The Skeleton in the Closet
Of all the issues I’ve discussed with teachers, classroom discipline always ranks as a very pressing, if not the greatest, concern. Educators are happy to dream up interesting and innovative pedagogical techniques, but behavior problems more often than not prevent these ideas from actually being adopted in the classroom. In fact, discipline issues are the main reason cited for the continued use of antiquated and unimaginative teaching practices. The greater the discipline problem, the more likely teachers are to steer away from open discussion, group work, creative projects, and the use of new technologies. In the most difficult teaching situations, the classroom takes on the character of a military boot camp. Students are lined up in neat rows and discouraged from expression. If we are to change the teaching practices we all abhor, we must start by tackling the difficult problem of classroom management.
October 25th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Ed,
I couldn’t agree with you more here. One of the biggest challenges in the classroom is to give interesting and engaging lessons in the face of unruly students. All the research seems to suggest that in the case of the horse preceding the cart, the poor teaching strategies precede the bad behavior. I do beg to differ. What I notice is that on days that I clamp down on unruly behavior, it is most effectively done by resorting to the tried and true traditional approaches that you mentioned. Before anything productive takes place in a classroom, teachers have to have the classroom environment under control and that is easiest done with some of the type of work students sometimes dread. Once students realize that there are as many alternatives ways in which their learning can take place in the class, the behavior moderates to allow them to participate in the more creative and enjoyable alternatives.