Behavior issues are typically high on the list of school problems educators talk about each year, but often not as high on the list of professional development topics school administrators stake out for the staff. And experts say even when they are covered, the sessions too often don’t create change.
“The absence of … professional development in the critical competencies of classroom organization and behavior management significantly reduces the effectiveness of many teachers, especially new ones,” says a report on the topic from Vanderbilt University researchers.
“Without the resources and support linked with school-wide systems, they likely will fail,” the study for the U.S. Department of Education adds. It notes that the focus should be on teachers because “the classroom environment is a primary context where prevention occurs.” Despite more attention on these issues, however, too often such efforts don’t exist or they are ineffective “train-and-hope” approaches that aren’t consistent or thorough, the report finds.
“I still believe that teachers are not prepared to handle behavior issues,” says Regina Oliver, co-author of the study and now a professor of education at University of Nebraska. “Learning about how to handle student behavior requires much more than just didactic training where a professor or staff developer gets up in front of the room and talks about it. It requires training and coaching with performance feedback in the classroom to help teachers transfer the knowledge into skills, which is much more difficult when it comes to behavior than it is for academics.”
Rachel Flynn, an education researcher at New York University, recently studied the impact of such professional development and found when its done well it has “the potential to improve teacher behavior management practices and reduce exclusionary discipline.”
Flynn, like the Vanderbilt report, found this work with staff had to be carefully conceived, engage the entire school with similar coordinated rules and strategies and include follow-up or coaching sessions. Too often she found, when it wasn’t well planned with very intentional follow up to review and revise policies and provide ongoing support for teachers, it became an afterthought in the school, and a program in name only, and failed.
Ruth Herman Wells, a specialist in professional development on behavior topics, says such a focus on behavior would help new teachers, who say that behavior issues are a prime reason they lose their enthusiasm for teaching. It’s also a primary reason veteran teachers leave the profession. Such problems use valuable classroom time, diminish achievement, damage school climate, and consume big chunks of the counselor’s or administrator’s day when they could focus on positive school and student efforts. “A typical teacher loses 22 of every 50 minutes per period to on-demand behavior management,” says Wells. “To say this should be a bigger focus is a giant under-statement,” she says.
Here are some key components that experts say should be part of any professional development program related to managing student behavior:
Jim Paterson has been a newspaper and magazine editor and an award-winning writer for The Washington Post, USA Today Weekend, the Christian Science Monitor, Parents magazine, and a number of national and regional publications. During a break from writing he worked as a school counselor for seven years and quickly became head of a counseling department and "Counselor of the Year" in Montgomery County, Md. He now writes about education primarily. More about Jim at www.otherperplexity.com. |