00:00:00 Simon Currigan

Does your class work well independently, but the moment you put them into groups, the noise goes up and everything turns to blah? After 19 years supporting schools of behaviour and classroom management, I've seen how the way we organise group work can make a massive difference to some classes, to whether they focus and settle or they just disintegrate into chaos. So in this episode, I'm going to give you 5 simple strategies that help pupils transition into group work, settle quickly, and then stay focused on social learning.

Welcome to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast. I'm your host, Simon Currigan; my co-host is Emma Shackleton; and we're obsessed with helping teachers, school leaders, parents, and of course students when classroom behaviour gets in the way of success. We're going to share the tried-and-tested secrets to classroom management, behaviour or special needs, whole-school strategy, and more, all with the aim of helping your students reach their true potential. Plus, we'll be letting you eavesdrop on our conversations with thought leaders from around the world, so you'll get to hear the latest evidence-based strategies before anyone else. This is the School Behaviour Secrets podcast.

Hi there, welcome to this week's School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and as far as I'm concerned, prawns are just little alien babies. I mean, just look at them. Properly look at them. They've got, like, antennae bits, loads of legs, and these weird, kind of translucent bodies. This is not an animal that belongs on the Earth; it's an alien. Which means a prawn cocktail is basically a wine glass full of xenomorph foetuses covered in cream and vinegar. And people serve that, unbelievably, as a starter to wet your appetite before the real food arrives, and then you put them in your mouth. So if you're eating a prawn sandwich while you listen to this, enjoy. Maybe. And I'm going to be honest, I've got a cold again this week, but I'm going to keep pushing through. So work with me on this, because I think the content is going to be really useful.

So, right, group work. Here's something I've seen loads of times in classrooms, in my work observing and supporting in classes. A teacher kind of gets the class settled, the kids have listened to the input, and then the teacher's got the kids' attention and everything's going pretty well, and then the teacher says to the class, "Okay, I want you to get into groups of 4." And suddenly everything in the room changes. It's like all the pupils have caught jungle fever. You've got pupils moving around, chairs are scraping, conversations happening left, right, and centre. Someone decides they desperately need to speak to their mate on the other side of the room. Someone's dancing. For some reason, someone's sitting on a table, and the teacher just looks around the room thinking, understandably, "This class just can't cope with group work, and it's just not worth the hassle."

But I'm not sure that's fair on the kids, and I'm not sure that's always true. Because think about what we're actually asking our pupils to do when we start them on a group work activity. They might have to move around the room, work out where they're going to sit, negotiate not just the space but the task with other pupils, manage and share resources, cope with more noise, switch their attention from listening to the teacher to working on the task, remembering a set of often quite complex instructions, work out who's doing what with other kids who might not have been fully listening and understood themselves, and manage the social side of working with lots of other people. So there's actually quite a lot happening all at the same time.

And if group work keeps kind of falling apart, instead of asking, "Why won't these kids just settle?" sometimes I find it's better to think about which classroom routine, or part of a routine, isn't working here for these children. Because that's the big idea I want you to take away from this episode: group work isn't something you tell the kids to do. It's actually a classroom routine. A routine exactly the same as how we get kids to walk into class or tidy away their resources. And if we treat it more like a routine than an instruction, that gives us some practical things that we can do to make group work work better. If I didn't say the word "work" too many times there.

So that said, here's my 5 strategies to make group work run more smoothly. The first strategy is to pre-tutor your routines for group work you want pupils to follow before you actually start the group work. Now, pre-tutoring usually means priming an individual pupil one-to-one before they go into a situation that they might find difficult. For example, before assembly, you might quietly remind a particular pupil what's going to happen, what to expect, what you need them to do, and maybe what they can do if they start finding the situation difficult.

