Why are teen behavioral patterns a particular problem in classroom settings? To understand the issue we first have to understand what we are expecting from these children and we have to look at it from their perspective.
Unfortunately, the reality is that what we teach children at this age: Math, Geography, Language, or History, has little meaning, no significance and is therefore of no interest to them. Simply put, most subjects as they are currently taught in school have no relevance to children’s day-to-day lives.
An example of this would be if I told you that you had to spend the next two hours copying the first 60 pages of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It would be an activity you would most likely experience as boring and meaningless. You would resent it and you would find creative or confrontational ways to get out of it.
However, when it comes to children we expect that they will behave responsibly and do things which are inherently boring and irrelevant to them to them simply because they “should” realize that an education is important to their getting into college, and in the years to come to their career prospects. Or, we expect that children should work simply because we as teachers have asked them to. Unfortunately that is an unrealistic expectation to have of children especially those aged 13 to 16.
This situation is further compounded by the fact that teenagers are going through very real chemical, hormonal and structural changes in their brains that predispose them towards both socializing and to the defiance of adult authority. This is a volatile mix to say the least, especially in a classroom environment!
Given this period in their development, it is quite absurd that we confine 25-30 boys and girls together in a room for up to 6 to 7 hours at a time. On top of that we not only expect them to sit quietly, but we expect them to stay in their seats and actually make an effort to engage in an activity they have no interest in.
You can force a man to dig a hole at the point of a gun, but you can’t force a student to learn. All higher level thinking tasks, in fact anything beyond rote learning as in simply memorizing something to be reproduced on a test or exam, requires for the learner’s will to be engaged in the activity. Real learning does not take place under compulsion, and this is why the Care and Growth framework developed by Schuitema is the single most important intervention required in the education sector in this 21st Century.
The basic structure of today’s schools designed for mass education was first developed in the middle of the 19th century in Europe. Its purpose was to develop low level administrators for the growing European empires of that era. The need was for developing people who could follow order and had basic reading and writing skills necessary for correspondence and record keeping.
In this model, the previous approach of one-to-one or even small group instruction where the teaching was designed for the learners needs and ability went out of the window.
Demands for the 21st Century workforce are completely different. Our goal is to develop young people who have initiative, who can think independently and critically, and can sort through vast amounts of information available and make sense of it. The focus on strict discipline and do as you are told because I say so, no longer works on today’s young people who are growing up in a different world
A teacher’s role in today’s learning environment is to get the learner to function in the upper end of Bloom’s Taxonomy; which means the student must be engaged in activities that require analysis, integration and evaluation. A teacher must therefore create a learning environment where a student’s attention is on the activity and where his will is engaged. Real learning, as defined above, cannot take place in an environment permeated by fear or anger.
There are a number of ways of approaching this problem. We could change the curriculum to make it more relevant to children. Teachers can make lessons more interesting. We can break up the day to give children more breaks. Most schools and teachers use a variety of these approaches, but the core issues won’t go away. Not all teachers are born entertainers and the fundamental structure of the curriculum is not set by schools themselves but by colleges, universities and societal expectations.
So the core issue remains, we are asking children to do something every day that they inherently don’t want to do and this sets up a relationship of conflict between teacher and student. Therefore the most important question has to be, how do we change students motivation from working because they have to, which leads to minimum effort and mediocrity, to working because they want to… the first step on the path to excellence.
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