced and greatly enjoys teaching. But while wanting her pupils to retain some independence, she finds lessons more stressful when she sends them off to work, at Christ Church Primary School in south London.

Liz likes to operate from a central table where she does literacy work with individual pupils, but she has to be constantly on the alert and making sure pupils are on task. In conversation with John, Liz suggests giving children the specific roles of manager, explainer and encourager, so that they can keep an eye on each other when engaging in different activities.

In a subsequent lesson Liz tries the idea with remarkable success, as seen in this pedagogy video. The children warm to their new tasks with great enthusiasm, and John and Liz speculate positively on how such a strategy might take the class forward in the months ahead.