Learning and behaviour

‘Learning trumps behaviour’. When the Fair Go teachers gathered for the cross-case analysis days this was a dominant pedagogical theme to emerge. Now while this is an important idea for the wider engagement project that underpins this book, there is a danger that, at first glance, it might hide some really important work that many of these teachers perform in challenging school and classroom contexts. It might also suggest the writers of this book naively believe that a strong focus on learning and the careful planning of high cognitive, high affective and high operative experiences will easily deliver a classroom full of model students. This is far from the case. Hence some caveats are first entered here about the research and learning and behaviour, before we briefly highlight some common classroom approaches employed among the Fair Go teachers that support those students who exhibit inappropriate behaviours.