'Whole-Brain' Behaviour Management in the Classroom

Every Piece of the Puzzle

Chris Derrington, Hilary Goddard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415411806
• eBook ISBN: 9781134127641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Representing a brave and insightful shift away from narrow perspectives on behaviour management, this book draws practitioners towards a more holistic understanding of ourselves and how we impact on children's learning and behaviour.

The authors' brilliant new conceptual model of 'whole-brain' behaviour management challenges existing theories about the management of children's behavioural issues. Their pioneering 'whole-brain' approach draws upon a range of influences and concepts that cross discipline boundaries, expanding on the practitioner's understanding of the complexity of children's behaviour through their own knowledge of neuroscience, biopsychosocial theory and interpersonal awareness. The book will take the reader through a process of self-evaluation in which their preferred ways of thinking, acting and relating will be explored and interpreted in order to help them understand the impact of their 'personal style' on how the children in their care behave.

Offering new insights and creative solutions, this is a practical guide to coach practitioners in their personal and professional development, helping them to raise the achievement of children exhibiting even the most challenging of behaviour.

Part I
Blue sky thinking

Chapter 1
Opening the box

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

(Abraham Maslow, 1908–1970¹)

Introduction

This well-known quotation is generally attributed to Abraham Maslow, the eminent humanistic psychologist. Allegedly, he coined this popular maxim in the 1960s as part of a comment about the limitations of behaviourism in psychological research, but it has since been adopted widely by initiators of change in just about every professional field. What the saying suggests is that there is a universal tendency for individuals to rely upon a familiar ‘tool’ for solving a range of problems even though this tool may be ineffective at times or even unfit for purpose. A ‘tool’ in this context is any kind of response used to tackle a problem and is usually driven by a particular belief or perception about the problem itself.

Let’s think about this in terms of behaviour management and consider three hypothetical teachers. The first teacher tends to use the tool of ‘tactical ignoring’ on a frequent basis, and this is grounded in her perception that when students misbehave in class there is a conscious intention on their part to divert and steal her attention away from other, more deserving students. Although she may not be consciously aware of it, her inner belief is that disruptive students do not deserve to win attention in this way and, as far as she is concerned, she won’t give in to it. Her response is to punish the students concerned by denying them the attention they crave. The second teacher regularly yells at students when their behaviour irritates her. The type of behaviour that provokes the shouting can range from forgetting to bring a pen or producing untidy work through to deliberate non-compliance. This teacher defends her style of behaviour management by maintaining that students can easily become out of control and that they need to be kept in their place and understand that teachers hold the balance of power. The third teacher often threatens his lively class with the intervention of a senior colleague because he believes deep down that he himself lacks the authority and credibility to manage the students’ behaviour as effectively as his colleague.

Although their favourite tools might be entirely appropriate in some instances (for example a loud shout could prevent a fight from breaking out) these three teachers continue to adopt and depend on these strategies even though the tactical ignoring often results in an escalation of the unwanted behaviour, the shouting usually evokes equally hostile responses and aggressive challenges from some of the students, and the senior colleague is usually too busy or disinclined to intervene in the third class. In each case, the teacher’s repertoire for managing student behaviour has become self-limiting. To avoid the limitations of any one tool, every teacher, like any other professional, needs to have many at his/her disposal. This advice sounds easy enough, so why do these teachers continue to limit their responses in this way?

According to the concept of ‘Maslow’s hammer’, what happens is that we unconsciously distort our perception of events around us and become ever more selective in what we choose to focus on, so that our preferred ‘hammer’ always appears to be the most appropriate tool there is. In the case of the second teacher, the student who forgets to bring a pen to class is perceived as having done this deliberately to challenge the teacher’s authority and test her patience. The problem behaviour (in this case, forgetting to bring a pen) is habitually perceived as a ‘nail’ (the challenging of her authority) that therefore needs to be ‘hammered’ (the teacher yells to restore her authority). If the outcome of our action is unsatisfactory, because the initial problem wasn’t a nail after all, we experience cognitive dissonance and, to cope with this, we protect our internal representations and our belief-driven behaviour by placing the blame elsewhere. Blaming is what we do when we are unwilling or feel unable to take restorative action ourselves and this can include the search for better, alternative solutions.

