Raymond Soltysek @raymondsoltysek has blogged (snippets below):
... an approach to behaviour that is authoritarian, damaging and, potentially, supportive of bad, bad teaching.
... you should – must – ‘build relationships.’
... behaviourist strategies cannot do that; they aren’t designed to. Behaviourism focusses only on behaviour, not on minds and certainly not on hearts. Dogs are conditioned to respond in a particular way to a stimulus, but it has nothing to do with understanding, since we can elicit exactly the same response quite quickly if we change the stimulus. Similarly, schools which use ‘no excuses’ policies are frequently lauded for their ‘respectful ethos’, yet we cannot know that a policy that sends children to detention for forgetting their homework or for dropping litter or for talking in the corridor builds respect; all we can with any certainty say is that they are behaving in a conditioned way to a stimulus, as if they respect us. They may not – indeed, it’s absolutely certain that some won’t – and, if we changed the stimulus we use to encourage respectful behaviour, we’d get just the same result.
That’s why I think that we have to be much lighter on our feet in terms of behaviour management, that we have to utilise not just the blunt tool of behaviourism, but cognitive constructivist and social constructivist strategies too. It’s the core of the way I’ve been getting student teachers to conceptualise behaviour management for years now, and it’s something I’ll return to in later posts, perhaps.
But in the meantime, ‘no excuses’ is a stony ground for our classrooms, and for anyone who wants to build relationships with pupils. Just think about it; what other human relationship imposes such conditions? Would you marry someone who said there was no excuse for not having the dinner ready on time, and who put you in a room until you’d learned your lesson? How would you react if you visited acquaintances and they sent their elderly mother to the garden shed because she’d lost her purse through a hole in her coat pocket? The notion of there being no excuse for behaviour is to deny the very essence of humanity, people making their way in a universe which is at times capricious and unpredictable, a universe in which in the face of things we can’t control we all have the right to make judgements which at times will be flawed or judgments which at times might be unfathomable to others.
