In the final semester of my formal schooling, for my MSEd in English Education 7-12, for a class project, I embarked upon a quest to shore up my most serious deficit as a teacher: classroom management.
I took as my inspiration one of my cats, The Right Honourable Leopold Tiberius, 2nd Viscount Fluffypants – Leo for short. Leo, though normally a very good boy, sometimes decides to act out – scratching at random doors, chewing on charger cables, getting the zoomies (running around hectic and pell-mell), fighting with our other cats, etc.
Ineffective techniques for getting misbehavior to desist include raising our voices to call his name or scold him, hissing “psssssst”, picking him up and moving him away from whatever he’s messing with – when presented with these responses, Leo will either not desist, will promptly go right back to whatever he was doing wrong, or will switch to some new misbehavior. Even if we lock him in the bathroom for ten minutes, he’ll frequently resume the behavior once released.
Techniques that do turn out effective involve redirecting Leo from the behavior: making a kissy noise to call him over to be petted, lavishing him with affection, giving him a treat, throwing a cat toy to play with. It could be that he’s only misbehaving out of boredom, and being given something more interesting to do quells the boredom; or perhaps he genuinely enjoys his misbehavior but he enjoys affection, treats, and cat toys more; or perhaps he knows I might give him affection, treats, or cat toys, and is misbehaving for the purpose of acquiring these things.
I embarked upon a campaign of research, observation of other teachers, and interviews with teachers and students, to answer the question: are there some effective techniques, perhaps equivalent to the techniques effective for redirecting Leo’s misbehavior, that a teacher can use with students who scratch at doors (metaphorically), chew on cables (metaphorically), get the zoomies (in some cases literally), or fight with other students (physically or verbally) – to descend from the analogy: to reduce behaviors such as getting out of seat, talking during quiet work or when the teacher is instructing, or staying out of room for excessive lengths of time on trips to bathroom?
Obviously human young people are somewhat more cognitively complex than cats, but analogy with Leo inspired pedagogical contemplation nonetheless. Just as it is unclear why Leo misbehaves, human students come to the classroom carrying their own individual backgrounds, histories, identities, experiences, and even trauma, which could be what drives them to behave in various ways the teacher does not want. They might misbehave out of boredom; because they enjoy the misbehavior; or because they want to get something from the teacher; they might behave in a way that’s normal in their home or in their culture, but which is not conducive to learning in the classroom; they could be neurodivergently stimming; there could be other, more complex reasons.
To return to the Leo analogy: yelling and physical redirection are obviously ineffective, not to mention cruelly unconducive to learning itself (plus a risk to the teacher’s job – and correctly so); sending a student out of the room (to some disciplinary location) leaves them missing out on content, is a squeeze of the pump of the school-to-prison pipeline, and then the student is likely to resume the behavior as soon as they come back anyway.
Are there some teacher analogues to giving Leo affection, treats, and cat toys – ones which ideally do not invoke the moral hazard attendant with rewarding and incentivizing misbehavior? Perusing the literature led to the conclusion: If misbehavior is occurring, it's already too late. This conclusion was borne out by observations and interviews: prevention is much more effective.
Successful means of prevention that are within the teacher's control include, primarily: establishing relationship between teacher and student; and implementing structure and consistency.