Three Reasons Why Students Misbehave in Mathematics Lessons and What To Do About It?

Disclaimer: This is not a behaviour management article. It does not address severe student management issues. However, the ideas address many student behaviour issues in mathematics classrooms. Most are relevant to all classrooms.

If you are a mathematics educator, you don’t need me to tell you how challenging the task of teaching mathematics is. Presenting mathematical ideas in ways that have students understand and successfully apply strategies to gain correct answers is little short of a miraculous achievement.

And that’s with students who are on-side, or at least compliant.

However, when we insert two or three students whose behaviour is oppositional and against the lesson flow, the difficulty level rises to ‘off the charts’.?

It is common for mathematics classes to have many students behaving in ways that express the messages, ‘I hate maths’, ‘I don’t want to be here’, and ‘It’s more fun misbehaving than doing what the teacher asks’.

So, to the question -? Why do Students Misbehave in Mathematics Lessons??

Note: I’ve incorporated the ‘And what to do about it’ into the responses.

It is tempting to assume students misbehave because they hate mathematics. But this assumption is too shallow; we need to get to the root of why most - yes, most - students dislike mathematics in the first place.?

Below are three reasons students dislike mathematics and misbehave in mathematics lessons. All three are interrelated.

Reason #1: They do not understand the work.

Thankfully, not all students who lack understanding misbehave. However, almost all students who misbehave lack mathematical understanding. And by ‘lack of mathematical understanding’, I mean they don’t understand the concepts that underpin the procedures they have been tasked to work with.?

What percentage of students don’t understand the concepts that underpin related procedures? Who knows? But ask any thinking mathematics teacher, and they’ll tell you it’s upward of 60%, more likely 70-80%. Not in every class, of course, but across the board in most countries, especially Western countries.

If that 60-80% figure hasn’t shaken you to the core, you are not paying attention. Imagine a massive effort encompassing several hours per week over many decades - for example, a marketing campaign or an effort to make third-world villages self-sustainable - and the result is 60-80% of your target audience hating your idea, hating your product. It is an unfathomable idea. And yet, this is the story of school mathematics.? ?

Thank heavens, only a tiny fraction of the 60-80% misbehave.?

(Note that most of the 60-80% of students who ‘don’t get it’ tend to be the compliant students - students who slog away in a vacuum of misunderstanding but prefer to toe the line rather than get into trouble. (The? problem of compliant-yet-not-engaged students is a whole other issue, and not for this article)

The real question, then, is, WHY only 60-80 % of students understand the concepts that underpin the procedures they are tasked to work with?

The answer is obvious, although many educators will disagree. I lay out my reasoning in the article ‘Why Students Need To Understand The Concept Before We Teach Them The Procedure ’. But here it is in a nutshell. 60-80% of students will never understand the concepts that underpin the related procedures because most students are learning mathematics via a process that assumes mathematical understanding (understanding the concepts that underpin the related procedures) occurs through drilling procedures.?

Sorry, it won’t. It doesn't. It can’t.

Having students practice procedures repeatedly does little to give them an understanding of the underlying concepts.

The top 20% of students become proficient procedurally, but this 20% could become proficient simply by throwing the appropriate texts at them. They (almost) don’t need a teacher.

And, as a related aside, 99.9% of mathematics teachers come from this 20% pool of students who ‘get it anyway’.?Ponder that one, folks, because therein lies a considerable part of the problem! (Again, fodder for another article)

(BTW, I made up the 99.9% figure, but it’ll be close.)

Reason #2 (for mathematics students misbehaving): They have no sense of control over their work.

There’s a very simple formula for engaging students in any pursuit - present the pursuit in a way that gives students a sense of control.?

Why? Because giving students a sense of control over their learning, whenever possible, is the ONLY way for authentic (intrinsic) engagement to occur. ?

A sense of control leads to ownership and agency. Students become authentically engaged when they have (some) control and ownership. This is one of those human nature-type things, a universal law if you like. We should all know this through experience. Compare learning something complex with someone telling you what to do, when to do it, how to do it, how much to do it and when to stop doing it so they can show you the next thing to do. i.e. via lecture format according to their schedule … versus … learning something complex by choosing a variety of mediums (videos, articles, talking to experts) according to your schedule and what works for you.

The former is ‘park-your-brain-and-replicate-what-the-teacher-says’. The latter gives you agency over the task. In the latter, you are engaged because you are in control. You are drawing on experts but also finding your way. The latter is how humans are wired to learn.

The idea of agency being fundamental to learning is not common knowledge. Why this is is beyond me.

Oh, and in case it is not already implied, students with agency have a much better chance of understanding the concepts that underpin mathematical procedures.

How do we give students a sense of control??

