Children Misbehaving? How are WE Reacting?
Etti Siegel, MSEd
Adjunct Professor, Workshop Presenter, Keynote Speaker, Teacher's Mentor, Educational Coach, Educational Consultant
It is inevitable. The number one answer to “What is your biggest concern as you enter the classroom for the first time?” from any soon-to-be teacher is “behavior management” or “classroom management.”
Current teachers also worry about off-task behavior and want to know the best way to discipline; wanting to brainstorm what effective punishments and rewards might be.
“Is now a good time?” is the prelude to a scenario a teacher wants to recount and get advice about what happened in class that day, a situation that brought the teacher to despair, wishing she could just quit.
So… Why do children misbehave and what should we teachers do in response?
Before we delve into specific misbehaviors, let’s talk teacher.
Most teachers are reactive.
If a child talks out of turn, he gets a warning. If a child is sassy, she gets an assignment. Some children are kicked out of the room. (I remember my shock years ago as I entered the coaching world and discovered first graders were being kicked out of class!) I have witnessed teachers lecture, yell, slam books on their desks in frustration and anger. I have seen red-faced staff members put on “the look” and point to the door. I have seen teachers cry.
These are all reactive behaviors.
But really it is the teacher’s responsibility to be proactive.
We would never call children, or anyone, to supper and then set the table and then brown the meat for a hearty stir fry we know they will love. We would never put sharp knives on the table with young children, even if we have supper all ready and the table all set. We proactively make sure supper is ready before calling everyone to eat, and we proactively remove or leave out sharp knives by young children’s seats, knowing that we are setting ourselves up for problems if we don’t.
We instinctively know that we are asking for trouble if we are unprepared.
Doug Lamov, in Teach Like A Champion, calls it double planning. It’s just as important to map out what students will be doing during each part of your lesson as it is to plan for what you will be doing and saying. So double planning involves planning not only what you will say and teach, but also what the students will do during a lesson. We educators send so much time on creating the perfect lesson plan, but forget the role of the audience, hopefully an engaged, interested and interactive one.
Most importantly, we must keep in mind that our children are captive audiences, usually against their natural will.
A child is wired to be running, exploring, making messes and figuring out the world around him, not tied down to a desk all day, with paper and pencil in hand. (See Dr. Jean Piaget’s work on cognitive development for more on children’s natural urges to explore and learn.)
The proactive teacher has strong lessons, tight transitions, no dead-time, and lots and lots of relevance.
A teacher with a strong engaging lesson, a lesson that is age appropriate and has relevance to the class (whether it automatically does or the teacher must create the relevance) is already a teacher who has the minds of his class working and engaged in the planned activity with no time to be busy with distractions and mischief.
Such a teacher is not just talking and lecturing, but asking questions, scanning the class, walking around, and engaging the students. If she is reading a story, children are looking in intently, knowing that at any moment the teacher will pause and the class will have to read the next line. (I have done this with students from grades 2 to 12, with excellent results.) If he is explaining a concept, the children are listening closely because they know the teacher will ask them to repeat a word or phrase because this is a common occurrence in the engaged classroom.
A teacher can have the most engaging and strong lessons, but still lose the class.
The culprit?
Transitions.
Tight transitions are so important that I spend coaching and mentoring time encouraging younger grade teachers to find songs to sing in between lessons as books are exchanged or papers are collected, and I tell older grade teachers to keep talking.
Yes- Just keep talking!
Ending a math class and moving on to science? As the class puts away their math papers or books, and sits waiting or looks on the board to see what page to open to, the teacher should just keep talking. Ask questions on the previous day’s science lesson. Ask some homework questions. Ask a riddles that pertains to the upcoming unit. Don’t say anything that needs to be written down or recorded; stick to basics… but draw in children and have more and more children join as they are ready.
Just keep talking.
If the teacher stops talking the children will begin talking. Once that recess feeling hits the class it is hard to bring them back to task.
Silence is great for assigned quiet time, like individual work, when the class is concentrating on a task on their own or with a neighbor, not for time that no brain power is being exerted.
Great lessons, transitions covered… and still having problems?
That might be because of dead-time.
