Managing the behaviour of challenging children

Introduction

Creating a good atmosphere in the classroom is important and crucial for the learning process and every child’s needs have to be taken into account. The majority of pupils behave in an appropriate manner; however, there are pupils whose behaviour are challenging in many ways and their behaviour disrupts lessons, particularly in secondary school. The interaction between learning, teaching, and behaviour is complex and multifaceted, and admittedly there is no simple solution to the problem of disruptive behaviour. According to the Steer Report (2009) it is the responsibility of all staff to ensure that the quality of learning, teaching and behaviour is high, and it is suggested that schools can “raise standards if they are consistent in implementing good practice in learning” (The Steer Report, 2009, p. 2). At the same time, teachers should also provide personalised or tailored teaching to the needs and interests of pupils (NASUWT, 2009).
A behaviouristic approach has been an influential and popular paradigm, however, it has often been used in an inappropriate manner and it has been difficult to translate the theory into the classroom (Landrum & Kauffman, 2006). In many cases, positive and negative reinforcement have been used in an inconsistent, incorrectly or in a haphazardly manner. The ability to shape appropriate behaviour while at the same time creating a positive and challenging environment for everyone is difficult. In some cases, high attaining children find school boring and as a consequence they lose interest and may develop behavioural problems. Many schools have used higher attainment groups as a way of catering for the students; however, research suggests that this method is not always successful and that pupils are assigned to different groups based on social class rather than on their ability (Gazeley & Dunne, 2007). The purpose of this study is to investigate how the use of reinforcement can help manage the behaviour of ‘problem’ children.