But we can take that same basic principle and apply it to whole groups or classes. So before we release everyone to group work, when we're giving them some whole-class input, what we do is we tell them what successful behaviour during the transition actually looks like. So instead of saying, "Right, groups of 4, off you go," and then trying to explain your expectations once 30 kids are already moving and talking, we do it beforehand, when we've got their attention and they're quiet and they're focused. We say something like, "In a moment, I'm going to put you into groups of 4. You're going to take your book and pen with you and nothing else. Move to the table that I'm going to give you, and when you get there, sit down and look this way because I'm going to give you one or two more instructions."

Now, obviously, how you phrase this is going to depend on the age and stage and maturity of your pupils. Not suggesting you speak to a Year 10 class as if they're 7 years old, or a group of 7-year-olds as if they're a Year 10 class. But the principle is the same. We're going to prime them before the transition happens. And actually, over time, our aim is to say less and less. Because as the routine becomes familiar, it takes over that constant repetition for us. We don't want to spend the rest of term narrating every tiny movement our pupils make. The point of teaching a routine is eventually the routine starts doing some of that work for us.

Strategy number two is to separate the transition to group work from the task itself. Sometimes, without realising it, we can give pupils a set of instructions like this: "Okay, get into groups of 4. Collect a big sheet of paper from the front. Choose someone to write. Someone else needs to go and get the cards. Discuss the three questions on the board, and you've got 10 minutes. Go." And then we're surprised when one group gets the paper but doesn't know what they're doing. Another group starts the discussion, but no one's writing anything down. And another group has somehow found 17 marker pens and is using them to draw on each other's hands.

When we give a lot of instructions, we leave the children with a lot to hold in their heads. So it helps them to scaffold it, to separate it out. First, get into your groups. Stop. Now, get settled. Stop. Now, introduce the resources. Then start the task. In other words, we're staging this. We're not starting group work while we're still creating the groups or moving the students around.

Once those routines become really well established, yes, you can compress those stages, because the pupils know what's coming next. But if your class is struggling right now, we need to strip the transition back and make it much simpler. Number three is then to define what "ready" actually looks like. Teachers use phrases like "settle down" all the time, but if you think about it, "settled" is quite vague and it's quite subjective. It can change from teacher to teacher.

In your head, it might mean everyone's seated, the resources are ready, the voices are off, and everyone's got their attention back on the adult. In the pupil's head, it might mean, "Well, technically, one of my buttocks is touching the chair, so I'm pretty sure I've nailed this." For another teacher, well, their expectations might be completely different too, and the kids are bringing the expectations of someone else and applying them to you.

So instead, what we do is we give them a visible finish line for the transition that's really concrete. We say something like, "When everyone is seated, your books are on the table, and you're looking this way, then you are ready." Now pupils know what success actually looks and sounds like. And you might use a countdown, or a consistent phrase, or a visual signal to reinforce that. It doesn't matter which one you choose. What matters is that your class understands what they're trying to achieve, and that you use that symbol, or that phrase, or that routine consistently.

By the way, if you're finding these ideas useful, make sure you're following or subscribing to the School Behaviour Secrets podcast in your podcast app. It means that when I release the next episode, it will appear automatically on your phone or device. And unlike prawns, subscribing to the podcast has absolutely no weird legs, antennae, or disturbing translucent body parts for you to put in your mouth, as far as I am aware.

So while you're listening to me say this, if you're not subscribed, get out your podcast app now and just tap the follow or subscribe button. Right, done that? Of course you have. Right, number four. If your class repeatedly struggles with group work, you want to practice the routine before you need it when the stakes are low.

And I know some people will be thinking here, "Simon, right, I've got a curriculum to get through. If you think I've got time to spend in lessons practicing moving kids around and starting group work, you have another thing coming." But if you do the maths on this, if you currently lose 3, 4, 5 minutes every time you send kids to group work, that time is already lost. It's already like sand trickling through your fingers, and you're spending it lesson after lesson, again and again and again, without getting anything back.

So it's worthwhile investing in practicing the mechanics of moving to group work separately from when you mix them up with a difficult academic task. Practice moving from whole-class input or independent work to group work. Now, that might take 2 minutes. Tell the class your expectations, right? You're pretending to work individually, right? I'm going to set you to group work. And then, when they've done that, they've had their 2 minutes, or 60 seconds, or whatever you give them, you then give them specific feedback on how they did.

