Assistant Principals' Report

Hello and welcome to our newsletter item for this week. 

Positive Classroom Management Strategies

The Positive Classroom Management Strategies (PCMSs) are 8 evidence-informed practices that create safer, more purposeful learning environments supporting student learning, wellbeing and behaviour. The strategies strongly align with our current whole school approaches including, School Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) and The Berry Street Education Model (BSEM).

The PCMSs are founded on the following guiding principles:

• Appropriate and inappropriate behaviours are related to the environment in which they occur. Environments can encourage appropriate or inappropriate behaviours.
• Behaviour is functional. Individuals learn to use behaviours to get their needs met. Behaviour that works is likely to continue.
• Behaviour can be taught. It is possible to teach alternative replacement behaviours to meet students' needs more appropriately.

This term, HPS have put a spotlight on the strategy of Classroom Procedures and Routines, and more specifically entering and exiting buildings including classrooms and learning spaces and line up routines.

At Heidelberg Primary School we explicitly teach classroom procedures and routines because they: 

• Help create predictability and structure in your classroom
• Provide a guideline for students to monitor their own behaviour
• Increase instruction time by preventing behaviour errors
• Contribute to a positive, collaborative classroom culture
• Routines free up students’ working memory and reduce cognitive load
• When classroom procedures are well established, taught and practised, they become routines.

We would like to celebrate rm 13 for their excellent efforts in following routines and procedures for lining up at the end of break times and entering the classroom ready to learn. They have certainly been impressing us all with how quickly they line up after break, calmly entering the classroom and getting ready for learning. They are also very excited to have their photo featuring in the Heidelberg Primary School news!

Check them out, they are rockstars! Well done rm 13 and Miss Tino!

As mentioned, we have focussed on line up procedures as well as entering and exiting classroom routines across the school. When we spoke to some of the older students regarding how procedures and routines such as these help them to learn and regulate they stated by gathering the whole class before entering the room after breaks, it helps us to enter classrooms quietly and calmly. By entering our classroom in a calm manner, it helps us to switch into ready to learn mode. When following this procedure, our teachers and classmates know we are ready to learn and we know the expectations as students. 

Thank you to rm 25 for their reflections and contributions.

Helen Thomas & Monique Rankin

Assistant Principals

Heidelberg Primary School