Cogs, Compliance and Comformity

by Robert Pondiscio
January 14th, 2010

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Posted in Education Practice, Teaching | 19 Comments »

A short blog post on classroom management has ignited a fascinating and at times contentious debate on our expectations for children to behave in certain ways in classrooms.  Scott McLeod’s Dangerously Irrelevant blog typically concerns itself with technology implementation in schools.  But overhearing a preschool teacher tell her class “Good job!  I like the way you all are staying in line. You’re so good at this!” prompted McLeod to respond with two simple sentences:

The socialization to be a cog in the machine begins early. Woe be it if you don’t stay in line.

This is the most common positive reinforcement trick in the classroom teacher’s bag of trick (I’ve even joked it’s the basis of Race to the Top).  McLeod’s quip implies it’s mindless compliance, but teachers see it differently.  “I don’t see the woe in this, just courtesy, common sense, and safety,” writes one.  Walking quietly in line in preschool shows consideration for the other classes, notes another. “You could say that the teacher should explain WHY being quiet is good in the hallways, but trust me – she did, about 20 times already.”  A third teacher writes,

I can only assume, Scott, that next time you go to the movies or the grocery store, you’ll stand randomly by a check stand and hope someday it will be your turn. A queue is not necessarily a means to transform us into lemmings.

And this:

Sometimes it’s about safety. We drive in lines, not clumps. Conformity for the sake of someone else wielding their power is a problem. Conformity for the sake of everyone’s well being is a good thing.

Most of the commenters on the blog, presumably educators, see nothing sinister at work.  But a few see conformity and coercion in the teacher’s praise for her young charges’ ability to stand quietly in line.  ”If we only occassionally asked for mindless compliance from children, but most of the time encouraged them to be active participants in their learning, I would be lot more satisfied,” writes one.

I’m with the common sense crowd.  Lack of self-control and consideration for others was the biggest impediment to learning in my classroom and in my school.  On a scale of one to ten, it was a thirteen.   A little self-discipline and self-control goes a long way.  And besides, isn’t lining up and walking silently a form of group work and cooperative learning?

 

 

Britain Prepares a Crackdown on Student Discipline

by Robert Pondiscio
April 15th, 2009

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Posted in Education News, Parents | 5 Comments »

A British government study into classroom behavior calls for holding parents accountable for their child’s classroom behavior, including fines for condoning truancy.  “More schools will also be encouraged to use traditional methods such as detentions, suspensions, isolation rooms and lunchtime curfews to punish badly behaved pupils,” London’s Telegraph reports.  ”They will be told to order pupils to remove caps and confiscate mobile phones. Guidance also calls on schools to punish rowdy behavior, bullying and fighting outside the school gates, including incidents on public transport, to stop poor behavior spilling onto the streets.”

The conclusions are presented in a major review by Sir Alan Steer, the Government’s leading behaviour expert. They came as teachers warned that existing methods were failing as a “reward culture” seen in banks was spreading to schools. Jules Donaldson, from the NASUWT teachers’ union, claimed some headteachers were fuelling the problem by handing out prizes if children promise to behave instead of setting proper boundaries.

“Children can’t learn if classes are disrupted by bad behaviour,” said Ed Balls, Britain’s Schools Secretary. ”That’s why parents tell me they want tough and fair discipline in every school. That means we must all play our part and back our teachers when they use their powers to keep good order.  Everyone needs to share the responsibility of maintaining discipline, including governing bodies and parents. Where parents are unable to do this, it’s right that local authorities should consistently use parenting contracts as a way to support and help parents face up to their responsibilities.”

A teacher’s union survey of 10,000 teachers in Britain shows an average of 50 minutes of lost classroom each day due to misbehavior.

That’s Edutainment!

by Robert Pondiscio
January 5th, 2009

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Posted in Education Practice, Opinion, Teaching | 6 Comments »

“Why did the amoeba cross the microscope?  To get to the other slide!!  Hey, you’ve been a great class, thanks for coming!  I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip the classroom aide.  I love you!  G’night!!”

Believing that poor classroom behavior indicates of a lack of stimulation, the official British education watchdog organization, Ofsted, is planning a “crackdown on boring teaching” in the mother country, the Guardian reports.  Chief inspector of schools Christine Gilbert tells the paper,

“People divorce teaching from behaviour. I think they are really, really linked and I think students behave much better if the teaching is good, they are engaged in what they are doing and it’s appropriate to them. Then they’ve not got lost five minutes into the lessons and therefore started mucking around. Behaviour in our schools is generally very good. But there’s what I would describe as low-level disruption where children are bored and not motivated, so they start to use their abilities for other ends. That then can lead to other children being distracted in lessons and so on.”

