More videos from Tom Bennett
Video transcript
okay tom tip number four please before yes again this is these these are also quite samey but they’re all different but they all come from the same principle students how to have the right equipment now this doesn’t sound very glamorous but a few of these things do you know that very little of what you might call great behavior it is glamorous or exciting or particularly interesting but some children will come to school every day with uh you know brimming with with equipment some children some children fetishize it and they have you know suitcases full of pencil cases full of uh smiggle and you know transformers pens and so on and harry potter lovers now that’s fine but you can’t can’t rely on them to be the the school stash and also you can’t be the same stash either and there’s an interesting um culture of dependency that can sometimes sometimes whereby we want students to learn so they need certain equipment on to do so and if they don’t have it we’re then faced with the eternal teacher that i’m like what do i do right so kid isn’t my pet kid doesn’t have a pen classic example what do we do next i mean there’s lots of ways you can go with this to my mind the the least satisfactory is just give them a pen and then say nothing else about it because they have to have a pen now again this doesn’t sound particularly important or safe but but it could often be the difference between them starting five minutes into a lesson versus them starting with everybody else are you having another kind of tireless com tiresome conversation about why don’t you have a pen and teach them exactly what equipment they need to have and again that sounds all you just do already but a lot of teachers don’t and it’ll be just something buried in their school planner that these are the the equipment expectations and you’ll frequently see children at the beginning of their school career either reception year one or you’re serving in the uk you know they’ll have the right equipment for about a week and then they’ll know what he cares nobody’s checking up and basically and because human behavior tends towards entropy events people will start forgetting stuff and if nothing happens to them at that point they’ll just think well i don’t have that stuff because nice mr barton’s always going to give me a pen yeah so why should i have to bring in stuff which means that nice mr barton ends up giving away all his pain and eventually he gets to the disastrous stage where he’s giving away his good pen you know you all got a good pen and that’s your parents like a four pound pen or something like that or a or a was that a blue or a fountain you don’t want to get there so say to the kids exactly the beginning of the the school year this is the equipment you need to have um you know and it might be you know sewing trunks or maybe a pair of compasses or something like that but you teach them exactly what it is and you check that they’ve got it it’s the least for the first few weeks like uniform everyone put my check on let’s see what you got brilliant well done well done we’re done we’re done where’s your where’s your calculator watch craig and uh are children still expected of calculator i still have a calculator you know they’re bouncing at the bouncy button that’s the beginning of it and then you check them up in it and that’s you know the continuation of it but thirdly there’s something which i remember um learning from of all places tgi fridays right which as regular viewers of my outfit will know somewhere i spent a good few years after university because i studied philosophy and um and one of the things they had one of the mentors they had there was actually really really good as a waiter you were expected to have lots of pens so they used to say you minimum three pen being a pen it was minimum three pens and the mantra was one to use one to lose and one to land nice right it’s so cheesy you could you could you know you could toast it but but it’s good it’s good because you know one thing one for you one for somebody else in case they needs it in case they need it and then one in case your friend breaks i just think it’s so clever and smart you’ve got to have it and if you’ve got that kind of behavioral habit to the students then they’ll all be able to share the amongst one another unless there’s a student everyone particularly dislikes and give a backup plan the backup plan is when you give when somebody wants a pen you say sure fine we keep lesson going but teach them that they must ask immediately they must ask and they don’t they’ll be held accountable for their actions again all right so there’s a consequence for that and then so you might find i will help you there’s your purple pen make sure it’s like a purple pen so that if you do it three times in a row for example you can then make something over i would i wouldn’t for instance penalize somebody for once we get a pet but i would have to do it or three times a week or three times in a month or something and you so you have to track it so you sweat the small stuff which means not not necessarily leaping on them instantly but but noticing really respectively and then when it comes to parents gaming you can say look purple pen purple foundation and you can make a conversational point about it so there’s that or you have a stock of pens yourself but then you make sure it’s handed back in or they give you a five p deposit or something like that or you teach children what to do for instance go to the school stationary stock shop the point is this the exact strategy doesn’t matter the point is they are taught not just the expectation but how to cope with not having it they’re taught how to deal with disaster circumstances it’s really nice this time and as you say feeds back into the things you’ve spoken about already you could imagine this well you’d hope this would be part of the school policy or what to do with equipment so again even if you don’t necessarily agree with it as an individual teacher following that policy if it feels like it’s important i really like the idea of the purple pad i’ve not thought of doing that so you you in because the problem is i’ve got into big rounds with kids so they don’t have a pen i’m like why am you got a pen and the lesson’s taken away it’s bubbling up but i like the idea of okay here’s a pen but it’s gonna be very obvious when you do your writing your book that i have lent you that pence it’s gonna stand out and so on i like that so i’ve got the kind i can follow that up later on without having to deal with it there in the moment that feels really important as well i like that and but it’s fascinating it’s a controversial one this i mean we we’re both on twitter and we see it all kicking off all the time on twitter this equipment always kicks off it kicks off over rubbish who cares like equipment is always one right and again you can get you can get the extremes where you’re in a detention for forgetting your pen and you get the other other extreme where it’s just all your teacher just dishing out equipment left right and center and it’s very easy to get kind of hung up on this but i guess without putting words into your mouth following following the school policy feels important trying not to disrupt lesson time in the moment but also having that kind of follow-up so so the kids kind of know what the rules are on what are would that be fair yeah oh absolutely i mean i can’t think of a job in the world where if you didn’t show up with what you needed to bring they’d let you get away with it i mean there’s a there’s a very real there’s a kind of a real world real life um ramification or or or consequence of this which is you’re going to teach children to be responsible for their own stuff now i’ve taught um teachers uh you know from burkina faso teachers from you know eastern europe cultures where you know schools have got very very little and you’re expected to provide everything that you need for the school and obviously i’m not wishing that as a state but i’m just saying that in situations where you know you need it and it’s important people tend to value these things and tend to remember it and you tend to like use your pencil down to the stub because because it matters because you can’t just chuck a pencil away and say i don’t have another pencil you know that’s your pencil for the month um and in situations where we value these things we treat them as if they are important and we change our behavior accordingly