Best Practice

Sweating the small stuff: Five teaching habits to tackle low-level behaviour

Behaviour Lesson planning Quality First Teaching Pedagogy Early Career Teachers
Low-level disruption can be just as detrimental as bigger outbursts of negative behaviour. Sean Harris considers some teaching ‘habits’ that can help us in addressing various forms of disruption in the classroom
Image: Adobe Stock

In classroom settings, low-level disruption can refer to seemingly small, repetitive behaviours which can persistently interrupt the flow of teaching and learning. These might include students talking out of turn, fidgeting, being off task.

A plethora of research studies (e.g. Cogswell et al, 2020; Kreisberg, 2017; Ofsted, 2014) shows that, over time, these behaviours can accumulate, leading to a classroom environment full of distractions that can hinder your ability to focus on the task of teaching as well as students’ ability to learn.

One survey of behaviour experiences in schools nationally found that on average about a quarter of learning time is lost to negative behaviour. The National Behaviour Survey (DfE, 2024), covering the 2022/23 academic year, calculated that seven minutes of every 30-minute lesson are lost to misbehaviour.

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