You might say, "That was much better. Everyone moved quickly and safely. You kept the noise level at the level we agreed, and you were ready in, I don't know, 25 seconds." You're telling the students exactly what worked so they know what to repeat next time. And once that routine becomes automatic, because you practiced it several times, what happens is you get those practice minutes back every single time you use that routine in the future.

It saves you time. It's an investment that pays you back over and over and over. And actually, not just in time, but in frustration and stress as well. Number five in my list of strategies is to teach the transition back away from group work. And I think this one gets forgotten quite a lot. We plan our pupils are going to move from whole-class teaching or individual work into group work, but then we don't necessarily teach them how we're going to get back again.

And actually, coming back away from group work can be harder because by that point, the pupils are actually often socially engaged. They're talking, they're doing something that they might be excited about, or they're enjoying. And now we tell them to suddenly stop and switch their attention back to us. So we need a taught, predictable way of doing that. And it might be, again, a countdown. It might be a visual signal. It might be a phrase you use consistently. Whatever works for you and your pupils, use it.

But you need to teach them what happens when they hear or they see that signal. Do they stop talking? Do they put their resources down? Are they supposed to look at you? What does "ready" look like? Because otherwise, we end up doing some variation of this, right? "Right, okay, everyone." "Right, guys, guys." "Can we stop now, please?" "I've set the timer." "The music's finished." "Hey, everyone." "Eyes on me." "Magnet eyes, everyone." "Everyone, come on, guys." And gradually, our voice gets louder and louder, or more desperate and more desperate as we try to compete with the noise in the room.

Whereas a well-practiced attention signal means pupils know exactly what to do because we've trained them to do it. Group work isn't finished when the activity finishes. I'm going to say that again so you need to get this in your head, right? The group work isn't finished when they're finished working on the activity. It's finished when you've successfully transitioned the class into whatever you want them to do next. And that might be whole-class input, it might be part of your plenary, it might be some individual work or reflection.

So those are your five things. Pre-tutor the transition before pupils start moving around. Separate moving into groups from starting the task. Make what "ready" looks like concrete. Make it observable so kids know what "ready" looks and sounds like. Practice those transitions when the stakes are low and they're separated away from the rest of the task. And teach pupils how to come back out of group work, as well as how to get into it.

And remember, the big idea behind all this is group work is not an instruction that you give kids to do. It's a routine. And ideally, we don't want kids consciously working through 15 different behavioural decisions every time we say, "Get into groups of 4 and work on this." We want the mechanics for how to do that to be automatic and predictable. Because that frees up our students' attention for the thing we actually care about, which is focusing on their learning.

And if group work is one of those points in your lessons where behaviour starts to become a bit more tricky, it might be useful to step back and look at your classroom management as a whole as well. And to help you, we've got a free download that does just that. The Classroom Management Score Sheet helps you to review what's working well in your classroom, spot the areas that might need a bit of tightening up, and it helps you identify where to focus your attention first so you get the most reward for your efforts.

It's a simple guide that you can fill out. It's a tick list. You can do it on your own. You can use it if you're observing a member of staff that you're supporting who finds classroom management difficult. I'll put a direct link to it in the episode description. But if you want to get the Classroom Management Score Sheet by yourself without having to open the app and click through, what you can do is visit beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk. Click on the free resources tab at the top of the page, and you'll see it in the free downloads section.

So if you know another teacher who regularly watches a calm class turn into absolute chaos the moment they say, "Get into groups," don't keep this episode to yourself. Share this episode with them as well. You can do that directly from your podcast app. It might save them a few grey hairs and a lot of stress.

So thank you for listening, and I'll see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets. I hope you found that useful. And if you're currently eating a prawn sandwich, I'm sorry. Actually, no. Someone needed to tell you what you're putting in your mouth. I'll see you next week. Bye now.