Literature Review

The Steer Report (2009) emphases the importance of a calm and safe working environment for children and teachers. Disruptive behaviour is not acceptable in schools and teachers should aim for the highest possible standards. It is suggested that in some schools a large proportion of a lesson is wasted on behavioural issues. Furthermore, schools that are considered as being “satisfactory” should work hard and improve their standards, and intervention should be swift and not disturb the other pupils. Admittedly it is not always easy to handle disruptive behaviours; however, the quality of teaching should be high and teachers should allow all children to develop their potential to the fullest (NASUWT, 2009). Learning and teaching should be personalised and tailored to the needs of individual pupils. According to the United Nations Article 29 education of the child shall develop the child’s personality and talents to their fullest potential” (Every Child Matters, 2009).
The concepts and ideas about personalised teaching might be accepted among educators and teachers, and there might be consensus about the suggestions that disruptive behaviour should not be tolerated; however, practical suggestions and solutions have not been developed and there are few suggestions in the Steer Report (Every Child Matters, 2009). NASUWT (2009) suggested that personalised teaching have always been a priority; however, it continues to be debated how it should be put into policy and practice. There is a danger that inappropriate approaches to teaching are used unless consensus about policy and practice is established. Furthermore, practical solutions to how a teacher should handle and manage disruptive behaviour while at the same time managing the other children have not been put forward. Many schools use withdrawal rooms as a form of fixed term exclusion, and research suggest that this intervention has been successful. However, the use of withdrawal rooms has also been misused and some pupils have spent a large proportion of the school week in the withdrawal room (NASUWT, 2009).
Most schools have a stimulating and supportive environment where an individual is valued, but changing negative behaviour is not easy and there are several different methods and theories to choose from, for example, behaviourist, cognitive, humanist or social orientation to learning (Smith, 1999). Schools use several different strategies to help children develop good behaviour and to encourage them; commendation assemblies, certificates, mentoring system, involving students in setting their own behaviour target. A diverse range of punishments and sanctions are also used to deal with non-appropriate behaviour schools; removing the child from the class, withdrawing break or lunchtime privileges, making the student carry out useful tasks in the school, internal or external exclusion (Behaviour4Learning, 2009). Different programs have been developed, for example, positive behaviour support (Bambara & Kern, 2005). However, recent research suggests that it is the more advantaged children that the ones who are benefitting the most from the expansion of educational provisions and opportunities (Schoon, 2009). She argues that bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds do not achieve as well as they should and that they might be held back because of lowered aspirations. The children themselves have lower aspirations as well as their parents and teachers. It is possible that disadvantaged children need more encouragement and that teachers do not always have the time and resources in the classroom to attend to the higher attaining children. The consequences for the children from a disadvantaged background are in some cases of a different character as compared to other high attaining children, i.e. the disadvantaged children lower their aspirations. Thus, it is of crucial importance that methods are developed to help teacher manage the behaviour of pupils and at the same time provide attention to the other pupils.
A behaviouristic approach has been a popular and in many cases a successful way of working in the classroom. The use of reinforcement can, if applied in the correct manner, help to manage the behaviour of children (Brophy, 2006). The idea that if you take a dozen of healthy children that you can transform them was suggested by the behaviourist John B. Watson in the 1920s. Watson’s idea was a reaction to the assumption that hereditary factors were solely responsible for learning and development. Today most psychologist and educators recognise that development and learning is a complex interaction between nature/genetic factors and nurture/ environmental factors. Educators have used Watson and Skinner’s idea s and adopted them to a system of rewards and punishment into the classroom. It has been suggested that a learner will repeat a desired behaviour if positive reinforcement follows the behaviour and the idea is that you reward desired behaviours and punish inappropriate ones (Tauber, 2007). The reward may vary but it is important that it is important to the learner in some way. For example, a teacher who wished to teach someone to remain seated during the class period might be rewards by being allowed to run an errand.
The idea is that most behaviours is learned and if behaviours are learned then they can also be unlearned or relearned (Parkay & Hardcastle Stanford, 2003). The use of positive reinforces means that the teacher adds something to motivate the pupils to do the same thing again. A negative reinforcement is to remove something or get something from the child so that the child aims for the rewards. Negative reinforcement is not the same as punishment; negative reinforcement is the strengthening of a particular behaviour by using a negative consequence, negative punishment is the weakening of behaviour by using a negative consequence. It is important that the reinforcement is immediate, and specific. Praise should also be used sparingly; too much praise makes it less effective. The praise or reinforcement should also be made in a loud and clear voice so that other children can hear it and learn from it (Parkay & Hardcastle Stanford, 2003). The reinforcement should be appropriate, frequent and the expectations for the student’s behaviour should match their developmental level. It is also important to be creative and the reinforcements should be something that the student appreciates and responses well to. Furthermore, research suggests that a long-term view and strategy is important if you want to change children’s behaviour (Wyse, 2002).
Positive and negative reinforcements will be used to investigate whether children’s behaviour will change. Two groups of children will be selected, one group of children with behaviour issues. The children’s behaviour will be observed before the teachers are instructed to use positive reinforce in the form of allowing a child who followed the class room rules to spend the last five minutes of the lesson choosing their own activity. The teacher will use this strategy and the children’s behaviour will be observed after a week. Considering the importance of encouraging positive behaviour it is predicted that children’s disruptive behaviour will change, and improve. It is also predicted that the children belonging to the group with disruptive behaviour will improve the most. That is the number of occasions with behaviour issue would be reduced, particularly for the group with behaviour issues. Furthermore, it was predicted that the children would respond equally well to positive and negative reinforcements.

