A Comprehensive Guide to Classroom Management

Facilitating engagement and learning in schools

Louise Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367717315
• eBook ISBN: 9781000247886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Behaviour management in the classroom can be one of the most challenging aspects of teaching, but with the right approach it can be rewarding and enriching for both student and teacher. A Comprehensive Guide to Classroom Management provides a systematic overview of the major theories and styles of discipline in schools.

Drawing on the latest international research, Porter outlines how teachers can develop a personal style in classroom management based on a sound understanding of theory. The emphasis is on proactive, authoritative approaches to discipline to engage students and facilitate the achievement of educational and social goals. Porter demonstrates how it is within the power of schools and teachers to create the conditions under which even disadvantaged or disenchanted students strive to learn.

A Comprehensive Guide to Classroom Management is the essential handbook for preservice teachers and a valuable reference for more experienced teachers who want to develop their approach to complex behavioural challenges.

'True to its title, this is an enormously ambitious - indeed, encyclopaedic - resource that makes a compelling, multilayered case for putting respect for children's needs ahead of our urge to control them.' - Alfie Kohn, author of Beyond Discipline and Punished by Rewards

'There is so much to admire and absorb in this impressive and highly readable blend of research, idealism and sound sense - highly recommended for principals, aspiring school leaders and reflective practitioners teaching students with behavioural difficulties.' - Dr Ted Cole, lead editor of The Routledge International Companion to Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties

PART ONE

Overview

CHAPTER 1
The nature and causes of behavioural difficulties in schools

[Young people] with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges are still poorly understood and treated in a way that is completely at odds with what is now known about how they came to be challenging in the first place.¹

In his theory of justice, the philosopher John Rawls called on each of us to invent our ideal economic system as if we had no knowledge of our eventual standing within it.² Behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ we could design a system of gross inequality – as long as we were willing to risk being on the bottom economic rung, of being one of the system’s victims. Similarly, in this book I ask you to consider how you would design a school or classroom, if you did not know ahead of time whether you would be a teacher, a parent or a student and, if a student, whether you would be academically talented or, instead, someone experiencing learning impairments, family adversity, racial oppression and poverty. How would we design a system to treat disadvantaged students if there were a chance that we might be one of them?

As the first step towards answering that question, in this chapter, I outline some of the behavioural and emotional difficulties common in children and adolescents and examine their causes. This sets the scene in chapter 2 for a discussion of our aims for the education and discipline of students, in general, and for those with emotional or behavioural challenges, in particular.

Types of behavioural difficulties

Psychologists characterise emotional and behavioural difficulties as either internalising or externalising. Internalising behaviours are self-focused and are characterised by under-control. In lay language, they are typically referred to as emotional difficulties. Although the main person to suffer is the one experiencing the emotion, the issues are a problem for both teachers and parents, who routinely are concerned because of the children’s anguish, because the behaviours are related to poor adjustment to school and because emotional difficulties can trigger disruptive behaviour.³

In contrast, externalising behaviours are directed against others. The overt forms include outbursts of aggression, impulsivity, disruptiveness and defiance.⁴ A second class of externalising behaviours – covert actions – are surreptitious. These include relational bullying, telling lies, gossiping, playing mean tricks on others and, at older ages, vandalism and theft, for example.⁵ These and the more overt behaviours, are typically referred to as behavioural problems. The resulting disruptive acts are considered to be a problem because they interfere with the rights or needs of surrounding people, or violate the rights of the children who are performing them – by, for example, earning them a negative reputation, or limiting their learning or social-emotional adjustment.

Almost all behaviours are functional at some time and in some contexts. A child assaulting and then escaping from a teacher is unacceptable, but the same act might be advisable when directed towards a would-be abductor. Many other behaviours are simply normal, given children’s developmental capacities. Therefore, demanding though certain behaviours can be, they do not constitute a ‘problem’ unless they:

• are part of a constellation of difficult behaviours spanning oppositionality, negative mood and aggression
• are stable over time – that is, they persist beyond the age when they typically begin to decline
• are excessive in terms of frequency or intensity
• are aberrant regardless of age, for example head banging and biting oneself
• are evident in several settings
• are inappropriate in the context and
• impair children’s social functioning or educational progress.⁶

Externalising behavioural problems

In the early childhood years, the behaviours that commonly concern parents and teachers are uncooperative behaviour (often termed noncompliance or defiance), high activity levels and aggression.⁷ By school age, (as shown in a 2007 survey of teachers in 21 countries spanning 30,000 students), the most common externalising behavioural problems reported were inattentiveness and aggression; lesser concerns included absenteeism, tardiness and disputes between students.⁸ Those behaviours that most impinge on school safety such as drug use, gangs, possession of weapons and abuse of teachers, while serious, occur at very low rates and reportedly are not increasing.⁹ Violent behaviours, although rare and less frequent in schools than in homes, nevertheless are witnessed by large numbers and hence have an effect beyond traumatising their immediate targets.¹⁰

Cooperation

Children’s cooperativeness increases over the preschool years.¹¹ With respect to prohibitions (such as not to touch forbidden items), 14-month-olds have been observed to comply 40 per cent of the time, rising to an average of 85 per cent cooperation by almost four years of age.¹² More challenging for young children are requests to persist at mundane tasks, such as packing away toys or sitting quietly during group activities. On these persistence tasks, 14-month-olds cooperate on 14 per cent of occasions, whereas by almost four years of age, children can do so around 30 per cent of the time.¹³

During the time frame of nine to 27 months, children become more negatively reactive in response to having their goals thwarted.¹⁴ However, from 40 months onwards, they can communicate with language, increasingly can use self-talk to direct their own actions, and can direct their attention away from their own desires towards what is being asked of them.¹⁵ Consequently, children with all three skills are better able to cooperate with adults’ directives.

Meanwhile, a warm relationship with parents along with autonomy support increases children’s willingness to cooperate with adults.¹⁶ This was also shown in a preschool, where children followed 100 per cent of teachers’ directives when the teachers’ approval rates were high, with only 14 per cent of cooperation when their teachers were disapproving.¹⁷

Attention skills

A second difficulty that concerns teachers is children’s distractibility. This can encompass any or all six forms of attention:

• alertness: maintaining an optimal level of arousal
• focus: the ability to focus on a task
• selective attention: the ability to filter out and ignore irrelevancies
• alternating attention: ability to change focus from one aspect of a task to another, and back again
• divided or parallel attention: ability to complete one task, while listening to instruction or planning the next activity
• attention span (concentration): the ability to sustain attention.¹⁸

After their first birthday, children improve in their ability to focus, to resist distraction and to sustain attention.¹⁹ Even so, half of all children aged from five to 10 years are variable, across time and settings, in their attention.²⁰ Inattentiveness in the early years of school depresses children’s academic achievement in first grade²¹ and subsequently. This comes about because the children miss out on learning some foundational skills, with the result that they achieve less well academically, particularly in reading skills.²² This occurs, however, only in classrooms lacking in emotional support.²³ Warm relationships with their teachers motivate children to engage and persist, while structure will make it easier for them to learn – with a consequent impr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Boxes
• PART ONE Overview
• PART TWO Controlling discipline
• PART THREE The guidance approach
• PART FOUR Applications
• PART FIVE Beyond the classroom
• References
• Notes
• Index