Student Behaviour

Theory and practice for teachers

Louise Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000247497
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Gestion de la salle de classe

Behaviour management in the classroom and schoolyard is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching. Student Behaviour offers a comprehensive overview of the major theories of behaviour management in primary and secondary schools, illustrated with detailed case studies.Porter outlines how teachers can develop a personal approach to classroom management based on a sound understanding of theory. The emphasis is on proactive approaches to discipline to assist students in achieving educational and social goals. Porter also shows how to enhance students' motivation and help students become confident and independent learners. This third edition has been fully revised and updated to reflect the latest research, and includes new material on collaborating with parents, ethical issues, dealing with bullying and helping students to be autonomous in their learning and behaviour. Examples and references are drawn from current international research. Student Behaviour is an essential textbook for preservice teachers and a valuable reference for more experienced teachers who want to improve their ability to cope with disruptive behaviour. The style of writing is clear, accessible and authoritative an ideal text for all teachers in initial and post-experience training. It treats its audience as intelligent and discerning, provides a clear digest of a very wide range of published material, and allows its readers to reach their own decisions about suitable and sensitively executed approaches that are likely to be of lasting value.' - British Journal of Educational Psychology

Part 1
THEORIES OF DISCIPLINE

A few years ago I met an old professor at the University of Notre Dame. Looking back on his long life of teaching he said, with a funny twinkle in his eyes, ‘I have always complained that my work was constantly interrupted until I slowly discovered that my interruptions were my work’.

Henri Nouwen (in Rogers 2002: 5)

Teaching young people self-discipline is not a diversion from ‘real’ teaching but is integral to it: education must, first and foremost, be about teaching people to live together peaceably, for which they need to learn to consider others and to solve problems (Gartrell 2003). It is your professional responsibility to help young people become fully functioning members of society (Rodd 1996).

School-based behavioural difficulties are often blamed on students’ disadvantaging home lives. However, young people spend 15 000 hours in school, which provides a significant time frame in which they can learn. This is verified by comprehensive research showing that differences in achievement outcomes, attitude to school and, to a lesser extent, rates of absenteeism and other behavioural difficulties are systematically related to schools’ quality (Mortimore et al. 1988; Rutter 1983; Rutter & Maughan 2002). Indeed, school features have a more direct effect on students’ academic progress and behaviour than does their family, accounting for between 20 and 25 per cent of the difference between schools in student progress, with family factors explaining only 5 percent (Mortimore et al. 1988; Osterman 2000; Rutter & Maughan 2002; Sylva 1994). Classroom factors may be even more influential than aspects of the school (Sylva 1994), if only because there is probably more variation between classes than between schools. These findings confirm that teachers’ influence over academic outcomes is stronger than parents’ (Gonzalez-DeHass et al. 2005), with students’ perceptions of the personal support they receive in school for academic achievement powerful in motivating them to put in the effort to learn (Marchant et al. 2001).

The conclusion is unequivocal: students’ progress in school is more influenced by school quality than by their social backgrounds (Mortimore et al. 1988; Rutter & Maughan 2002). Student outcomes will never be equal, of course, as the only way to achieve this would be to lower the attainment levels of the more able students. Nevertheless, improving school quality can do much to alleviate individual difficulties by promoting in students a commitment to schooling and a sense of self-efficacy, which is their belief in their own ability to influence their life outcomes (Rutter 1983; Rutter & Maughan 2002; Sylva 1994).

Thus, while disadvantaging home factors create the potential for negative academic and behavioural outcomes, these will not be expressed when schools offer appropriate supports in the form of teacher involvement, effective teaching, high academic expectations, clear school organisation, surveillance to permit prompt intervention with difficulties, and noncoercive discipline (McEvoy & Welker 2000; Reinke & Herman 2002; Rutter 1983). To achieve this, schools need a clear rational (or theory) guiding their practice.

The value of theory

There is an old saying that advises: ‘If you want to get ahead, get a theory’. This is because theories help us not only to know what to do, but also to be able to explain our practices. This is the essence of professionalism. Although theories might sound too abstract to be of practical use, they describe why and how things work as they do (Chibucos et al. 2005). They explain and predict events and, in doing so, guide practice.

Yet trainee teachers have many branches of knowledge to master, while practising teachers experience the imperative to ‘just get on with it’. Neither can afford to ‘waste time’ theorising. The trouble is that ‘getting on with it’ can involve doing the same unsuccessful thing over and over—not because you are incompetent, but because the ideas (the theories) that drive your responses are not helping. Practice that lacks a coherent body of guiding ideas can leave you ‘winging it’, reacting to each disruption without the tools to reflect on which interventions have worked and which have failed. Not only is this less likely to result in effective action, but it adds to your work and stress loads as you are required to make decisions on the run, without the time to consider what you believe and to evaluate which actions correspond with those beliefs.

The abiding truth, of course, is that ‘one cannot not theorize’ (Fisch et al. 1982: 7). That is to say, we all do develop ideas (that is, theories) about events—in our case, about the behaviour of students in schools. Through experience and reflection, many teachers do arrive at clear theories about their practices. However, this process of personal theory building is more efficient and comprehensive when informed in advance by theoretical knowledge. To that end, this book aims to formalise your present knowledge about two bodies of theory: disciplinary practices in schools and educational theory about teaching and learning. The basic premise is that for your practice to be coherent these two sets of ideas must be congruent with each other.