The response from teacher’s unions?  “With comments like that, the chief inspector fuels the view that every lesson of every day for every minute has got to be packed with excitement,” said Chris Keates, the general secretary of the NASUWT.  “Quite frankly, life isn’t like that and education isn’t like that. Comments like this make teachers fair game for everyone, including pupils.” This British teacher, however, seconds the motion:

In schools that serve poorer areas, where many students’ attention spans are decimated by a diet of sugary snacks, video games and 20 channels of fast-edited crud on the cathode ray tube, pupil engagement is not just an issue; it is the issue. The teacher who is not able to induce open mouths expressing awe and wonder within the first 10 minutes of a lesson is likely to witness the jaws of those mouths slacken as one, when class behaviour heads quickly in the direction of “off-task”.

No one will argue that engagement doesn’t matter.  It’s a way to get and hold a student’s attention, which is a prerequisite to learning.  Still, it’s hard to unravel all that is troubling about this. First, there’s the idea, per Keates, that a day in school is made up of non-stop entertainment.  Next there’s the devaluing of seriousness and reflection–plenty engaging for some–a point made in teacher Diana Senechal’s essay yesterday on accountable talk.  Then, perhaps most obviously, there’s how exactly to define a “boring lesson.”  I can trace my love of history and literature to a pair of middle school teachers, who knew their subject inside and out.  But they were strict, demanding, a little intimidating, and most decidely not engaging to many of my classmates.  I feared and adored them both.  On the other hand, my 9th grade earth science teacher was a laugh riot, but I wouldn’t know an igneous rock if it hit me between the eyes.  All three were well-regarded teachers, and rightly so. 

One student’s engagement rubric is not another’s.  Life is made up of dealing successfully with all kinds of people, and all manner of personalities. Vive le difference!

The Few and the Many

by Robert Pondiscio
October 15th, 2008

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Posted in Education News, Educational Policy | 4 Comments »

A British school engaged in battle of wills with a parent has inadvertently turned a spotlight on the issue of student discipline.  The school in Doncaster, England, won’t let an 11-year old return to class until he spends a day in the school’s “isolation room” for letting the air out of a classmate’s bicycle tires.  But the boy’s father describes the room as a dungeon and compares it to a cell in Guantanamo Bay.  He has threatened to remove his son from the school in protest.   

The room is painted totally black. The walls, the partitions, the window blinds – everything was black,” said Andrew Widdowson.  “The partitions down one side created four cells where school kids are expected to sit at a desk all day.  My son has never been in trouble. The first time he’s done something and he gets told to go into isolation. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime. I was shocked they were putting children into that room. It’s more like a prison.

“In my days as a young teacher, in the early 1990s, I was very trigger happy about sending irritating kids to such places,” former British teacher Francis Gilbert, writes in the Guardian. ”It gave me a huge feeling of power.  However, I began to notice that it was always the same pupils going there. Increasingly, they became rather too happy to leave my lessons. Indeed, spending time in the ‘cooler’ – as one of my schools nicknamed it – was seen as cool.”

Gilbert’s observation is familiar to anyone who has ever taught in a school plagued by chronic disruption.  There’s  a familiar cast of characters in most schools that use “in-house suspensions” – typically off-the-books punishments not officially reported to districts.  Nothing is expected of such kids, who are merely being warehoused on-site.

As the Children’s Rights Alliance for England has pointed out, by not expecting anything of them, the school is depriving them of the right to an education and contravening the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Moreover, these internal exclusions seem to disproportionately affect our most vulnerable children: looked-after children, pupils with special educational needs, children from poor and ethnic backgrounds. Experience suggests that internal exclusions have played a role in contributing to the rock bottom levels of achievement of our most deprived children.

As always, there’s another side to this coin.  Profoundly disruptive children represent an enormous drain on educational resources in struggling schools, not the least of which is teacher and student time on-task.  Certainly, letting the air out of another kid’s tires doesn’t seem to meet the definition of profoundly disruptive.  But finding an effective way to safeguard the education of the many ready and able learners in even the most chaotic schools, while not giving up on the few disaffected and disruptive is a balancing act that very few if any struggling schools seem to get right.  The problem is typically compounded by a knee-jerk “blame the teacher” response for failing to control his or her class.  In this way, inexperienced teachers learn to place a premium on classroom management, and not much else.  The net result is…pretty much what we have.

Get Up, Stand Up

by Robert Pondiscio
September 22nd, 2008

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Posted in School News, Teaching | 3 Comments »

Here’s an idea that will appeal to every teacher who has had students who can’t sit still (read: every teacher):  Stand-up desks. 

“As part of a small but growing movement in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota that many teachers say is bound to gain popularity elsewhere, several schools are experimenting with their physical learning environments by incorporating stand-up workstations in the classroom, or, in one school, stability balls instead of traditional school desk chairs,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Kids who are habitually fidgety or who suffer from attention disorders appear to show the most improvement, teachers tell the paper.  Richard Whitmire predicts a rush on orders for the desks.