More videos from Tom Bennett
Video transcript
okay tom tip number three please tip number three this is a really simple one but again it can appear into what i’ve said before but it’s it’s it’s it’s worth it’s worth teasing out many children will exist in an environment where there’ll be an unfamiliar teacher a cover teacher a supply teacher an occasional teacher a couple of supervisor an administrator the janitor possibly might be coming in to deliver a lesson plea very frequently people will come in and you won’t know who they are or you want a very strong relationship with them so here’s my top tip number three teach students how to behave in a supply or cover lesson teach them what to do before that lesson exists or happens and it’s such a powerful tip i mean cover teachers will sing your praises and valhalla for doing this so essentially what you do you say you say to students right i am here right now but tomorrow i will not be here so here’s how i expect you to behave when i’m not here now and again instead of just saying a way to behave tell them exactly what you want them to do so for example you might say there’s work i’m going to set some work and it’s part of our syllabus and it’s important and you need to have done this because if you don’t do this then you’ll have to you know you’ll have to combine that command you’ll have to come back after school and do it so all the time you know it’ll be an inconvenience to them so first of all motivate them by saying this matters to do it because it’s good and then this matters because if you don’t do it you’re in trouble really make the expectation really ramp up the value of who’s coming in and then say here’s exactly what you need to do i want to take your normal seats i will give a seating plan to the supply teacher stick it in the wall give it to a kid and say give this to the supply feature so assign kids rolls so i want you to give despite each other’s seating plan i want you to give them the cover work i want you to give them uh you know to hand out the books and at the exercise books handed the equipment and it depends the pencils the the tabards and and the trainers and so on the point is this gives children expected roles and hold them accountable for those roles and if you like make the same make one of the kids your snitch or something like that so you know what you you’re my grass don’t do that but but you know what i mean but teach the kids this is what i expect you to do and what you will expect of them to have achieved and so on otherwise you walk into situations where you get like 25 scrappy bits of paper and three people’s books and two people lived on the work and as a kid you would expect i’ve done the work and and some kids will have just drawn you know caricatures of you and stuff like that and it’s just a very unsatisfying experience and the kids know you don’t care the kids know you’re not going to follow up the kids know that the expectations are do as you please that shall be the whole of the law and it shouldn’t be that so teach them what to do in a supply lesson and let this supply teacher know that’s going to happen now obviously this this anticipates a situation where you know that you’re going to be away and you’ve got time to prep and plan for it obviously this isn’t exactly the same as how you would cope with for example an emergency situation where you were called away on the spot or you phoned in sick and so on but there should still be a pre-taught ritual of if i’m away this is what happens and you can do that at the start of the year you know when you’re there i i and embed that and remind them of it from time to time and if they don’t do it crucially hold them to account for their actions if work’s not done say right you need to come by have after school do it and kids do the math with them of that very very quickly and work out maybe i should just do it in the class but supply teachers love it when you do this kind of thing and in lots of schools supply teaching can be as i said you know can be ten percent of the day on average i think it is about 10 of the day you know across primary and secondary and in some skills particularly schools through covert uh you know bubbles collapsing and so on this has been a substantial part of the of their school day so teach them what to do in a cover lesson i love this tom love it um again well two well one point and then one follow-up question to this i guess the point remains the same that we spoke about in tip two that again this has got to be practice rehearsed retrieved and so on so it’s not just something we say to the kids once but it sticks but secondly in terms of communicating this with the supply teacher again this is a mistake i’ve made in the past where you just the only info the supply teacher gets is the work that’s to be completed and then they’re walking into the unknown would you advise kind of stating down for the supply teacher which kids are doing which roles and so on so they go in with those expectations or is it enough just to tell the kids i know i i i would i would consolidate that as much as possible because normally when they’re supplied to come to school they are given if they’re lucky they’ve been given the work if they’re lucky yeah now on that note which is given to them there should be an indication that you know look for these five children these children will be able to assist you and if they don’t yeah leaving some feedback and also finally there should be some kind of sense of where to leave feedback because a lot of supply teachers know full well that a lot of teachers will treat supply work as as busy work and the kids know it too you get to raise the importance of all that by creating a system that says this still matters and to me one of the best ways i can i can assess a school’s cultural integrity you know the strength of his behavior culture is if i can walk into a supply lesson as an unfamiliar observer and if i can’t tell it’s a supplied lesson if i can’t tell to cover lessons then that’s when i know that the school system has worked running smoothly and incidentally what this tells me is that the kids aren’t just behaving because they have a relationship with the teacher they have a relationship with school community and their own learning lovely