Negative behavior and student productivity in the classroom

¶ … American Educator

How does one deal with a select group of youths who are identified as antisocial, whether in elementary, middle, or high schools? Is intervention and collective counseling appropriate, or individual counseling for such students? Is merely universal strict school discipline enough, with selective intervention only a last resort? Should the antisocial individual ever be removed from the school population as a whole? Unfortunately, current studies provide a mixed set of research data and outcomes of programs to answer these thorny questions, with the only consensus emerging that the earlier the identification and targeting of such students, the better, for both the other student, society, the individual in question, and society as a whole.

Literature Review

"Is Negative Behavior Causing Students to be Unproductive in the Classroom?" The answer, provided by the article by Hill M. Walker, Elizabeth Ramsey, and Frank M. Greesham, published in Winter 2003-2004 edition of American Educator, provides a resounding 'yes.' The article defines a three-tiered strategy to cope a specific and dangerous type of student who is, according to the authors, disrupting the classrooms of America's teachers, and thwarting the educations of their fellow students. Not only are these students coming to the classrooms of American academically unprepared to cope with the reasonable demands placed upon them by teachers, rather the antisocial type of student's social dysfunctional impulses provides an equally substantial roadblock to the student's learning and mainstreaming into a classroom environment.

From their survey of educators who attested to the loss of classroom time by student's behaviors that were identified as antisocial, the student body in general was not the problem, rather specific antisocial students. In fact, with this core group of antisocial students, usual classroom management of collective unruly behavior was often ineffective. Genetic and environmental issues may conspire to cause the behavior, or in some cases a learning disability, but regardless the student's use of hitting, whining, punching, or generally disruptive tactics gave them a limited repertoire of coping skills that the student's parents either unintentionally reinforced or could not cope with at home. This makes the normally difficult transition time into school, requiring the student to cope with others, deal with conflicts and competition with others, and negotiate disagreements particularly fraught. (Walker, Ramsey, Greesham, 2003)

Estimates of children with this pattern of behavior run as high as sixteen percent, according to Walker, Ramsey and Greesham, and they catalogue a 'spiraling' effect whereby minor infractions in the lower grades, when ignored, lead to more dangerous and even criminal forms of 'acting out' in later adolescence. This is why early intervention is so key, especially as while truancy is quite rare in elementary school and even middle school, it becomes more common in the transition to high school, thus meaning these at-risk students may simply remove themselves from the school population, making classroom management easier for teachers, but injuring the local community and society at large in the long run. (Cho, Halfors, Sanchez, 2005)

Another potential consequence is that students, as they grow more cooperative with one another in a scholastic and social context, can band together. Deviancy training may occur within the "friendships of high-risk male adolescents," for example. Antisocial students form core networks against, rather than within the common social framework of their peers. (Mager, Milch, Harris, Howard, 2001)

Solutions and Implementations

Rewarding academic achievement, giving students positive channels for aggressive behavior, and making use of early, universal models that demand strict but fair discipline of all are potential ways for a district to cope with these behaviors. Walker Ramsey, and Greesham define a three-tired strategy deemed to be effective with as many as eighty to ninety percent of the identified students. Only after creating a school with strict and fair discipline for all need selected individual interventions with or without the parents can be inflicted against specific 'problem's students, with outside authorities brought in, as a last resort according to what is called the Oregon model. This strategy stresses universalism, rather than selecting and removing students, and mainstreaming even antisocial students under the same disciplinary regime, by and large.