by: Mery Tellez
Considering the when and how to react to our students’
behaviors is a tricky business. The
language we utilize, our tone of voice and body gestures, have a big impact on
classroom situations. For any situation
that arises in a classroom, its meaning is tremendously impacted by our
reaction to it.
Regardless of the set of specific consequences we are
planning to implement in our classroom and if the behavior and consequence is a
positive or negative one; there is a general process that we do need to go
through every time a situation arises in our classroom. The flowchart provided here is an attempt to
organize this internal process. Being conscious
of what we should be doing to ensure an effective classroom management is certainly
the first step to building a positive learning environment for our students.
The flowchart starts at the beginning of the school year,
when rules, procedures and consequences should be discussed and agreed on
together with the students.
Socializing these three components, and allowing your
students to be part of the process, will facilitate the understanding of your
future efforts to promote positive classroom behavior. Imagine you are keeping the entire classroom
for 5 extra minutes during their recess as a consequence of your never
socialized rule of being on time, how many students will be upset, frustrated
and probably even offended by your decision?
Contrast this against the scenario of a class that starts the school
year by deciding what is important; being on time for example, and how can we
compensate the time lost if we are not on time; taking time from recess. Certainly the students' reaction will be a very different one.
After that we can see how the flowchart moves towards the
many specific situations both positive and negative that you will experience in
your students’ behavior. For each
situation a suggested course of action is presented in a general approach:
The first identified step is to make sure to have all the
information you require to make a judgment.
Imagine for example that you have agreed on individual work time with
your class. While you are working
individually with a student, you turn and you see a student coming back to
his/her chair after having “interrupted” another student work. Acting without proper information might
result on this student being penalized for a misbehavior. Inquiring first, and aiming to get as much
information as possible about the situation might allow you to realize the
student was helping with translating instructions, or providing pieces from the
prior group work to his/her classmate turning the entire situation around. Snap judgments are not good advisors,
particularly when aimed to students with prior positive or negative behaviors
as our judgments tend to be biased in those situations.
Once you are sure you have enough information, the next step
involves a sub-routine in which you will need to make questions that will guide
you through the specific course of action required. There are many possible consequences that
could be stablished for many different behaviors, with varying effects on
repetition and student learning. The
only and best way to go about deciding how to react and what strategy to use is
by knowing your students and being consequent with what you have previously
stablished. The questions suggested
will help you to decide what should be the most appropriate strategy to use.
For example, if a student is raising her hand wanting to
participate, you can immediately detect that as a positive behavior and move
forward on your plan to praise it or recognize it. If you stop for a second on the suggested
questions, you might remember that this is the same student who has been
praised for the same behavior constantly, and might remember as well how
over-praising a behavior makes it lose its meaning, not really building up the
skills or motivation of said student, and you might change your reaction to a
more subtle and meaningful one, such as acknowledging her with a nod or a
smile.
Finally, after applying the selected consequence, positive
or negative, there is a step that I consider crucial in the process of building
a positive environment in my class. Keeping record! This might change from person to person, and
some do keep a public record (class dojo, stop signs, behavioral charts) as a
way for the students to have a visual reminder of the expectations the teachers
have for them. For others, myself
included, the record keeping is more of a strategy to inform my own future
actions. I am a specialist teacher in MS
and HS, this means that I do not spend my day with the same group of 18-40
students, but instead I have an average of 100 – 400 students that I see once
or twice a week, or only for one period per day. Keeping a mental track of their behaviors
have proved not to be the most effective way to go about this in the past, and using
any of the many options to keep an anecdotal record of what had happened in
each one of my classes has greatly helped me to be more efficient on my
questioning stage.
To close this post, I would like to make a short reflection
on consequences. Marzano, (2007) in his
chapter on recognizing and adhering to classroom rules and procedures,
stablishes that “Rules and procedures for which there are no consequences do little
to enhance learning”. I couldn’t agree
more, but I do believe we need to re-evaluate what most of us do as a
consequence, its frequency, and its effects in building our students’
character.
How much do consequences help to educate and bring the best possible
out of a child, and how much are these systems of punishment and reward a
detrimental system that hurts better tan build students-teacher relationships?
There are many teachers who believe that our reward-penalize
system is not one that in fact reflects the real world our students live in,
and that by constantly making an effort to even visually point out a misbehaviour or a positive behavior that should be expected, we are in fact
placing the job of managing students’ behavior in the hand of the teacher and
not in the hands of the students where it belongs. In this scenario the students become the
object of a judgment instead of the self-regulators of their behavior that we
were originally aiming for.
The reality is that as adults we are not constantly being
praised or penalized for our good actions or small faults. We do face consequences in the long and short
term for our actions, but the ideal I would like to help build in the character
of my students is one in which their actions are not determined by the fear or
need for the immediate or long term praising, but instead for their inner
motivation to act according what they believe correct.
With that being said, I believe we should be motivating much
more self-reflection and much less candy and stickers for behaviors that should
be the norm. Should we really be so
surprised that our students remain in line? Or submit homework? Or get to class
on time? I believe that by praising
those behaviors that are an expectation better than an extraordinary action, we
are educating our students to act based in a reward and not on their
convictions.
Cited Sources:
Marzano, R. J. (2007). Chapter 7. What will I do to recognize and acknowledge adherence and lack of adherence to classroom rules and procedures? In The art and science of teaching: A comprehensive framework for effective instruction(pp. 131-148). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
