Taught with hard-won professional knowledge

PHIL Beadle was punched by a student twice in his first year as a teacher, and it's an incident he still regrets

Teacher in residence Phil Beadle

PHIL Beadle was punched by a student twice in his first year as a teacher, and it's an incident he still regrets.

 As a high school English teacher in one of the roughest schools in London's East End, Mr Beadle was thrown into the classroom with no skills and little advice about managing a room full of cocky and challenging teenagers.

The one piece of advice he was given by a more experienced teacher -- never block the door -- he ignored. "It was my fault entirely. I was given that piece of information and I rejected it, and therefore I was in receipt of the consequences. And so was the kid, because he eventually got excluded and it was my fault."

A former teacher of the year in Britain, Mr Beadle, 47, shot to prominence after featuring in a television documentary called The Unteachables, in which a group of teachers worked with a group of difficult students.

Mr Beadle is in Australia as teacher-in-residence at Knox Grammar, an independent boys school on Sydney's north shore, where he is working with teachers and students, as well as travelling to other schools around Australia.

While students often get labelled as troublesome, difficult, naughty or even unteachable, Mr Beadle believes student behaviour, and misbehaviour, is the responsibility of the teacher.

"Some environments are more challenging than others, and extremely so in some cases, but no matter the environment you are in, appropriate classroom behaviour is your responsibility," he said.

"If you negate that responsibility, you end up blaming children for being themselves, which is ultimately a vile thing to do."

For him, the best way to improve the quality of teaching is not by insisting on higher academic standards among new teachers, which will cut out some of the most gifted teachers, but by improving teacher education.

Mr Beadle, who has just completed his sixth book on teaching -- with colleague John Murphy, called Managing behaviour in challenging schools -- said teachers were poorly educated about managing classrooms.

"The techniques are there, everyone needs to know this stuff and no one does," he said.

"Teaching is a profession and as a profession it comes with a bunch of knowledge one has to learn. Is it any wonder our profession has a poor reputation if we are up against doctors who have acquired a massive body of knowledge and lawyers with great knowledge, yet our one-year degree courses don't equip us with the knowledge that exists?"

Mr Beadle is known for his creative and subversive approach to teaching, which encourages teachers to juxtapose different subjects like arts and physics, but he says there must be a balance between creativity and rigour.

"If it's not aligned with an equal dose of rigour, we ain't learning anything and lessons are chaos," he said. "The chaos has to be within certain constraints."

Mr Beadle will next week travel to a school in the Tiwi Islands where he will introduce a program he's been developing at Knox, using AFL to teach grammar and punctuation.

"We're having fun playing football and there's an element of learning, and then we bring it into the classroom," he said.

To share your experiences, email [e-mail]