Behaviour rewards put stop to troublemaking
A GEELONG school’s move to reward students for good behaviour has led to a significant reduction in offences committed on school grounds.
Northern Bay College’s five campuses are located in Geelong’s most disadvantaged suburbs, but the school’s dedication to finding new ways to engage students is reaping rewards.
Principal Fred Clarke said many of the students had been exposed to, and still lived in, traumatic circumstances leading to poor behaviour and sometimes resulting in police call outs.
“There’s no such as thing as a bad kid,” Mr Clarke said.
“They are acting as a consequence or an outcome of a situation they have been exposed to.”
The college’s teachers have been receiving training in the Berry Street Education model since the start of the year to ensure they can help get the best out of students.
Berry Street trains teachers to look at how trauma affects the brains of young people and teach them to self-regulate, build relationships and confidence by focusing on personal strengths. The positive behaviour rewards system also focuses on confidence building.
The system has been introduced into more than 300 of the state’s primary and high schools, with one school halving the number of infringement notices in six months.
“If you can’t behave, we teach you to behave and we have developed a matrix for all different schools. We say ‘we are going to teach you then reward you if you learn’,” Mr Clarke said.
Berry Street education model senior adviser Tom Brunzell said teachers focused on creating a consistent and routine-based environment where they modelled the type of behaviour expected from students.
Another key way to reduce anti-social behaviour was to ensure kids don’t have too much “down time” after school.
To counter this the school developed an extended day program where they bus children to the one campus. They have access to tutors for free and can participate in interesting activities.
Last term, 600 students were involved in the program and Mr Clarke said vandalism was no longer a problem at the school.