Dead-time is a subtle announcement to the class that the teacher doesn’t have it together, an invitation to misbehave. Teachers are human after all, and mistakes happen, but proactive teaching means minimizing this very real problem.
“Where is the pile of papers I left on my desk?” is a common dead-time precursor, as the teacher leaves her class hanging mid lesson to search around her desk for the sheets she thought she had.
Dead-time means the teacher is distracted, looking something up quickly in a book, opening drawers in search of something she needs, talking to a fellow teacher at the door…
A proactive teacher looks for stuff when the class is otherwise engaged, or engages the class to allow the search time to happen. Asking questions on the material covered until that moment, having the class sing a song, or choosing the time to have “off the wall” – a child chooses the anchor chart and the kids look at it and recite the material all form a cover for the teacher to quickly and quietly get herself and her stuff together.
I have seen teachers stretch material for that last ten minutes of class when the lesson was done and interest dead, instead of proactively running a short “back-up lesson,” a quick review on another topic learned already, a trivia question and answer to peak interest… one 3rd grade teacher and I came up with a scientist’s notebook, for moments like these, to discuss why mosquito bites itch and other random but real life questions.
Stretching material is another invitation for misconduct as the class recognizes recycled material, and is equivalent to dead-time.
I remember getting a question from my eighth grade students that rendered my whole class null and void. It was that bad! At that moment I discovered that I did not know enough about the topic to answer the inquiry and continue teaching and I was thrown for a loop. I smiled and complimented the student on an excellent question, asked the class to close their books, and quickly moved on to a new lesson on a new topic I thankfully had proactively kept as a “just in case.” Never did I need it more!
Proper pacing is another dead-time eliminator. Instead of waiting until everyone is ready to begin, start your lesson as you walk over to the child is not ready, relying on proximity to get that straggler on task while the rest of the class begins.
There is nothing wrong with quiet in the classroom. I love silence... and the sound of children thinking, pencils scratching, desks scraping, and feet shuffling. Quiet is great when it is planned quiet. Dead time is unplanned and disruptive to the flow of the lesson.
There are times a teacher tells me her lesson was strong, she had good engagement strategies, there was no dead time and yet the class was still not enthusiastic. There were off task behaviors and she was stymied. What was she doing wrong?
A lesson without relevance is not a strong lesson. Children have to feel that the lesson matters to them. A teacher’s personal story, a connection to something they are interested, an artifact that gets passed around to make a pint… these are all ways to make relevance happen in the classroom.
Relevance signals “Tune in- this is interesting, important, and good to know.”
“Research shows that relevant learning means effective learning, and that alone should be enough to get us rethinking our lesson plans. The old drill-and-kill method is neurologically useless, as it turns out. Relevant, meaningful activities that both engage students emotionally and connect with what they already know are what help build neural connections and long-term memory storage” (Saga Briggs, 2014, at InformEd).
In Mind, Brain, and Education: Neuroscience Implications for the Classroom, cognitive neuroscientist and educational psychologist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Harvard doctoral candidate Matthias Faeth point out that if students don’t make any personal connection through engagement or interest, then the stickiness of the material vanishes, even if they do seem to be listening and learning on that given day.
Share a personal story and see how quickly your students perk up! Give a hands-on activity for the class to experience the lesson you shared. Use the students’ names in your worksheets. Why should the faceless John’s Doe’s of workbook notoriety always be featured?
(For more on Making Learning Stick see a previous post: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/making-learning-stick-etti-siegel-msed)
The proactive teacher has strong lessons, tight transitions, no dead-time, and lots and lots of relevance.
The proactive teacher has fewer everyday discipline problems.
What are your tips for the proactive teacher?
Teaching at Lagos State Ministry of Education, District 1
7 年Quite helpful suggestions. Over the years, I have learnt to keep the students really engaged positively in class. I never allow a dull moment (dead time). We have songs for practically all topics. AND CHILDREN LOVE SONGS YOU KNOW! WE HAVE SONGS COMPOSED TO DESCRIBE EVERY NEW CONCEPT. COLLABORATION IS ENCOURAGED THROUGH ENGAGING GROUP ACTIVITY. I later discovered that every misbehaviour is in line with the class activity!
