The document describes a co-design workshop held at Maylandsea Primary School in Essex to develop calmer classrooms. In the workshop, children and teachers worked together to design a website with interactive resources about classroom behavior management. The children identified talking, making noise, fidgeting, not listening, holding up class, and knocking into others as the top issues. Their input was captured to help shape professional development resources for teachers in behavior management.

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‘Capturing the voice of the child’
A co-design approach to developing calmer
classrooms
Dr Debbie Holley, Centre for Excellence in Learning,
Bournemouth University
dholley@bournemouth.ac.uk (@debbieholley1)
Dr Philip Howlett, Department of Education
Anglia Ruskin University
philip.howlett@anglia.ac.uk
Dr Nick Rudman,
Maylandsea Primary School

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Talk Structure
 UK Schools Policy
• Complex policies and options
 Case Study
• Maylandsea primary school Essex
• Co-design workshop with children
 Emerging Themes
• Behavior Management
 Conclusions
 Questions - suggestions

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UK Policy Framework
 Policy landscape (England ages 5 – 11)
• New national curriculum
• Changes to the types of schools : academies and free
schools.
• Aim to increase opportunities for school autonomy and
develop a culture of self-improvement
• Schools have to develop their own professional
development or buy into schemes or courses
 Teacher trainee experience
• Training days are didactic with limited support outside the
delivery.
• Lack of development with regard to support to manage
classroom behaviour

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Maylandsea Primary School
Maylandsea Primary is an average-sized, semi-rural primary school in Essex. There are 9 classes in the
school. Most of the children come from white-British backgrounds. The school is currently rated ‘good’ by Ofsted.

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Co-designed Website
Real life scenarios linked to interactive resources designed to prompt reflection
 (insert web site image and link)
Link to website

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Co-Design workshop
The co-design workshop consisted of collecting the
information generated and proposed by the participants,
observing how they created their ideas about classroom
behaviour, and is a feature of design based research (DBR)
McKenney & Reeves (2012)
Participants: Dept. Head Teacher (1), Classroom Teacher(2), Trainee Teacher(1)
Pupils(8), Researchers(2), Learning Technologist(1)

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Feedback from the workshop – childrens views

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Issues identified:
Talking/chatting/
shouting (41%)
Making a noise - other than talking &
shouting out (15%)
Fidgeting (15%)
Not listening (11%)
Holding up the class
(11%)
People or chairs
knocking into you
(7%)

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Questions – Comments – Suggestions