Four Most Baffling Challenges for Teachers and How to Solve Them, The

Classroom Discipline, Unmotivated Students, Underinvolved or Adversarial Parents, and Tough Working Conditions

Sheryn Spencer-Waterman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138165625
• eBook ISBN: 9781317922452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Award-winning teacher and best-selling author Sheryn Spencer Waterman shows teachers how to solve four of their most fundamental classroom challenges. The solutions provided in this book apply to elementary, middle, and high schools and are based on brain-based research, ethical development, the standards movement, and other practical factors.The four most baffling challenges for teachers are classroom discipline, unmotivated students, underinvolved or adversarial parents, and tough working conditions.

1

The Four Most Baffling
Challenges for Teachers

This book is about dealing with the four most common challenges for teachers. As you will see, there is a great deal of information about how to deal with these four challenges:

♦ Discipline

♦ Unmotivated students

♦ Underinvolved or adversarial parents

♦ Tough working conditions

In my years of teaching, I have dealt with various aspects of each of these challenges. Sometimes solutions were simple, but often solutions tested my character and skills. Fortunately, my struggles with these challenges have led to my growth as a professional teacher and as a person. When I started this book, I made a commitment to learn as much as I could about these challenges so that I could provide the information to my colleagues as a kind of executive summary of what is out there. Because this is the information age, information is easy to get; however, there is too much of it and new ideas pop up daily. I have read extensively on these topics, and I present an overview of research and resources that address each one. I also offer a criterion for judging the solutions I found in my reading and in my experience. I also offer a suggestion for decision making based on a synthesis of the information and my experiences as a classroom teacher. I give examples of how I solved issues related to these challenges. Although these examples are based on real events, they have been fictionalized to protect those involved from being identified.

I hope this book provides some possible solutions that could help make teaching more rewarding and that it might even prevent good teachers from leaving the classroom. If you are affected by any of these challenges, or if you know someone who is, please check out this book. Read it chapter by chapter or just read the chapters that address your particular challenges.

How to Evaluate Solutions

In addition to these challenges, there is another underlying challenge: deciding what solutions to choose. Making decisions about how to deal with these challenges can feel like a tug of war; each side of the issue has undeniable, empirical evidence through research that their ideas are superior to the other side’s ideas. Therefore, a significant challenge for you is to decide which solutions are right for you, your students, and your school.

Many departments of instruction insist that any program or strategy adopted by a school system be research based; however, it may be wise to use not only the evidence of research, but also to use other criteria. As you consider how to deal effectively with challenges in your classroom, school, or district, the first thing you might do is think about various responses in terms of your own belief system. You may discover that many solutions to challenges in the classroom are counterintuitive (i.e., seem to go against reason). Ways to deal with challenges may seem counterintuitive because your belief system could be tied to theories and concepts that have been replaced by ideas that in close analysis make more sense for today’s children, young people, and adults.

Todd Whitaker, author of the inspirational book, What Great Teachers Do Differently: 14 Things that Matter Most (2004), says that it is people, not programs, that make excellent teachers and excellent schools; however, it is beneficial to establish a basic criterion that might help teachers decide what solutions to choose. This criterion can help teachers answer the questions they should ask when they make decisions about dealing with challenges: Does this solution add value to the people involved? And does it resolve the situation/challenge effectively? For example, if I use a discipline method that helps my students learn better self-control and helps me learn to be more skilled at being kind while firm, then that discipline method added value to the situation. However, if I use a discipline method that makes a student angry and embarrassed and puts me in the role of enemy rather than helper, then that method has not added value; it has hurt both the student and me.

The BESST Criterion

What follows is an explanation and examples of a criterion that adds value to the lives of those involved in schools. As you will see, I summarize and draw conclusions about some important ideas I believe will be most helpful to you as you deal with these four challenges and others.

This criterion is based on relatively new education concepts: brain-based research, levels of ethical development, the standards movement, and systems theory. Basing a criterion on these four ideas seems to have the most to offer for these reasons:

♦	These are relatively new ideas whose purpose is to improve education. For instance, some of this information was not available to many teachers before the 1990s. Now that it is available, we can use it to help with these challenges.
♦	Using four ideas instead of one, gives a broader base to decision making.

I propose a criterion that summarizes and simplifies these concepts in order to make them useful for teachers and that add value to the lives of those involved. I do not like using acronyms for programs; however, when you are learning something, an acronym can help you remember until you incorporate the information into our way of being. Therefore, I have chosen an acronym for my criterion and present it as a simple formula: the BESST (brain-based, ethical, standards-based, systems theory) Criterion = Value Added.

In the following pages, I provide summaries of information about the four areas that make up the criterion, and then I present a synthesis of that information in a chart that might help you evaluate solutions to your challenges. In the chapters that follow, I include a thorough discussion of each of the four challenges and show you how to use the chart to evaluate solutions to these challenges. I also describe a model of decision-making that incorporates the BESST Criterion and show you how to use it in real situations. And finally, I propose criteria for a caring-based education organization.

Brain-Based Research

Brain-based research has unlocked many of the secrets that limited scientific capability denied us for many years. Although we do not know everything about how the brain functions, we know a great deal more now than did scientists like B. F. Skinner and Abraham Maslow (1962) when they were developing theories about learning. Many of the findings of brain-based research support what researchers in the past could only assume from their subjects’ behaviors; however, some of the original findings are not supported by this newer research. Unfortunately, old ideas die hard, and even though some ideas have been disproved, people still hold on to them as if they were true. Brain-based researcher Eric Jensen explains in his book Teaching With the Brain in Mind (1998) that we now have evidence that disputes certain commonly held ideas about leaning. One of the most important findings is the idea that the brain has its own reward system.

Knowing that many teachers rely heavily on rewarding students as a way to motivate them, Jensen suggests that instead of asking what they can do to motivate students, he says a better question to ask is, what is going on in the brain when students are motivated? His ideas (p. 68) are illustrated in the accompanying image, “Practical Alternatives to Using Rewards.” Jensen warns that if teachers withdraw rewards, students may initially seem to do poorly; however, for the sake of students’ well-being, teachers should not give up finding ways to naturally engage the desire to learn.

Practical Alternatives to Using Rewards

Example: Some programs align themselves with brain-based research and some do not. Though you may believe what the brain-based researchers are saying, it may not fit well with your own situation. For instance, a middle school team of highly capable teachers was having so much trouble with their stud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Four Most Baffling Challenges for Teachers
• 2 Classroom Management and Discipline
• 3 Unmotivated Students
• 4 Dealing With Underinvolved or Adversarial Parents
• 5 Tough Working Conditions
• 6 Solutions Overview
• References