"Behavior is communication."
- Me, (Like Every Day)
This is an idea that runs through my mind every day, several times a day. To think I spent ten years teaching, and never really thought about this idea; I just, like most teachers, tried to figure out the best form of classroom management. For my first three years of teaching, I struggled, miserably. Taking a course in "classroom management" is where I first learned the importance of developing a system when it comes to "classroom management".
Another decade later, when working alongside a behavioral specialist did I really start to come to understand how little I knew and understood about behavior, as a teacher.
This problem started for me at the end of the 20th Century. Two decades into the 21st Century, it pains me to see teachers struggling with "classroom management". It also pains me to see teachers who think they've gotten this right, when really they've used a compliance measures to manage student and class behaviors. This is really a desperation move, and the beginning of the end for a teacher successfully managing student behaviors or being skilled in the area of "classroom management".
When is it evident that this is failing or has failed? When we see "classroom matters" become "main office matters" in a matter of moments.
Teachers growing frustrated with a lack of compliance from one or several students, leads to a power struggle, abandons mutual respect, and students are sent to the office. The follow up is being asked where lunch duty is held. This doesn't work, not for anyone.
And this is not typical to new teachers in the 2020s. It's teachers who grew up, attending a school in which "command and control" and "classroom management" were virtually synonymous terms and concepts. We may have convinced ourselves that it "worked" back then. But did it really? How do we know? And for whom, exactly?
As an alternative, I am writing to learn in this post, about an idea that's got me thinking about "behavior is communication". I am also blending some ideas I'm thinking about, based on the books, Atomic Habits, by James Clear, and Super Better, by Jane McGonigal.
Let's begin with what James Clear calls, the second law of behavior change: Make it Attractive.
Here are five ideas, based on my notes:
The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit forming.
Habits are dopamine driven feedback loop.
When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.
It is the anticipation of a reward, not the fulfillment of it that get us to take action.
The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.
Apply this idea to working with students. Imagine we considered...no...imagine if we BUILT OUR SYSTEM around these ideas.
Questions we may ask of ourselves:
Are we designing our classrooms/learning spaces and students' learning experiences around habit formation, anticipation, dopamine, and a system of rewards?
Who is "doing the work", the teacher, the students, or the system?
Hint:
If you're a teacher, feeling exhausted and/or frustrated, and your students are using their behavior to express they're exhausted and frustrated, then both the teacher and the students are doing too much of the work.
And the system hasn't been designed or isn't operating to it's fullest potential.
In the next post, we'll take a deeper diver into the work of Jane McGonigal to help look at how to look a bit differently at creating a system that works!
This is part five of a ten-part blog series, based on the book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.
A few "writing to learn" posts on the topic of being more "gameful" with learning:
The Game of Learning (100/365)
Ideas from...Jane McGonigal (132/365)
"Gameful" Daily Practices (138/365)
Click here to visit the Learning Leadership 365 site, where you may read all posts I've written.