No matter the School District, the social class of the area, or the home life your students have; we are a product of our environment. I included myself in that statement because I think sometimes media forgets that Teachers are people too. School is this magical place that when students enter the building they decide who they are going to be, maybe they live a very strict lifestyle at home but when they enter the school building and sit in their desk they relax because their parents aren’t there to “order them around”, or you may have a student that is child number 4 out of 10, where often times at home they are spoken over to the point where at home the student just stops talking, but in school they are the first to answer a question because they know their voice will be heard. With whatever new-found freedom those students chose to embrace, there are those to behave for extrinsic reasons, maybe they aren’t noticed at home and just want someone to acknowledge what they are doing just for the sake of being noticed, and those who behave for a more intrinsic reason thinking that this behavior will help them gain relationships that they may think they can’t get without acting this way.
Currently I am reading a book by Geoff Colvin, and in the very first chapter he discusses what he believes to be The Seven Key Principles for dealing with behavior. My mind often tries to connect my life experiences to what I read or learn to help me better understand what is being said. The first principle Colvin talks about is Correction Procedures, which boils down to: shifting focus from the “problem behavior” (the books words) to what is considered the “appropriate” behavior or “desired behavior” for the task at hand. In trying to think of an example that would best show this principle in action. I immediately thought of Airplane Johnny. Airplane Johnny wasn’t his actual name, but I grew up with him he sat by me in most of my classes through elementary school. He adored airplanes, he drew them, read about them, made paper airplanes, he lived and breathed Airplanes. Johnny would get so frustrated in class because he had a hard time with comprehending information, so when he would get “worked up” he would get up from his desk, move to the back of room and pretend to be an airplane, arms rotating, making engine noises, the whole shebang.
As a teacher you have to think about how to handle this, you have a class of 26 and one of those is running back and forth pretending to be Crop-duster in the back of your class. No teacher had succeed in drawing our attention away from Johnny like our Third grade teacher, she not only shifted our focus from Johnny but reinforced what we needed to be doing by saying “I like the way Sarah has her Math book out, her pencil is in her hand and she is ready to learn”. That way it not only reminded her students what behavior was appropriate but also drawing the attention away from Airplane Johnny and reminding him of where he is and where he needs to be without directly saying “That is not appropriate” or stop. In the end it all worked out, because Airplane Johnny is now an engineer for you guessed it Airplanes!
