Keep a diary of critical classroom events, observations and personal feelings, particularly regarding the behaviour of a range of students with different attitudes to learning.
Review your diary some weeks later. This will trigger a personal recall of events and feelings, and enable you to construct a meaningful (and evidence‑informed) story of how classroom relationships developed. Did your students’ behaviour remain within the bounds of the working consensus that you had previously established with them? Or were some students acting beyond these limits so that they actually challenged your authority? If so, which students and with whom? Could you feel the engagement of the class ebb and flow over the period? What helped them to become more settled? What disturbed them? Can you relate these patterns to the things that you did, or felt? How did these changes affect particular groups of students?