Politics of discipline in schools

Before detailing in coming chapters the range of theories about school discipline, it must be acknowledged that each adopts a political stance, with inherent values, assumptions and contradictions (Johnson et al. 1994). Disciplinary practices typically reflect an imbalance of political power between teachers and students that is legitimised on the grounds of the developmental incompetence of children. As is always the case when power is distributed unevenly within society, some groups are served by the maintenance of this inequity; in schools, children are marginalised and disadvantaged by it (Johnson et al. 1994).

This power imbalance is reflected in the language used to discuss behavioural difficulties in schools. It is problematic in many ways. Sometimes the topic is referred to as teaching discipline, which is the term I use here, but because our society has such a long tradition of using controlling forms of discipline, the term itself is sometimes misconstrued as referring to punishment. Nevertheless, I prefer it to its alternative, behaviour management, because, in Western societies at least, the term management has overtones of controlling others, of doing something to them, rather than working with them (Kohn 1996a). Also, in educational circles, the term behaviour management is sometimes used synonymously with behaviour modification—that is, with an authoritarian rewards-and-punishment system. Other language that we employ in schools that implies that we (adults) will do something to children includes observation, assessment and intervention. Although our aim in using such language is to obey the scientific imperative to be objective, these top-down processes distance us from children’s experience and overlook their frame of reference (Henning-Stout 1998), typically resulting in a ‘laundry list’ of what is wrong with children, subsequent to which we impose our own (often deficit-oriented) solutions (treatments) on them (McGlone 2001; Murphy & Duncan 1997).

This introduces the second issue to do with the terms discipline and behaviour management, which is that they have an interventive bias, overlooking the fact that by far the largest and most crucial component of any discipline program is the prevention of difficulties. Despite this, the preponderance of school policies on discipline are actually punishment policies (Lewis 1997). Their relative neglect of preventive measures will inevitably lead to failure and frustration as it is always more effective to prevent difficulties than to correct them once they have arisen (Maag 2001). Thus, as depicted in Figure I.1, school-based disciplinary measures must encompass three layers of practice, with those at the lower levels predominating. The first component is primary or universal prevention procedures, which focus on the larger environment and put in place protective mechanisms that safeguard all students and thus prevent behavioural difficulties on a school-wide basis (Algozzine & Kay 2002; Kerr & Nelson 2006). While universal preventive measures will meet the needs of a majority of students, creating fewer disciplinary issues and thereby releasing resources to direct towards specific difficulties, they will not be sufficient for all (Lewis et al. 2002). Therefore, you will also need to plan secondary preventive strategies. These are focused or supportive interventions aimed at avoiding future disruptions by providing specific skills and supports to students who are experiencing academic failure or behavioural difficulties. This form of prevention requires you to decide which students will be targeted (McConaughy & Leone 2002). The tertiary and final level of practice is enacting solutions—otherwise known as intervention. These methods are designed to prevent further deterioration of a problem (Algozzine & Kay 2002) and will encompass both immediate and longer-term actions.

FIGURE I.1 Levels of prevention and intervention with school behavioural difficulties

A third issue with language is that terms such as ‘misbehaviour’ and ‘unacceptable’ or ‘inappropriate’ behaviour do not specify to whom those acts are ‘inappropriate’ (Kohn 1996a). They imply that adults’ judgment on this issue is sacrosanct. Similarly, when a student’s behaviour interrupts or disrupts the class, we often call this ‘problem behaviour’ or, taking this a step further declare that an individual student has or ‘is’ a behavioural problem. Using language such as ‘disruptive child’ suggests a character flaw—one, moreover, that either the child cannot help (so deserves pity) or one that he or she is indulging deliberately, which implies the need for authoritarian controls to make him or her stop (Docking 1982). Such language defines the behaviour as a quality of the student, while overlooking the contributions of the environment to the behaviour, and thus results in a deficit orientation to problems.

A medical or deficit orientation

Aside from the blaming character of diagnoses, individual explanations are linear: they contend that cause A leads to event B (Fisch et al. 1982). This linear explanation implies that, if only we could find out the ‘real’ or underlying cause of a problem, we could arrive at a solution. This mechanistic approach sounds logical, but is more relevant to the car repair industry than to people (Berg & Steiner 2003). With people, even if you could identify the cause, it may be virtually untreatable, such as a central auditory processing difficulty or social oppression. The fact that these causes are untreatable would generate hopelessness about the possibilities for improvement. However, this pessimism is unnecessary because many effective solutions are unrelated to their cause. You are willing to take painkillers for your headache, even though clearly the headache was not caused by a lack of painkillers. As de Shazer (1988: 10) observes:

we end up searching for explanations believing that without explanation a solution is irrational, not recognizing that the solution itself is its own best explanation.

A purely pragmatic argument against prolonged searches for underlying causes is that this process will consume resources that could otherwise be used for intervention. In schools, this is particularly wasteful, given that the vast majority of disruptiveness will never qualify for a medical diagnosis anyway (Le Messurier 2004). Furthermore, even those behaviours that do get...