Methodology

The main purpose of this study was to examine the effects of positive reinforcement on children’s behaviour. The intention is to study how two groups of children will respond to reinforcements of their behaviour. The children’s behaviour will be explored by class room observation and the number of time the children are told off or given either a positive or negative reinforcement will be counted before and after a week of positive/negative reinforcements. This method was chosen for a number of reasons. A quantitative analysis allows the research to observe and recode children’s behaviour and analyse it post hoc (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2007). It allows the researcher to form a good overview and perspective of the problems. However, there are a number of problems associated with this method. The reliability of the researcher can be questioned. Furthermore, it is difficult to understand and draw conclusions afterwards about why some things are happening. It is possible that another observer would get a different result, or that the result would be different on other day. There are also several questions associated with the validity. Does the observer actually observe what he or she intends to? Are the interpretations right?
Two primary school classroom teachers, Year 6, were asked select two groups of children. The first group consisted of children who were considered as having behavioural problems and the other group consisted of children who were considered as not having any specific behavioural problems. Each teacher was asked to identify two children in each group. Thus, in total eight primary school children participated in the study; half the children were classified by their teachers as showing signs of disruptive behaviour and half were classified as not having behavioural problems. In order to make sure that the teachers used the same criteria when selecting the children they were asked to take the following into account when choosing the children. The classification of disruptive behaviour is based on a survey on classroom behaviours made by NUT (Mill Wharf, 2009). Disruptive behaviour was defined as: inappropriate interruptions, answering back, offensive language, refusing to work, insulting personal comments.
The children’s behaviour was observed at two separate occasions. On the first occasion the teachers were told to act as normal and the children’s behaviour was observed and the number of times the children were told off by their teachers was counted. After the first observation the teachers were told to use either positive or negative reinforcement and they were showed how to use it. A week later the children were observed again, and the number of times the teacher used positive reinforcement was recorded. The positive reinforcement consisted of the teacher saying “thanks for following the class rule” when the child was quiet”. The teacher would say this when the child stopped talking in the classroom, i.e. the teacher would reward the stopping of the behaviour rather than tell the child off for talking. The negative reinforcement consisted of the teacher saying the “if you do not follow the class rules you cannot spend the last five minutes of the lesson doing your favourite activity.” The teacher would say this when the child was talking.
To make classroom observation successful everyone concerned has to get used to the idea and initial discomfort about being observed. One separate visit to each classroom was made before the observation took place and on these prior visits the same behaviour was used, i.e. the observer spent the time at the back of the classroom, and wrote on a sheet. This process also made it easier for the observer to recognize and study the children involved in the study. The observations took place on two consecutive weeks, on either a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Half the day was spent observing the children.
Observations are not neutral, and there are ethical concerns that need to be taken into account. The study was covert and the children in the two groups did not know that they were specifically being observed. The children were told that the observer was a teacher in training who wanted to observe all the children and their learning in a classroom. This method can be justified by the concern for reactivity. Since the behaviour of some children whom were considered as challenging was observed it was important to make sure that they did not change their behaviour (Cohen, et al., 2007). Since no video recording took place it was impossible to make sure that everything that was happening was noticed. Furthermore, it is difficult to decide how successful the teachers were in implementing the positive/negative reinforcements. The results will be analysed and the differences in behaviour between the two occasions will be examined.
Contact was made with the school, and the teachers and the parents of the children were informed about the study. The letter to the parents informed them about the research, and the letter contained “I do not wish (my child) to participate” option on the form. The research did not discriminate or identify any groups of children, the teacher and the observer were the only ones who knew who was being observed. Since both groups receive the same type effective behaviour management the research is not considered as unethical. The research was carried out in a morally responsible way; it respected others’ opinions and rights, and did not misusing the information.

Evidence and Data

On the first observation the number of times the children were told off was noted on the recording sheet. It was predicted that the group of children classified as having behavioural problems would be told off more often. Table 1 presents the number of incidents observed as behavioural problem on the first observation, i.e. week 1.
Considering the small number of children in each group it is difficult to draw any specific conclusion of the result. However, as expected the number of incidents of problem behaviour was higher for the children in the group consisting of children with behavioural problems, 78 incidents versus 22, i.e. 78 per cent of the times a teacher told a child off it was one of the children in the group with behavioural problems (see Table 1). There was no difference between the two classrooms concerning the number of times the teacher told children off in the group consisting of children with no behavioural problems, ten times versus 12 times. However, there was a small difference between the two classes for the group of children with behavioural problems; 45 of the incidents in contrast to 33 times. In total there were more behavioural problems in classroom 1: 55 incidents in classroom 1 as compared to 45 in classroom 2.
An analysis was made to determine whether there were any effects of the positive/negative reinforcements. It was predicted that there would be no difference between the two conditions. Table 2 presents the number of behavioural incidents the week after. The number of times the teacher used either positive or negative reinforcements was recorded. The prediction was that on the second week the number of positive and negative reinforcements would be reduced particularly for the children in the group classified as having behavioural problems. The reduction in positive or negative reinforcement would indicate that the children were changing their behaviour, i.e. that reinforcements are an effective behavioural management strategy. The number of behavioural incidents for the group consisting of children with behavioural problems was 65 versus 10 for the other group (see Table 2). Thus, there was a reduction in the number of incidents. However, the reinforcements were more successful for children with no behavioural problems, these children halved the times they were told by their teacher that their behaviour was not appropriate, from 22 to ten times. In contrast the group consisting of children with behavioural problems got told off 65 times compared to 78 times before the use of either positive or negative reinforcements.
Although the number of times the teacher used reinforcements dropped as compared to week one there was no dramatic overall change. The largest change was in the group with positive reinforcement. A possible conclusion is that the negative reinforcement had less impact than the positive reinforcement for these children, a change in classroom 2 from 33 in week one to 30 incidents in week 2. In contrast, the children who received positive reinforcement had 45 incidents in the first week as compared to 35 in week two.
In a classroom several activities are happening at the same time and to observe four children at the same time is difficult. The reason for the children being told off was not recorded, however, and informal observation noticed that in many cases the children were being told off because they were talking to a friend. One of the children was responsible for 35 of the behavioural problem incidents, i.e. the pupils were responsible for 43 per cent of the incidents (see Appendix 1.). An informal observation noticed that this child was in most cases being told of for talking and answering questions without putting the hand up. The child who was told off 35 times in week 1 received positive reinforcements 30 times in week two.
There were only a small number of children in the study; however, there is an indication that positive reinforcement reduces the number of behavioural problems slightly more. There is of course no way of telling how the teachers used the reinforcement strategies during the week. The teachers’ use of the strategies was not observed and it is possible that it was easier to apply one type of reinforcement. Also there is no data on what sort of method/s the teachers had used prior to the observations. In other words, a strategy might have been more successful because it was new and interesting.

