Behavioural Theories

Choice Theory – William Glasser

 Key Points:

• Students are motivated to act responsibly and achieve high academic standards if a school is democratic and the curriculum is relevant and meets their needs.

• Student’s needs are love, belonging, power, freedom, fun and survival.

• The best way to meet student’s needs is to lead them rather than dictate them.

Glasser believes that children are capable of being responsible for themselves in making choices about their behaviour and learning. With this in mind, the disciplinary role of the teacher is to construct caring, thoughtful relationships with the students to enable them to build the ability to take responsibility for themselves.

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Neo-Adlerian Model – Dreikurs, Dinkmeyer & Balson

 Key Points:

• Aim is to increase students’ feelings of belonging and resulting  appropriate behaviour by achieving democratic relationships inside the classroom that are grounded by the ideas of mutual respect, cooperation and encouragement.

• Students who display disruptive behaviour are inappropriately choosing the behaviour as a way of meeting their appropriate need of belonging to a group and feeling acceptance.

• Teachers can recognize the goals of student disruptive behavior by analysing how they feel and respond to the behaviour, and how students respond to behaviour modification. After doing this, the teacher’s goal would then be to help the student meet the same goal in the future through appropriate behaviour.

The disciplinary role of the teacher is to encourage students social, emotional, intellectual and physical development to their best possible levels while still encouraging them to take ownership for their own choices and actions.

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Applied Behaviour Analysis

§       Behaviour is determined by the reaction it receives. Therefore if a teacher wants to increase the occourence of behaviour then they have to reinforce it with a positive reaction. Alternatively, if a teacher wants to decrease its occourence then they follow it with a negative consequence.

§        Antecedents (the environment) can make the likeliness of a behaviour to occur decrease or increase.

§        Reinforcers and punishments vary in how they interrupt the teaching process and restrict the students.

The disciplinary role of the teacher is to encourage the occourence of desirable student behaviour through well thought out and structured responses to both positive and negative behaviours.

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Fred Jones’s Behaviour Management Ideas

Jones believes the two major types of misbehaviour are talking without permission and general ‘goofing off’.

He believes that teachers can change their classroom environment and teaching methodologies to counteract student misbehaviour. Key aspects of his approach include:

  v     Having a positive attitude to teaching and students

v     Designing teaching and behaviour management strategies that are easy to implement.

v     Using effective body language

v     Implementing genuine incentive systems

v     Strategies that are efficient in producing results

 The key principals underpinning Jones’s ideas are that teachers need to:

  v     avoid acting on adrenalin driven impulses

v     not rely on being loving and patient alone

v     realise that upset, impulsive behaviour is weakness

v     calm, well thought out actions are strength

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