The REAL Reasons Kids Misbehave in School

From Running the Room by Tom Bennett

Classroom management is a skillset in which many teachers have received little training, yet it is essential for learning to take place. Managing behavior has always been one of the greatest challenges for teachers, and today, the challenge is even greater. As students returned to classrooms after virtual learning, once-familiar behavior standards were forgotten.

Enter Tom Bennett, UK Department for Education’s Behavior Advisor, to the rescue! A former night club manager and a once-floundering newbie teacher, Bennett brings light-hearted humor and serious help to teachers struggling with student behavior in Running the Room. The book contains useful frameworks, processes, and concrete behavior solutions.

I think the ideas below are an excellent way to start – if you don’t understand student behavior, it’s hard to manage it.

10 Reasons Students Don’t Really Enjoy Behaving in School

1. We ask them to do what they otherwise would not choose to do. On their own, how many students would choose to do trigonometry or sit still on a rug for 45 minutes? If we decided to only teach the completely willing students, then we might find ourselves teaching in an empty classroom.

2. We ask them to think, and thinking is hard! It’s easy to sit passively. Students can sit there and let music play in the background, no problem. But it becomes hard when we ask students: What instrument it is? What does the music mean? Why? What follows?

3. We judge them. No one likes to be judged. And yet in school, students are judged all day long on their knowledge, skills, opinions, and character by staff, peers, and friends. Now imagine students who fear looking idiotic or incompetent – perhaps we can understand why students might not always be looking forward to school with a sense of joy.

4. We ask them to sustain their focus on things that don’t interest them. Think about something that interests you – how long can you concentrate on it? Now think about students learning something they have no interest in or aren’t very good. How long do you think they can focus? It’s not easy. Students cannot yet focus as long as adults can, plus, they’ve got the Internet to contend with. It takes time for students to learn the habit of concentrating for sustained periods and yet we assume they naturally know how to do so.

5. Distractions abound and are much more interesting. Some say humans are innately curious. But this doesn’t mean that they are curious about trigonometry. We aren’t equally curious about everything. Students may indeed feel curious, but they might be curious about the student next to them is doing. And it’s a myth that the solution is to “make” everything we teach interesting. Create a game of it. Teach Shakespeare through rap. The truth is that learning will have to happen in a way that doesn’t always entertain all children.

6. Evolution does not support the type of learning kids are asked to do in school. Evolution has prepared humans to do many things – just observe a baby navigating the world. They even pick up verbal language without a classroom. But that learning doesn’t look much like school. Our brains haven’t fully evolved to learn long division or the capital of France naturally.

7. Students are not motivated when they don’t feel successful. We are less likely to engage in activities that make us feel bad. If we have trouble persevering with a task we’re bad at or even hate, then we shouldn’t be surprised when students give up when they are not successful in school.

8. Students perceive school as a necessary evil. Many students do not arrive at school with a positive view of it. They may believe school is pointless or a waste of time and simply be waiting until they are old enough to be employed. They may reject school because they mistrust institutions and see those who work there as authoritarian adversaries. This mindset certainly impacts their behavior.

9. A lot of “misbehavior” is simply messing around, and that’s a lot more fun than behaving. To many children, learning about Julius Caesar is not their idea of a good time. Instead, it’s more fun to make friends laugh, doodle, and chat about nothing. This type of messing around is what the adults often call misbehavior. And yet this misbehavior is almost always more fun than the lesson at hand.

10. They have bigger problems. Students come to school from all walks of life. If some are dealing with trauma, abuse, hunger, mental health issues, and more, then quietly paying attention to and learning phonics and math might not be their top priority.

The lesson? Don’t assume all students can or want to behave. Yet. That’s why Bennett’s 3 steps to behavior management help: KNOW the behavior you want, TEACH it explicitly to students, and MAINTAIN those standards all year by revisiting and re-teaching them.