Conclusion

Improving pupils’ behaviour while at the same time maximising learning for all pupils is a challenging task. Findings from this study support previous research which suggests that it is difficult to find quick and effective solutions to behavioural problems. The children in this study only have a week’s experience of the positive or negative reinforcements and a long term strategy is probably a more efficient solution to behavioural problems (Wyse, 2002). The children’s behaviour did change and the number of times that the children received a positive or negative reinforcement was lower as compared to the number of times the children were told of in the previous week. This would indicate that something happened to their behaviour.
Only eight children were observed and it is difficult to draw any specific conclusions, particularly since the number of children in each group is small, i.e. 2 children in each group received either positive or negative reinforcements. Admittedly, the change was larger for the children in the group with behavioural problems who received positive reinforcement. However, it is difficult to draw any conclusion from four pupils. The way the positive and negative reinforcement was applied was not examined, and research suggests that the timing for positive reinforcement is of crucial importance (Maag, 2001). Furthermore, it should be noted that the teachers used a diverse range of strategies which were classified as “telling the children off”. These strategies were not classified either. In other words, it is possible that the teacher strategies did not change that much. The observations conducted did not examine the teachers’ responses to the children. Furthermore, the study did not examine what happened in the classroom during the week.
One aspect that has been highlighted by this study is that the reasons behind the student’s behavior need to be examined. In this study there was one student who was provided with the most told off. Informal observations suggested that in most cases the child was either talking or answering questions without putting the hand up. There was no significant improvement of the behaviour, and a possible explanation is that on week is not enough time to change someone’s behaviour. Furthermore, the relationship between the teacher and the pupil is important. Research suggests that the physical and personal settings are most important for children with behavioural problems (Brophy, 2006). A statistical analysis can lead to an abstraction of what had happened in the classroom, rather than a reflection or description of the event (Hopkins, 2002). A video recording of the class rooms could have answered some of the questions.
The problems connected with changing children’s behaviour are highlighted in this study. According to the Steer Report (2209) the quality of learning and teaching should be high and schools should raise the standards connected to the behaviour of children. Behavioral strategies and reinforcements may not be a successful long-term strategy; the pupils do not develop an intrinsic motivation to solve the task. In order for a teacher to support the high attaining children at the same time it is important with strategies which can be used to support different groups of children. Behavioral reinforcement strategies worked with different groups of children in this study. However, further studies are necessary to examine the consequences more in detail.
In summary, several of the results in this study are supported by a vast amount of research (Brophy, 2006). A calm and well-managed environment is an essential prerequisite for learning. Systems and experience will help to achieve effective discipline, however, there are children whose problems are complex and they are unlikely to respond to a short-term interventions. There was a difference between the numbers of times the two groups of children were told off by their teachers; children with behavioral problems were told off in more cases, and one child was told of in almost half of these cases. After a week of either positive or negative reinforcement the behavior did slightly change, particularly for the two children who received positive reinforcements.
It was suggested that more research might provide an explanation to the result, particularly another way of observing the children, for example, the children could be observed after a couple of weeks in order to study the long-term effects of positive and negative reinforcements. In another study a video recording of the observations could be made and the teachers’ responses could be examined. The reason for the children’s behaviour could also be examined and classified. It is possible that some type of behavioural strategies work better for certain problems.