With reports that disruptive behaviour in classrooms has increased after the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) has taken steps to promote positive and restorative behaviour in schools – among these is the newly established Positive Behaviour Intervention and Resource Centre in Wynberg.
Speaking at the second annual Positive Behaviour Day on Tuesday 17 May held at Tenterden, Berenice Daniels, WCED Director: Specialised Education Support, said not only was disruptive behaviour in the classroom a barrier to learning, but it also caused many teachers to reconsider their choice of profession.
“According to reports we are getting, especially now after the Covid-19 lockdowns, teachers are reporting they have to deal with more and more disruptive behaviour on a regular basis and a few teachers have even considered quitting teaching,” said Daniels.
She added if they did not want hundreds of people to leave the profession annually, learning how to deal with challenging behaviour was very important.
According to Daniels, although challenging behaviour can take many forms, it essentially comes down to the level of disruption in a class: low-level or high-level disruption.
Explaining what WCED’s Inclusive and Specialised Education Support had in place to deal with these kinds of disruptions, Daniels said the directorate had both learning support teachers as well as circuit-based support teams – including psychologists and social workers – to assist schools and learners.
Another tool is the Positive Behaviour Programme aimed at capacitating schools with support to empower educators, learners and parents towards effecting behaviour change.
The programme focuses on a number of strategies, including anti-bullying, classroom management, building a restorative learner code of conduct, behaviour as a barrier to learning, diversity, values-driven education and peace discipline.
Daniels said part of that was capacity building around teachers, “Because they didn’t have it as part of their pre-service training. They are now in the schools and learning to deal better with those disruptive behaviours in the classroom.
“Every district has somebody who is coordinating positive behaviour support.”
At the next level, Daniels said, they have the Behaviour Intervention and Resource Centre which has been more than three years in the making. With the staff only having moved into the new premises at Tenderten two weeks ago, the Positive Behaviour Day was the first event that the team had put together.
Daniels said the Wynberg premises will serve as the hub from which centre staff will do outreach.
She said at present, they had two positive behaviour outreach teams. Over the past few months the teams’ work has been mostly outreach-focused, she says.
“They find that it is really useful to go into a school, to watch what happens on the playground, to go into a classroom and then to develop a behaviour programme. That may involve parent education as well and maybe the sibling of the learner, but sometimes it could be talking to the learners in that child’s classroom because sometimes they are the triggers for the bad behaviour.”
With the model having been tried out in two districts (Metro Central and Metro South), Daniels said they are soon going to branch out to Metro East and then to Metro North. “And then we are going into the rural areas”.
Also speaking at the event, Moosa Mahadick, principal of the centre, said the resource centre was part of a vision in progress that started with the former provncial education minister [Debbie Schäfer] saying there must be more they could do than looking at suspensions and expulsions.
“What we see today is part of a very robust process of piloting and field testing. And Mr Schreuder (Brian Schreuder, retired head of WCED) insisted on having an empirical basis as well for the kind of work that we do so that people understand that working with soft hands and having children in the gentle embrace of conversation about where they must be and what they can achieve is not . . . just a new fad based on a paradigm which focuses on the humanities. It is messy work, it is hard work, but there is no other way to work in this educational landscape.”
