Welcome to life as a teacher, Mr McLachlan.

I’d like to welcome the CEO of the AFL, Gil McLachlan, to the world of educating the unruly and unwilling.

Gil, your quest to improve collective behaviour at AFL matches is eerily similar to the challenge that teachers in classrooms face every single day.

You’re seeking to standardize behaviour in an environment that is anything but standard. Teachers do that too. They work with students who have special needs, who have English as a second background, are battling the effects or trauma, who carry the burden of poverty and who are surviving the effects of neglect and abuse.

Some of the above is true for you too. And so we educators empathise. It’s really hard to get a 9-year-old dealing with any combination of the above to do something they don’t want to, like fractions. 

We go further to sympathise due to the unique challenge of your ‘classroom’. It includes rambunctious students like Joffa and Trout, of respective Collingwood and Richmond cheer squad fame, who are threatening to throw the crayons on the floor and storm out of the classroom if you don’t make them happy.

Tough gig, this teaching thing, isn’t it?

Gil, you’d do well to learn the lessons of what great teachers do and what poor teachers don’t if you wish your quest to be a successful one. In your case, failing to choose the right path could cost you your job.

Let’s start with what failing teachers do. They embark upon a game of old-school whack-a-mole. Do you remember the sideshow game you may have played at the Rosebud summer carnival where you use an oversized novelty mallet to whack any recalcitrant upstart over the noggin who dares to raise its head?

That’s what struggling teachers revert to when the class gets hard to control. They exclude, they punish and they enforce rules. They crack down.

Sounds a little like the Marvel Stadium crackdown we’ve seen doesn’t it? We now have fluorescent vested untrained teachers roaming the stands and whacking any mole who drops an F-bomb or calls an umpire a bald-headed flog. 

That’ll learn them! Although it won’t. The instigation of hardline, unsupported behaviour rules is soul-destroying to police and impossible to define.

Gil, you discovered this yourself when Neil Mitchell quizzed you on 3AW to define what you meant by “intimidatory booing” as opposed the booing you’d just described as a normal, historical component of the going to the footy.

Your downhearted and defeated “I don’t know” was all the evidence you should need to know you are going about behaviour improvement the wrong way.

Great contemporary teachers have chosen a different way. They accept that improving behaviour via crackdowns and categorisations is a fool’s pursuit. The best teachers understand that even talking about those behaviours incessantly is likely to increase their prevalence and severity.

I once spoke to a clump of Year 5 boys as they walked past me into the playground for lunchtime (and yes, I do believe fervently that ‘clump’ is the best collective noun for these characters). I barked “Hey you blokes. None of that fighting like we had yesterday”.

They looked at me quizzically while they remembered the fight the day previous. They then embarked on a collective telepathic connection that resulted in all boys running immediately to the location where the fight happened. 

Why did they do it? They did it because I put the idea in their heads. It’s called linguistic priming and respectful teachers simply choose to prime with the language of behaviours they wish to see instead of those they don’t.

If I’d just said “Hey you blokes. Have fun playing footy today. I’m looking forward to finding out who kicked a bag like Charlie Curnow did on Saturday night.” then I may well have engineered a different behavioural outcome. 

Equally, schools that try to classify behaviours into levels of severity fail. This is something you’ve tried with your fabled Match Review Panel and it’s also getting a rollicking from your fans. 

As one SEN listener complained on Monday morning, a friend was ejected from Marvel Stadium this weekend for clapping. Which sounds outrageous … unless of course that fan was aggressively and incessantly clapping in the face of an elderly lady who barracked for the opposition team. 

Context is everything when it comes to behaviour. Caging behaviour into tables and definitions will ultimately teach your fans to find ways to hack the system. 

So Gil, it’s time you treated your fans with respect. And there’s nothing respectful about crackdowns.

Instead, right now speak to the behaviours you wish to see rather than those you don’t.

Launch a tv ad where two fans are walking over the footbridge to the MCG discussing crowd behaviour. Have them agree on three ways to enjoy the footy.

1. Barrack hard without the swearing.
2. Watch out for the example you’re setting kids. 
3. Give an opposition fan a friendly wink.

See if that positive and respectful linguistic priming has a better effect than browbeating the fans who represent the lifeblood of your industry.

And finally, what’s the leadership and learning lesson in this for you? Are you walking headlong into multiplying a problem in your business by failing to recognise the methods by which people learn to behave, grow and enact your organisational values?

Or are you about whacking moles?