It is not easy to change the beliefs and perceptions we hold about others and ourselves or to adopt new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving and, because behaviour management is an emotive and sensitive issue, teachers often feel too embarrassed or even ashamed to talk openly about their experiences. Simply being told what you should say and do by a senior colleague or manager is unlikely to initiate long-lasting change and may even lead to more anxiety and a further reduction in effectiveness, particularly if this advice is linked to competency procedures. Training events led by charismatic behaviour consultants may be highly entertaining and inspirational but they can leave some teachers feeling inadequate because they could never, in a million years, imagine themselves being able to exude such ‘personality capital’, confidence and prowess when dealing with challenging behaviour. Although whole-school intervention approaches such as assertive discipline (Canter and Canter, 1992) have been embraced enthusiastically by a number of schools in the UK, there is still limited empirical evidence to support their longterm effectiveness (Evans et al., 2003), and it has also been acknowledged that inconsistency in interpretation, application and delivery by different teachers impedes their effectiveness (Fox, 1991; Taylor, 2003).

We believe there is a need for a radically different and tailored approach to behaviour management training, one that encourages teachers to develop their self-knowledge or intrapersonal intelligence (Gardner, 1993) and helps them to realise that they have the inner resources to alter their perceptions and thus expand the range of tools they have at their disposal. Reflective practice has its roots in the writings of John Dewey (1916), who described life as an experiential journey made up of problems for us to solve. Dewey suggested that we could achieve this by taking a step back and viewing the situation holistically before taking subsequent action. This also has links with ‘double-loop’ learning (Argyris, 1976) in which assumptions underlying one’s current views are questioned and tested out. By applying these principles, teachers may become better equipped to manage the challenges that present themselves on a day-to-day basis.

Most books on classroom behaviour management are written for teachers but are mainly about children or young people and how to deal with them. This book represents a shift in approach. Firstly, it is about teachers rather than students. Secondly, it challenges the supposition that teachers are a homogeneous group with identical training needs. ‘Whole-brain’ behaviour management (WBBM) highlights the individual teacher as a key variable in successful behaviour management and recognises that his/her internal model of reality including perceptions, beliefs and feelings all impact on relationships and management skills in the classroom. Scripts and learned techniques can help to improve behaviour management up to a point but become superficial and virtually useless if applied without authenticity and congruence with what the teacher believes and feels within.

From a social constructivist perspective, this book does not attempt to provide the answers as we see them (through our view of the truth). Rather than offering yet more tips on how to manage behaviour, we intend to provide a broad theoretical framework within which teachers are encouraged to acknowledge, reflect upon and analyse what they already feel, think, say and do. It is an existential process that assists us to make sense of our world.

This book contains many opportunities for guided self-reflection through the presentation of authentic case studies, exercises and selfaudits, all designed to promote critical analysis. Essentially, the book is a personal guide that will coach and support individual teachers in initiating change and ultimately achieving a more balanced set of personal and professional competencies. It is our hope that the ‘whole-brain’ approach will offer some fresh new insights and creative solutions to behaviour management and help all teachers to recognise the link between their personal constructs² (the way they construe the world) and their responses to behaviour in the classroom. In doing this, teachers will feel greater ownership of outcomes and become more energised and more able to reclaim their personal empowerment and avoid giving it away to others (Zull, 2002). Fundamentally, this book, which draws on a converging synthesis of emerging research in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and positive psychology with ancient theories and existential Eastern philosophies, is about discovery, self-knowledge and the nature of human relationships.

This book will help teachers to:

• explore the spectrum of competencies required for effective behaviour management;
• analyse and reflect deeply upon their own beliefs, feelings and behaviour;
• gain a thorough understanding of the complexity of behaviour management by engaging with realistic case studies;
• identify what changes they can make in themselves and plan a course of action;
• develop greater personal responsibility for managing behaviour and establishing and maintaining harmonious working relationships in the classroom.

