What Are You Looking For? (Things That Have Worked For Me #3)

This post is part of a series of things I've picked up over the last 9 years that have turned out to be incredibly helpful. Obviously their mileage will vary depending on your context and I don't expect them to work for everyone, so feel free to either take these on board or put them in your brain-bin - I won't mind either way.

3. Look for the Positives rather than the Negatives

This one sounds so simple on the surface but in practice it can be quite difficult to maintain. Any cursory look at a behaviour monitoring database held by a school will include entries that cover various behavioural events. These can be positive or negative, including things like a student completing a particular lengthy and high quality piece of classwork (positive) to a student becoming argumentative with the teacher (negative). In a lot of cases there will be an imbalance between these events, with a higher quantity of negative events being listed because these are the sort of things we've been trained to 'jump onto' as quickly as possible.

But when we think about it (or even look more closely at the data) there is often a pattern that reveals that the negative events are restricted to a very comparatively-small percentage of the student population. A look at the complete roll of students in any class will make it clear that the vast majority of students are doing the 'right' thing or, at least, not doing the 'wrong' thing (which in most eyes is considered the 'right' thing by default).

Child psychologists (such as Doctor Roberto Parada) will be among the first to tell you that recognising desired behaviour in children has a much bigger impact than acknowledging the kinds of behaviour we don't want. In a classroom, this can be admittedly difficult, but the long term effect of pushing further in this direction cannot be be underestimated and undervalued.

Here's a scenario called 'Picking Your Battles' that makes the thinking a little more explicit:

1. A student with a history of defiance comes into the classroom late while wearing a hat or listening to headphones. He sits down and begins working on the class activity like everyone else in the class, perhaps doing some work for the first time in weeks.
2. The teacher pulls the student up on breaking the school rule about wearing hats, listening to headphones, or coming to class late.
3. The student responds defensively, or aggressively, or both.
4. The student stops working on the class activity.
5. The student continues to break the original rule AND/OR gets detention for arguing. 
6. Any opportunity to build a positive relationship with the student during this lesson is now gone, PLUS no work has been completed.

If the student had gone unchallenged then we would've had a different scenario play out. The undesired behaviours, such as coming late or listening to headphones, could be dealt with afterwards when the student doesn't have an audience.

U.S. Educator Annette Breaux makes a few points that relate to the above scenario:

• If a student is angry, leave them alone and give them space.
• Weigh up the reality of what you're asking them to do - are they going to react favourably?
• If there is a choice of you having them working while breaking a minor rule, or not working at all, then what is more important in the long run? 
• Is it more likely that the student will listen to your instructions about following rules if you show them first that you care foremost about them getting the work done rather than having them accept your authority? 
• Is challenging a disruptive student going to ease the issue?
• Is their education the most important aspect of their being at school? How can we make this clear to them?

I'll add to the above that our syllabus doesn't include behaviour management. I'm not saying that behaviour management isn't a part of our job (that would be insane) but I'm saying getting students to meet syllabus outcomes is the first priority. If you can manage to get students to meet syllabus outcomes then the chances are that they won't have time to be able to break rules too much. Besides, what is a parent going to query more - the teacher disciplining their student or the teacher educating them in line with the syllabus requirements? If we're successfully teaching a student our subject then I'm arguing that that's the better goal.

I know it's not ideal but it's preferable... we don't live in an ideal world and there's a higher chance of teacher burnout when we strive to create an ideal world in our classroom. As Breaux suggests above, a student (and their parent) are more likely to listen and respond reasonably to our management of undesired behaviours if we're actively demonstrating that the student's education comes first (more on that in the next blog) or if we're waiting until after class to discuss the issue (proving that it isn't about humiliating them in front of their peers).

There's another really clever chap called Adam Lefstein who talks a lot about 'face-work', which is the idea of teachers becoming preoccupied with looking a certain way in front of their colleagues. This is nominally because we're worried about having our behaviour management judged. The more we can break the appearance of judging our colleagues, keeping an open door to our classrooms, and being honest about the challenges we face, the more we can start changing the conversation to being about the things that students are doing right in the classroom. Yeah, okay, there's four kids chatting and not focused on their work, but look at the twenty-odd other students who have done everything you asked! Is the visiting teacher seeing that part of the lesson?

The challenge here is to walk into a 'challenging' class you have this week and decide to only acknowledge the 'good' things happening, even with the students who are still exhibiting undesired behaviours. This could be awarding points in a system of some kind, chucking out some lollies, giving award certificates, promising a positive phone call home to their parent... but whatever you do, unless something completely un-ignorable happens, try to avoid even seeing the 'bad' stuff. We've all had enough lessons like that. We've had plenty of lesson where we only saw the things that went wrong, so what's the harm in trying the opposite just once?

Don't approach this as a sentimental or emotional exercise; try to drop any preconceived ideas you already have from your time teaching these same students in the past. Approach the lesson as scientifically as possible, identifying and rewarding desired behaviours only, and watch to see if student completion of work improves.