The Fallacy of "Behavior Management" in Schools

Instead of "fixing" our students, we need to fix our institutions

“Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple - or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves - and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”

- John Holt, How Children Learn

Recently, I had the opportunity to observe and evaluate pre-service teachers as they gave mock lessons. Those participating in the lesson were a mix of adults and students who had agreed to take part in the session. Many of these students had been prescribed roles to act out during class: Tapping a pencil loudly, eating in class, moving on to a different activity, etc. The purpose of these “plants” was to see how well the teacher could manage the behavior of these students.

Behavior management is seen as vital to traditional schooling because it is built on the same fundamental principle as traditional education: that students will not act appropriately or efficiently unless controlled by adults. Children, in this paradigm, simply cannot be trusted. This is true across the spectrum of traditional education, ranging from occasional teaching as choreography at many elite private schools, which may not control every aspect of what students do, to no excuses charter schools, which control nearly every movement of each student during their entire academic day.

Ultimately, behavior management is one of the major systems that makes traditional schooling dehumanizing because it relies on behaviorism to control students actions.

At its most extreme levels, behavior management leads to Black and Brown students being arrested in school at unacceptable rates. This happens across the country when students are seen as potential criminals by administrators and police, further solidifying the school to prison pipeline.

But even when the impacts of behavior management do not lead to arrests, they are still harmful because they are built on a dehumanizing premise.

Take social-emotional learning (SEL), which is supposed to support students in developing an understanding of themselves and support their positive development. However, in many traditional schools, SEL is used to control students actions, manipulating them into being docile cogs in a machine who do not ask questions and simply do as they’re told. In the traditional paradigm, the purpose of SEL is to make the students behave how the teachers prefer, not to support the well being of the child.

Early in my career, I had the (unfortunate) opportunity to see these practices unfold as a substitute at a no excuses charter school. I only lasted four days before I handed in my notice.

At this particular school, at the end of the day the teacher gave each elementary child a rating: Green (you did as you were told), Yellow (you sometimes followed directions), or Red (you were disobedient). As a method of protest, I gave each student a green at the end of the day, since not completing the behavioral chart was unacceptable. The students were unaware of my stance, and one particular day, a student came up and said “please give me a green, or my mom will beat me for being bad.”

On another day, a student raised her hand to ask me a question about a math assignment she was working on. Before she could get the question out, the para-educator from the back of the room shouted “STOP ASKING QUESTIONS AND DO YOUR WORK.” When the girl started crying, the para-educator said “stop acting like you’re seven and start acting like an adult.”

The child was, in fact, seven years old.

Many traditional educators will lament these outcomes. However, their response is to simply say that we need a better way to control students. What they’re ultimately advocating for, however, is not genuine change, but a “better mousetrap.”

I’ll let you in on a little secret.

I’ve taught well behaved students for years, and I have never needed to use this kind of behavior management. Nor am I the only one who has accomplished this.

And it’s not because these students were rich.

Or white.

Or the “exception” to the norm.

How a developmentally prepared environment eliminates the need for behavior management

The idea of a “prepared environment” as a critical part of the Montessori and Reggio Emilia education philosophy. It is based on the notion of learning as a process of action and reflection in an environment designed for the developmental needs of the students.

In this paradigm, the teacher does not direct each moment of each child’s day. Instead, there is a meaningful structure within which students can self actualize. The teacher focuses on providing just enough support to spark the child’s self-direction, but not too much as to take away the students’ agency.

When Maria Montessori first began studying children, she did not plan on creating a method of education. However, out of her observations and experimentation with various aspects of her prepared environment, key themes began to emerge across ages, cultures, and contexts. Montessori observed that if given a proper environment, children develop a strong sense of social cohesion and care for their community, working to meet their needs and the needs of their peers. No punishments, yelling, or imposing from the teachers were needed.

When talking about her observations of children in primary and elementary age groups in The Absorbent Mind, Montessori wrote:

“It is interesting to see how, little by little, [the children] become aware of forming a community… They come to feel part of a group to which their activity contributes. And not only do they begin to take an interest in this, but they work on it profoundly, as one may say in their hearts. Once they have reached this level, the children no longer act thoughtlessly, but put the group first and try to succeed for its benefit.”

What is particularly remarkable of Montessori’s observations is that this social cohesion was not the result of the children being told what to do; rather it was the result of a prepared environment that met the needs of the children.

This, of course, does not mean that behavioral issues never arise. However, when violations of community norms occur in the context of the prepared environment, they allow for students and teachers to engage in reflection and restorative justice. The purpose is not to prevent bad behaviors, but to prepare an environment so that when they occur, each member of the community is prepared to engage, reflect, and learn together.

There are some who may say that children, by nature, simply want to be devious. That has been disproven by modern psychology by folks like Ross Greene. Those who claim this belief hold a limited view of the child because they put their adult expectations on a child’s development. Montessori practitioner Hilla Patell, in her paper “Observation,” put it succinctly when she wrote:

“Most of us have had the experience of having to deal with a child crying inconsolably. When all adult efforts to distract and pacify the child have failed and there is no apparent reason for the child to be crying, do we simply dismiss the crying as fretfulness/naughtiness or can we look deeper to try to find what might be the real cause? Could there have been some order lacking in the child’s life just at a time when he is highly susceptible to order? Could it have been that when he was bursting to express himself, nobody was listening or paying attention to what he was saying? Could there have been some other cause… which was at the root of the child’s distress?”

This line of questioning, and the preparation of an environment for our students, requires a paradigm shift from the traditional education which states that students will not “behave” unless we direct their every move, or that it is in their nature to be “disobedient.” We must trust children and the power of their positive development in a carefully prepared environment. We must turn away from the desire to “fix” our children and instead fix our institutions to meet our children’s needs. What Montessori observed, and what countless practitioners in various Montessori, progressive, and learner-centered schools have observed, is this:

Our students are primed for social cohesion, genuine collaboration, and human solidarity; but only if we as adults get out of the way and prepare an environment which meets their needs!