How we came to develop ‘whole-brain’ behaviour management

For the past five years we have been formulating our theory of ‘whole-brain’ behaviour management, but our journey began much earlier than this. Our paths first crossed as young teachers in 1982 when we shared the teaching of a class of children with severe behavioural, emotional and social difficulties in a residential special school, as we alternately took periods of maternity leave and expanded our own families with faultless synchronicity! During the twenty years that followed, our careers took separate paths and between us we taught and managed in a wide range of educational provision including other special schools and units for students with behavioural difficulties, mainstream primary and secondary schools, and local authority services, as well as inspecting schools and conducting educational research.

Despite the geographical distance between us, we remained in contact with each other and around the time that we experienced (separately) the stark reality of taking up our first headship roles in very challenging schools we began to meet up occasionally at a very nice health spa to help us unwind and recharge our batteries! Inevitably, we also used these opportunities to offload our concerns, discuss educational matters and generally ‘put the world to rights’. Soon, our regular discussions developed into quite animated and lengthy debates that explored our shared (and sometimes conflicting) interests in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and spirituality. We had both rediscovered the psychological and philosophical works of William James, written more than a hundred years ago but eerily prophetic in his description of cutting-edge research in the field of cognitive neuroscience. We were also both interested in the Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s theory of emotion, which challenges the ideology that cognition is a separate entity from emotion. When we began to really analyse our ideas about student behaviour and its management, we realised the extent of our alignment after all those years and, energised by this, we began to write our thoughts down and even fill notebooks during our spa visits. Rather like Archimedes, everything became clear in the jacuzzi, and the ‘whole-brain’ model began to surface!

Historically, behaviour management models have reflected sociopolitical developments in how children are perceived and valued. For example, in Victorian Britain, the mantra of ‘children being seen and not heard’ manifested itself in a physically punitive and restrictive behaviour regime, whereas the progressive culture of the 1960s and 1970s led to a challenge of authoritarianism, a growth in childcentred practices and a far more permissive classroom environment. Our overall concern is that the prevailing social climate in the UK has become characterised by a universal paranoia of youth culture in which young people are routinely scapegoated as ‘yobs’ and ‘thugs’, alienated, demonised and even criminalised through a growing mistrust fuelled by media hype and scaremongering. It seemed to us that this negative representation was beginning to generate a climate of social fear that was permeating all levels of society (including schools) and creating a growing divide between ‘them’ (children and young people) and ‘us’ (the adults).

The increasing number of children being prescribed ‘class A’ drugs such as Ritalin³ to enable them to be tolerated in the mainstream classroom, the abundance of sensationalist reality TV programmes revelling in ‘shocking’ antics of children and teenagers, the social exclusion of youths for wearing a hooded garment,⁴ the proliferation of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs)⁵ served on juveniles, and references to ‘feral’ children in the popular press all contribute to the growing rhetoric that makes us question our capacity to tackle and stem the ‘rising tide’. This attitude persists even though national crime figures and school inspection reports provide evidence to negate the assumption that standards of behaviour are worsening. This pervading sense of helplessness goes hand in hand with the illegality of corporal punishment, which in an earlier age was used to ‘control’ the child. Current legislation, introduced to promote respect and greater community cohesion, seems to focus more on the enforcement of zero tolerance and punitive short-term measures than on enduring and preventive ones. Such an approach makes no distinction between equal and equitable treatment and also fails to acknowledge the ways in which inflexible and limiting social structures, systems and educational policy can lie at the root of disaffection and anti-social behaviour. This increasing disconnection between young people and adults has reached the point where anti-social behaviour amongst British teenagers is reportedly now the worst in Europe (Margo et al. , 2006).

Within our professional roles, we have noticed too how colleagues and peers are ever more intent on finding the key to better behaviour in classrooms. Policy makers search for a common approach or framework that can be applied to every school in their area, providing a level of co-ordination that central government requires of them. Head teachers and special educational needs co-ordinators eagerly subscribe to any new res...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Part I: Blue Sky Thinking
• Part II: Examining the Pieces
• Epilogue
• Appendix: CAB Key and Profile Sheet
• Notes
• References