Month: August 2018

 

Several teachers who are still in the classroom [as I am not], whose judgment I respect, continue to complain about a lack of cooperation and attentiveness from their students. In her new book, The Good News about Bad Behavior, Katherine Reynolds Lewis suggests the problem is an inability to self-regulate. She lists several underlying causes for that, including where and how children play, their access to technology [especially social media], the limited expectations for their being contributing members of their families, schools, and communities, along with overuse of rewards that inherently end up making outcomes less intrinsically valuable.

 

Her book has import for educators as well as parents. Lewis warns us about the damaging nature of power struggles. In my teaching memoir, I write about learning to avoid power struggles. It took me too long…

 

A product of the B.F. Skinner approach, I was trained to offer consistent consequences. I tried to do that. Why didn’t it work sometimes for me? Why does it seem to work even less often now? According to Lewis, “Contemporary psychological studies suggest that, far from resolving children’s behavior problems, these standard disciplinary methods often exacerbate them. They sacrifice long-term goals (student behavior improving for good) for short-term gain—momentary peace in the classroom.”[1] Given that the frontal lobe of the brain, the section of the brain that controls judgment and behaviors,[2] isn’t fully developed until the mid 20s,[3] Lewis asks how we can expect kids to process punitive consequences and rewards.

 

Lewis suggests a different approach. She emphasizes the importance of connection and empathy. After observing classrooms in a particularly challenged Ohio school, she wrote, “Teachers who produce the most orderly, productive classrooms combine a nurturing approach with clear limits and predictable routines.”[4] She urges schools to move from traditional methods of discipline to a collaborative approach. “Any consequence should be revealed in advance, respectful, related to the decision the child made, and reasonable in scope.”[5]

 

I would love to visit schools that operationalize these ideas, to see their impact firsthand. But even just from reading, I’m convinced that we educators need to shift our interactions with students. Not all of this is new: many of us had our students set up classroom rules and expectations, for instance. But the idea that students and teachers might work collaboratively to address student behavioral issues appeals to me. When I think back to my time in the classroom, the occasional exchange like that that I managed to do intuitively worked better than any authoritarian approaches.

 

Lewis suggests changes that families might employ that would facilitate self-regulation. I hope many learn from her book. In the meantime, her wisdom and her careful research should speak to educators as well. Any revelations that make us more effective can only benefit our students.

 

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/schools-behavior-discipline-collaborative-proactive-solutions-ross-greene/

[2] https://www.healthline.com/human-body-maps/frontal-lobe#1

[3] https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=3051

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/ohio-school-bad-behavior/559766/

[5] https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/06/02/611082566/why-children-arent-behaving-and-what-you-can-do-about-it

I wish that I hadn’t chickened out… We were at the amazing Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, ambling through the final exhibit. Holly Wilson’s exhibit, “Breaking Ground,” had already inspired a revision of one of our sculptures in process, and we’d both been moved by the “Without Boundaries: Visual Conversations” exhibit that features Indigenous leaders and contemporary artists whose work encourages social action.  The North Gallery offered “Art & Activism: Selections from the Harjo Family Collection.” Suzan Shown Harjo was an important American Indian activist, lobbyist, and policy maker whose family amassed a collection of significant contemporary Native American art in varied media.

 

We whispered respectfully as we toured the Harjo exhibit; reverent near-silence seemed fitting. It didn’t last. Three young women erupted into the room, loud and ebullient. Certainly they were in high spirits, but they may have been high on recreational substances. We smiled wistfully at each other but said nothing. Then one of them started handling the 2D hanging art, ignoring the “Do Not Touch” sign. I looked at her, but she ignored me. I contemplated saying something, but the racial and age gaps seemed substantial and I feared any comment from me might only escalate her behavior. What to do? In my classroom I would have spoken up immediately about behavior that crossed a line like that. I think I would have spoken up in the hallway with students I didn’t know. Here felt somehow different. I was spared the need to act when she and her friends settled down, leaving the works alone.

 

This encounter felt wrong to me. I’ve been reading the remarkable book, The Good News About Bad Behavior, by Katherine Reynolds Lewis [more about that in a future blog]. The author describes the inability of young people to self-regulate and the root causes of that inability. Not having reached her chapters that offer solutions, I felt inadequate and ineffective. Behavior that doesn’t respect common boundaries seems more and more common. As a civilian out in the world, rather than an educator in the classroom, what is my role? My responsibility? What might have worked? Should we have said something to the museum staff? I truly don’t know.

 

I do know that days later, when we were at Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs, I did choose to speak up. Someone had taken down the chain across the entrance to the mud baths that marked them closed and gone in anyway. Worse, they’d left the sign and chain stretched out across the entrance on the ground, inviting an accidental fall by someone else. We quietly told the staff, and they went out to rectify the situation. That move was easy. But my visceral reaction to someone’s touching art and my uncertainty about how to respond still make me squirm. What is our responsibility – as parents, educators, citizens – to counter behavior that violates rules and social norms? If we do nothing, are we not culpable, too?