ABSTRACT
Problems of classroom behaviour and motivation are, as the editors of this book make clear, endemic in education. Teachers consistently cite difficulties in these two areas as their main classroom concerns and traditionally they have been dealt with in the same way, that is, by punitive methods. Both unacceptable or troublesome behaviour and idleness or lack of interest represent threats to the teacher's role which he or she commonly seeks to excise or avoid by aver sive means. One consequence of this may be the daily litany of desist commands heard in many classrooms: ‘sit down, Sarah. Talking again, Barry. Leave Brendon alone, Nigel — get on with your own work. Something of interest outside, Mary? Eyes on your work please,’ and so on, endlessly. As the research reviewed by Schwieso and Hastings in this volume shows, teachers the world over spend a considerable proportion of their teaching time reprimanding children for troublesome and/or non-work-related behaviours and hardly ever comment approvingly on appropriate behaviour (Merrett and Wheldall, 1986 a). Moreover as our surveys in both primary and secondary schools (reviewed in our previous chapter in this volume) clearly show, teachers are mostly concerned with high frequency but relatively trivial troublesome behaviours such as ‘talking out of turn’ and ‘hindering other children’. These are the behaviours which help to cause teacher stress as they occur with monotonous regularity and call for immediate action which usually takes the form of reprimands and sanctions. In this chapter we will consider an alternative approach to such problems based on behavioural psychology: the behavioural approach to teaching. We will describe the basic operating principles and then illustrate the effectiveness of this approach with demonstration studies of its application with both younger and older children in schools.
