Spring 2006

Wellbeing and connectedness

Good manners in the classroom

Without good manners chaos reigns, disgruntlement raises its ugly head and learning is hampered. With good manners, harmony prevails, cooperation is cultivated and learning escalates. Julie Rosengren tells the story.

Duck, Squirrel and Cat make pumpkin soup as part of their daily routine, each with a specific job to do, until Duck decides he wants a change. Tired of putting in the pipkin of salt, Duck wants to stir the soup instead. This is met with resistance by his comrades, which takes the characters in Helen Cooper’s delightful picture storybook off on a journey of discovery, one that becomes a lesson in respect.

If we took a microscope and analysed what constitutes respect, a myriad of little things called good manners would be revealed. Sharing and taking turns are just two examples of good manners that Duck, Squirrel and Cat needed to demonstrate when they squabbled, especially if they wanted to keep the friendship and maintain a sense of civility while living under the same roof. How children behave in classrooms is not dissimilar.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, James Spigelman, claims that Australian adults and children alike have no manners. He cites road-rage, mobile phone conversations in restaurants, over-zealous parents at Saturday sport, noisy ghetto-blasters and reality television as just some of the perpetrators of disrespect. He goes on to argue that if children haven’t been taught good manners by the time they go to school, no doubt it’s a major exercise for teachers to set things straight. Furthermore, he states that it does children no favours at all to let them grow up without good manners, without knowing their social boundaries.

Children need values to guide them in making moral choices throughout their lives. Just as Pinocchio has Jiminy Cricket, we all need a conscience. Even some of Dumbledore’s words of wisdom to Harry Potter reinforce these sentiments. ‘It is not your abilities that make you what you are but rather the choices you make in life.’

John Howard has also publicly commented on the lack of good manners in the community. Indeed, this has been the impetus for the values driven education strategy currently being implemented in Australian schools. But whose job is it to teach good manners? Should it be up to teachers? Or should it be the parents and carers? Or is it more like the old African saying: ‘It takes a whole community to raise a child’?

Catherine Farrell, a kindergarten teacher at St Michael’s Catholic School in Lane Cove, Sydney, agrees and elaborates: ‘Everyday interactions in the classroom provide for many teachable moments, but to optimise learning, a more systematic approach is required, one where teachers make the learning of good manners an integral part of their curriculum planning and implementation.’

No doubt there are many creative ways to teach good manners in the classroom using a range of resources drawn from literature, drama, music, computers, games, film, and much more. Why not start with brainstorming what good manners actually are? Write them on the board and follow up with a homework news assignment where the children practise good manners and report back on their experiences. Not a bad way to establish where you all are and where you need to be. It could be further developed by writing the good manners on a poster to display. This could become the class’s ‘Guild of Good Manners’, an agreement to help direct student behaviour.

Actually communicating expectations and gaining commitment is a very powerful way to create harmony in a group. Recently, my family and I went to a sports camp. At the welcoming session, the camp leader made a very clear point of informing the diverse group that good manners were necessary in order to survive the camp. He went on to explain that when we wanted something from the teachers, the only way to get it was to ask politely. All participants were expected to talk in calm voices, listen well, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and smile—all basic tenets of respect. After our few days of cohabitating with a group of strangers, I thought we were working a lot better than the groups of strangers thrown together in Big Brother or LOST!

People by nature are social. In order to survive, we need to work together. There would be few cultures, if any at all, where respect isn’t an integral part of the social fabric, often the main thread that holds it all together. Some years ago, I lived with a family in a village in Thailand as an exchange student and attended the local school. I had the opportunity to participate in their yearly ritual, wun nupteur ajahn, where the students pay respect to the teachers at the school. We made beautiful flower and banana leaf arrangements and showered the teachers with gifts and appreciation all day long.

This is a culture where the expectation of respect is so great that they not only celebrate it, Thai students practise it daily by bowing to the teachers as they pass in the playground and before each class launches into its lessons. Good manners really are about respect, and a value such as this transcends cultural barriers, encapsulating the global village in which we live and learn.

The most powerful way to impart the value of respect is to practise it yourself. Bending or kneeling down to talk to a small child at their level, clapping tunes to get attention, singing songs such as ‘Eyes on Me’ to calm the class, listening to a child, acknowledging a child who shows good manners are some simple but effective techniques to show respect. There is nothing more determinant, more influential in a child’s life than the moral power of quiet example.

Having good manners goes way beyond the simple ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. It is about respecting the feelings of others. When a clear expectation of respect is articulated between teachers, parents and children, harmony will reign over chaos in the classroom, just as it did for Duck, Squirrel and Cat in the old white cabin.

References

Cooper, H (1998). Pumpkin Soup, Doubleday, Sydney.

Rowling, J K (1999). Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Scholastic Inc., London.

Julie Rosengren is director of the Life Institute of Family Education.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au