Simple. Give students some choice, for example, the speed with which they progress through a unit. Have them choose a range of questions from a complete set. Allow students - at least initially - to choose how they tackle a problem.?

More importantly, make the activities open and rich. Before deriving any given procedure, have students work through an activity that

1. has them collaborating
2. has them thinking, and
3. has them exploring the concept.?

Furthermore, and where possible, use activities for which there is NO PROCEDURE TO FOLLOW, activities for which students can only derive a correct answer if they understand the concept.

One excellent idea is to workshop concept-specific Open Ended Questions . ? (Explaining the process of workshopping concept-specific open-ended questions is way beyond the scope of an article or series. Hence the need for a short course.)?

Regardless of our approach, once students have grappled with the concept/s for five or ten minutes, then teach them the procedure. Or better still, workshop your students to derive the formula.

Reason #3 (for students misbehaving): They are bored.

When kids are bored, they muck up. We can hardly blame them. Think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of a student who has endured thousands of questions over many years based on fractions, decimals, percentages, ratios, algebra, measurement, Pythagoras, basic numeracy, etc. And you don’t understand any of it. You try - sometimes - to follow the teachers' instructions, and you do - sometimes - gain correct answers. But, most of the time, you have no idea what you are doing. When you are asked a question, you disengage your thinking brain and reach back into the recesses of your highly unreliable mathematics memory bank to select SOMETHING that resembles a procedure that MIGHT be somewhat close to the one you need to use to get a correct answer.?

You don’t like maths. You don’t see the point of maths. You feel like a failure. You’ve spent too much time in too many lessons across all your schooling years, having no clue what the heck it is you are supposed to be doing with these ridiculous mathematics tasks. You would rather be ANYWHERE but in a mathematics classroom.

And we wonder why students misbehave!

Well, I don’t blame them. Because mucking up at least breaks the boredom. Mucking up and getting the teacher riled is a damn site more creative and clever than working through these (seemingly) irrelevant and meaningless tasks.

Welcome to the world of the disenfranchised mathematics student.

How do we fix the boredom problem?

Refer to #1 and #2. Teach in ways that foster understanding and agency. Give students a sense of control over their learning.?

No more sage-on-the-stage as a default practice

I suggest that the sage on the stage - as a default practice - is a dead duck. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s simply that a teacher-directed, do-as-I-say, replicate-my-examples approach can only lead to passive learning and a lack of agency. Hence disengagement, boredom, and misbehaviour. It’s not your fault. It wasn’t my fault in my early years. (BTW, in my early years, I won the prize for the world's best boredom-inducing mathematics teacher. So go me!)

We can be as charismatic as we like. Still, if our students are not gaining a sense of control and getting their hands dirty exploring concepts through rich, open tasks - as a default, regular practice - then they cannot gain agency over their learning. We are shooting ourselves in the foot .

Learn to become a facilitator.

We need to put students at the centre of the learning so that the learning becomes active. As a default. We need to become more student-centric. We need to stop using the stage as our default and become a facilitator of learning as a default practice. We’ll still have many moments of being the grand master, but these will be when students require our sage - more commonly when students need our input rather than when our lesson plan says they need our input.

For many, this will require a paradigm shift. What I'm advocating is very different to the traditional stand-and-deliver teaching approach. Transitioning from a ‘Procedures-first’ approach to an ‘Understanding-first, (Procedures-second)’ approach requires a paradigm shift. It requires immersion in the ideas. It requires time. And THAT is why we have immersive PD to lead teachers through that paradigm shift .

But Richard, you should never assume there is one approach to teaching mathematics.

Final word - I often hear there is no one way to teach mathematics. And this is true. But this article does not point to THE ONE WAY. There are many ways to use a student-centric, agency-inducing, facilitatory approach.?

What I am suggesting, though, is that a teacher-centric, do-as-I-say, passive learning approach can only foster more of what we’ve already got - 60-80% of kids who don’t get it and who are bored, some of whom will resort to creative pursuits of misbehaving.?

Your turn

What are your takeaways? Did you find this article confronting? Or have you been inspired? I’d love your input, so please, fire away ...

More articles and links to PD that help make the paradigm shift to solve the disengagement and behaviour problem:

• PD: AEMS Agency - Empowering Your Mathematics Students
• PD: The Workshop of Concept-specific Open-Ended Questions .
• Video-Article: Why many students find fractions, decimals and percentages confusing
• Video-Article: Dividing by fractions: Why many students are confused, and how to make fraction division make sense?

• Article: ‘Why Students Need To Understand The Concept Before We Teach Them The Procedure ’
• Article: Why We Need An Understanding-first, Procedures-second Mindset When Teaching Mathematics

• Article: The Understanding-first, Procedures-second Approach in Action