"Negative consequences, timeouts, and punishment just make bad behavior worse. But a new approach really works. "
I'm tempted to simply say "duh," because my wife - a retired special education teacher - uses techniques like this. (now, they work quite well on me. )
Strategies for dealing with behavior work - the kid knows it's not working, they want something that does. She'd turn bullies into noble protectors of the downtrodden by starting out with "now, I know you are an honorable person..."
A very interesting article. I teach junior and senior high, and when I read the article, I immediately picture a few students who might benefit from an approach like this--but the issue, as always, is spending the time necessary to help that one kid while the rest of the class twiddles their thumbs. I already spend a far higher amount of time with students like these than I do with the students on the other end of the spectrum, kids who need to be pushed because they're extremely bright and find the "average" work too easy. I also work in a school with zero classroom support for exceptional students (those on either end of the spectrum). I'd love to hear how classroom modification can work for explosive students without sacrificing the needs of the rest of the class. My own children are in the system, and I don't want their education compromised because they have peers who, quite frankly, aren't able to handle a normal classroom situation. (Does that make me a horrible person? I have a sneaking suspicion that it does...)
I agree. This article espouses the exact management approach my wife and I take with our son, 7, and daughter, 5. I find that it works in both theory and practice. In practice it works just fine at home when I am helping my son and daughter manage their own behaviors. Where I teach though, as a middle school teacher in a class of 30-34 students, I'm afraid that this management system works only in theory. I agree with you that I can take time out to reason, when I have time, with students that are having difficulty. I practice a reasoned approach whenever possible. When I do this, management of the larger group can get very messy. My attention can be focused on one particular student out of 30 or so, for a limited time before ther rest of the group goes wayward.
This makes a lot of sense in theory. Children are in the most critical periods of their life. They are giant sponges absorbing every little thing around them. To teach children problem solving skills at an early age makes sense. Like the article mentioned it doesn't make sense to punish children for behavior they don't yet have the ability to control. To be completely honest this could be translated into strategies for parenting. My issue with this is the practicality of it. I remember going through school, and watching as classrooms got larger and larger. The teachers received no assistance and some just drowned. In a climate like this I don't see this as being useful simply because the growing number of other children who don't have to be handled like this are stuck being neglected because they are more competent than another student. What I'm curious about is will those students begin to act out if they see it is as way to gain the attention of the adults?
I come from a teaching family and my wife was a special-ed teacher for many years; one of my constant observations, reinforced by a very competent wife and a mother who was a comprehensively horrible teacher was that there seems to be very little respect given to the job and there's very little training given in how to do it well. It's also terribly subject to politics, fads and administrative whims. I could go on for hours, honestly. But teaching problem-solving skills was part of my wife's toolkit. Some of them worked alarmingly well on me. For me. I meant for me. And when doing a "push-in", say working on math skills for a group that's not getting it, sometimes she'd show the alternate strategy to the whole class. In other words, she was teaching the teacher how to teach better. She also taught test taking strategies, like "If you don't know, the answer is "c" more often than not." She'd model conflict-resolution strategies for kids with behavior issues. If they were never going to be able to master reading, she'd teach them how to cope with not being able to read. A master-class teacher is one who has strategies that work for different learning styles and abilities. In large classes, the best you get is "one size fits most." Lesson plan, teach to test, test, digest data, re-adjust; it could be done by an expert system running on a desktop PC. Which might be a great idea - if you keep the teachers; that would give them time to teach.
I remember there was an article in my school paper written by a professor at my university on how to change the college classroom for the better. The one that stuck at most was he wanted the lecture to disappear. Instead he wanted the professors to record their lecture (audio or video) and post them. He believed it allowed for students to go at their own pace. What was so crazy about this was that he didn't want to get rid of class time either. He wanted it to be used to go over material in a smaller group environment, so people who needed specific clarifications could come and get them. I thought it was a really interesting idea. I know the original piece wasn't about colleges, but its interest to see that the train of thought could be expanded all the way up the chain.