susanWALLACE
Responding to a disruptive learner
Susan Wallace suggests teachers need to turn philosopher to weigh up the best way to deal with that typical teaching headache: the learner who’s distracting everyone else’s concentration. But at the end of the day, it’s the teacher’s psychological insights that will work out the best way to help the disrupter.
Susan Wallace is emeritus professor of education at Nottingham Trent University. She is an author and expert n behaviour management. Susan and Geoff Petty will alternate their contributions to these pages.
Most of us are not accustomed to thinking of ourselves as philosophers; and yet every day, as teachers, we are weighing up our position between two famous philosophical arguments and choosing the stance we’ll take. To understand this, imagine a situation, familiar to teachers everywhere, where a group of learners are working more or less on task – except for one whose behaviour is beginning to disturb the concentration of the rest. The way we respond will be an indicator of whose rights we consider to be paramount in that context. Do you, in this instance, believe, like the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), that the rights of the individual are more important than the rights of the collective, and that no one person should be treated by any other as a means to an end? If so, you may tend to give your attention to the disruptive learner and do what you can to get them back on track. Or do you judge in this case that the progress of the majority should be your priority? In which case, you’d be aligning yourself with the utilitarian argument advanced by, for example, Jeremy Bentham (1748- 1842), that the benefit of the many is always more important than the individual rights of the few. If so, your response will be something along the lines of shutting down, ‘telling off’ or reporting the learner in question. We all make these sorts of calls instantaneously every day. They are just one of the multitude of professional challenges that we face. And it’s rare that we credit ourselves with arriving at philosophical decisions about what constitutes social justice. So what I want to talk about firstly here are some of the practical ways we can devise strategies which are consistent with the Kantian view that every individual’s
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rights matter – even when that individual is a learner whose behaviour is testing your patience to the limits. And a good place to start is with how we construe the behaviour. By that, I mean whether we regard it simply as a nuisance or whether we take it personally as an insult to our professional competence. Or can we pull back a little and see it as a useful source of information which, if we’re able to read it accurately, will provide us with clues about how best we can encourage the learner to engage. For example, a learner who’s opting out of the lesson or the task in hand may be doing so for a number of reasons which have more to do with fear than with laziness or malice. These might include one or more of the following: • Fear that they will fail at the task, thus reinforcing their own lack of self-esteem.
• Fear that they will get something wrong and look ridiculous in front of their peers.
• Fear that by engaging they will appear insufficiently cool and lose their rebel image.
Professional evaluation Your professional evaluation of the learner’s entry behaviour and ability level may allow you to home in on which, if any, of these factors is the likeliest cause. However, it’s always a good idea to build
opportunities into your lesson plan for a one-to-one chat to help you ascertain the nature and extent of the problem. This, in turn, will give you a clue to what strategies might work. If you suspect a disengaged learner of being covertly afraid of failure there are various familiar approaches you could try. • Avoid aiming direct questions at the learner, which could make them feel exposed in front of the rest of the class.
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