When it comes to discipline Australian classrooms rank among the worst in the world. Nationwide teacher shortages, an inability to adequately support students with high needs and poor mental health among students is being blamed. A senate inquiry into the issue has heard that the responsibility should not fall solely on teachers. Dr Paul Kidson, the head of postgraduate studies at the Australian catholic university says families also need to come to the table.
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00:00 A good, positive and productive learning environment is a relationship between family, students
00:07 and the school. And when you have any one of those dynamics that are out of kilter,
00:12 you're not going to get the types of responses, the types of achievement and the types of
00:16 academic growth that I think policy makers and families around the nation are really
00:20 looking for. And that becomes one of those relationship management issues that has been
00:25 stressed and we're unfortunately seeing an increase in some of the concerning behaviours
00:30 in that relationship. But there are also some really positive experiences that are going
00:34 on in a number of classrooms. Let's take a normal classroom where you may have 28, 30
00:40 students. If you only have three or four who don't wish to engage in the learning, who
00:45 are annoying to other people, who are not following the expectations, that actually
00:49 disrupts the learning of the entire class. If at the end of that class, I as a teacher
00:54 and it was 1991 when I started my career, and if I were to deal with that at the end
01:00 of it, I might just come along and say, look, can we just not deal with that? Let's get
01:03 on with what the learning should be about. We've got reasonable expectations. But now
01:07 I have to follow all of that up in terms of very small micro management issues, which
01:12 again the Productivity Commission's report into the National School Reform Agreement
01:17 indicated was part of that concern. So the amount of time that I've got available to
01:21 focus on the learning is actually disrupted by very few students, but its impact is quite
01:28 broad. Having set clear expectations to come into a classroom, it then behoves students
01:34 to meet those expectations. And that becomes part of the personal responsibility that they
01:40 have. Too much of the responsibility gets placed on teachers. What have they not done?
01:45 What have they not prepared? How have they not made the engagement? But those teachers
01:48 work really hard and we've seen that, especially through the period of COVID and post COVID,
01:53 where they are doing an enormous amount to prepare for that. But that means then that
01:57 students have an equal obligation and responsibility to get into the learning experience themselves.
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