Behavior Management

The spectrums of strategies and techniques adults invoke to influence how learners act in a classroom. This may encompass such areas as discipline, expectations, rule-making, punishment, or other attempts to influence or control how learners behave.

Among these are:

Behavior Modification: An approach based on behavioral science to change a person's way of doing things—specifically, systematic use of rewards, and sometimes punishments, to shape students' classroom behavior, and usually involving explicit objectives, elaborate record keeping, and visible tracking of progress. Used especially in special education classes for behaviorally disturbed students, behavior modification is controversial. Opponents say it is mechanistic, makes students dependent rather than independent (at least at first), and borders on cruelty. Advocates see it as scientifically based and effective in actually helping people change their nonproductive behavior.

Classroom Management: A term commonly used to describe a teacher’s effectiveness in the full range of approaches toward how students behave, from efforts to control disruptive behavior to creating a safe and positive climate for learning.

P.B.I.S. (Positive Behavioral Interventions & Support): According to their Website, PBIS is a framework or approach for assisting school personnel in adopting and organizing evidence-based behavioral interventions into an integrated continuum that enhances academic and social behavior outcomes for all students. PBIS IS NOT a packaged curriculum, scripted intervention, or manual based strategy. PBIS IS a prevention-oriented way for school personnel to (a) organize evidence-based practices, (b) improve their implementation of those practices, and (c) maximize academic and social behavior outcomes for students. PBIS supports the success of ALL students.

Procedures vs. Behavior Management: This is a notion, championed by Harry Wong in The First Days of School, that many potential problems with student disruption and classroom management can be prevented by having students learn procedures, rather than waiting until they do the wrong thing and have to be disciplined. Lots of examples—from bathroom practices to lining up for lunch, to dealing with missing homework or poor test results—can become ways of increasing student self-discipline and self-reliance rather than “problems” to be solved by increasingly punitive (or excessively lenient) disciplinary practices.

Responsive Classroom: Begun 20 or so years ago at a Progressive school in Greenfield, MA, and related to Wm. Glasser’s notion of kids having a say in their classroom community, the idea behind the Responsive Classroom is that the social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum. This leads to an emphasis on building a mutually-respectful classroom community, with students sharing responsibility for setting norms and adhering to them.