Teacher
7 年These are very practicable suggestions that every teacher should know. Articles like this should be required reading for new teachers. I had to find most of these out the hard way through trial and error in the early days of my teaching career, and I think it's the same for most teachers. The rest, I fear, never work them out at all. I found your suggestion about keeping engagement high while shifting from one period to the next (Maths to Science, for example) particularly interesting, as I have not done class teaching of this format before, having been a subject teacher for my whole career.
Head of Learning Support & SENDCo Kingshott School
7 年I agree with so much of this article - being prepared or double prepared is essential. This does rely on having adequate resources and sufficient time to plan. Working in the environment that I do I am fortunate to have both, but that has not always been the case in my teaching career and I still see too many administrations who have to cut back on teachers and therefore time at the expense of the children. It is a false economy that leads to guilt, stress and feelings of failure. Whilst we continue to live in a box ticking culture; one that makes us just mp through hoops then we disable good teachers and prevent them from becoming excellent but convince them that they are the problem. What saddens me most for the next generation of teachers is that there seems to be a developing trend school in school leadership that values and celebrates the box ticking culture.
Adjunct Professor, Workshop Presenter, Keynote Speaker, Teacher's Mentor, Educational Coach, Educational Consultant
7 年I have been in education and dealing with classroom management issues for 30 years, but never heard of PAX until now. Thank you for introducing me! While I have worked with teachers to create games to encourage good behavior, this is an already worked through program and I appreciate your bringing it to my attention. That said, I still think that strong lessons, tight transitions, no dead time and relevance are the key to good teaching, with or without a game to motivate students to behave. When done correctly, a game might not even be needed; something I found when struggling teachers I worked with followed the formula of a well run classroom... and longer needed external motivators to keep kids on task. Thanks for taking the time to comment, and teach!
Chief of Administrative Services at County of Ocean, NJ
7 年Nice advice! The best classroom behavior management strategy that not only controls your class but has long term positive effects on the kids is called the Pax Good Behavior Game. Invented in 1965 to tame the 4th grade "class from Hell' for its brand new third replacement teacher, GBG has 30 years of clinical studies by Johns Hopkins U. on 1500 kids in the Baltimore schools, a system about as tough as you'll find anywhere. The strategies work on any grade by using appropriate age-level rewards but the use of the game in the elementary schools Pre-K to 6th has truly unbelievable results. Classroom disruptions are cut by as much as 90%, transition times are reduced from minutes to seconds, hallway movement is silent and calm, principal referrals become almost non-existent, and, get this, school becomes more FUN at the same time. But that's not the incredible part. Use of the Game in 1st grade resulted in 50% lifetime reduction in substance abuse disorders, and 25% to 70% reductions in alcohol abuse, juvenile delinquency, suicidal ideation, violent and criminal behavior, ADHD, anti-social disorders, special ed classifications, and smoking. This is not based on some half-assed pre and post testing but an ongoing study that tracked the GBG kids and a control group from 1st grade to age 30. Oh, BTW, grades went up, graduation rates went up, college admissions went up. Using the Pax Game provides solutions to two paradoxes that teachers face. The first is how to address negative behaviors without REWARDING them with the ATTENTION that is usually being sought. The second is how one strategy can address the opposite ends of the behavior spectrum. Walk into any K-1 class and research shows that kids who will be in trouble someday can be identified by two general behaviors: the obvious is the of-the-wall hyperactive kid, and the less obvious is the introverted passive pupil. Having one strategy that works with both makes life easier. GBG has been shown to reduce ADHD, anti-social, and other special ed classifications. Imagine the cost savings for a district by reducing special ed by 25%? Imagine the change in those kids' lives? Imagine the improvement in future classes! The secret is that Pax GBG helps train kids to have self-control over their behavior and emotions. It’s not about teaching or preaching behavior as part of the curriculum, it’s about practicing being good and controlling one's self starting with short periods and working to longer periods, WHILE doing your normal curriculum. Pax isn't extra work, it’s a strategy used during work that makes doing schoolwork fun. And reducing classroom interruptions and transitions increases time on task by up to an hour a day!