Abstract:
Australian classrooms have ranked among the most disorderly in the OECD due to poor behaviour. These issues led to a senate inquiry into the “increasing disruption in Australian schools”, which highlighted the need to build student-teacher relationships through checking-in and showing interest in students. In addition, research indicates that strong relationships between students and their parents is vital to improved behaviour and engagement. Past research mainly focused on either teacher-student relationships or parent-student relationships. However, our understanding of young people suggests that developing three-way student-teacher-parent relationships may help alleviate many of the causes of poor behaviour and wellbeing, assisting school engagement. Past research has also asserted that students from low SES circumstances are more likely to display problematic behaviours and disengage from school. This research aims to assist low SES students’ behaviour, wellbeing and engagement through developing an intervention that fosters communication and shared student-teacher-parent goals. Also, it aims to create a better understanding of the nexus between home and school life, adding nuance to recent debate on student behaviour. This project utilises mixed methods design-based research (DBR), which is a natural choice due to DBR being suited to mixed-methods research in a real educational context that is focused on the design of an intervention. In this pilot phase, two teams were formed around students attending the same school in NSW. An initial individual meeting was held with each member of the team to canvas issues of behaviour, wellbeing and engagement for the student participant and to develop goals to help improve in these areas. Each team then met collectively over a six-month period at bi-monthly intervals to create shared goals, check-in on progress towards these goals and discuss how to navigate any issues. To help ascertain the effectiveness of teams, each team member was asked to complete the student engagement tool (SET) at the initial team meeting and again at the final meeting. This research highlights the importance of strong relationships on student behaviour, wellbeing and school engagement and the unique positive contribution that can be made using the three-way team structure. After showing improvement across the first two teams, we believe these teams provide an effective intervention that can be implemented by schools. The next phase of this project is to refine and strengthen the validity of this intervention through the recruitment of many more teams from low SES backgrounds in a variety of schools across Australia. Australian classrooms have ranked among the most disorderly in the OECD due to poor behaviour. These issues led to a senate