PU #245 - DON'T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF - At Odds With Behavioural Wisdom in Schools
There is a mantra in education circles around student behaviour: “sweat the small stuff”. The idea is that if a teacher is on top of seemingly minor things, like a child’s untucked shirt or their wearing a jacket indoors, then a general understanding pervades the school that rules are important and there will be consequences for not following them. Essentially: if you can get told off, and maybe even sanctioned, for not having your tie on properly, then you will definitely get told off for not bringing the right equipment to lessons or talking when you shouldn’t in class. So if teachers “sweat the small stuff” then, the idea goes, the bigger issues won’t happen.
The theory stems from the same flawed thinking of the “broken windows” theory of criminology. Fix the first broken window and the area won’t descend into a slum was the idea. In practice it led to oppressive, “zero tolerance” policing which created more crime, not less. But ideas such as this sound nice because they suggest a quick and easy fix to more deep-rooted problems. Larger crimes don’t happen because a broken window has not been repaired (the first broken window, after all, might be a crime of vandalism which logically predates the possibility of fixing the window to prevent it), and children don’t misbehave in schools because they are wearing trainers instead of school shoes.
Because education is a feeding ground for exploitative “consultants” always looking for some new proprietary fad to sell and teachers love a good buzzword or phrase they can buy into for some CPD or INSET, what once was, more honestly, called “behaviour modification” in schools when I was a student is often called “behaviour for learning” these days. Unlike sweating the small stuff though, this re-branding of everyday school practices has a good idea at its heart. It acknowledges that if schools want to have legitimate authority in their requests for student compliance, they must not demand compliance of certain rules merely for the sake of it, but rather because there is a reason we are all in a school — to learn — and some behaviours are detrimental to the achievement of that purpose, hence they need to be enforced. It is an idea which, unusually for schools, actually nods towards trying to justify itself to the students it is intended for rather than simply assert it as something to be done because we say so. We are not asking you to do A and not B arbitrarily, but because A helps with your learning and B does not.
Indeed, the problem of “sweating the small stuff” is exposed when we reframe behavioural expectations in terms of “behaviour for learning”, as I saw firsthand in a recent discussion about this at work. As staff were asked to list behaviours we thought were essential for learning it became apparent that many behaviours staff are well-trained in demanding had no business being on the list. After all, students can clearly learn with an untucked shirt, an undone tie, wearing a jacket indoors and in comfy trainers instead of smart school shoes. We know this because many countries around the world do not enforce a school uniform, university learning does not take place in the restrictive limits of a uniform, and the vast majority of everyday learning each of us will do throughout our lives happens out of uniform at home or in our spare time.
A reason I like the idea of “behaviour for learning” as a justifying principle for school behavioural expectations is that, if taken seriously, it suggests teachers should be demanding less behavioural compliance from their students, not more. If forced to justify our demands on a principle of them being necessary for students to learn, anything we demand which does not contribute to that end can be dismissed as irrelevant and unjustified.
Students can’t learn if they don’t listen to the teacher and to each other. They can’t learn if they don’t attempt the tasks assigned to help them. But they absolutely can learn if they are not compliant in specific and totally arbitrary uniform rules. They absolutely can learn if they chat a little while getting on with their work (silence is not always necessary). They can learn if they are eating food, or even chewing gum, while working.
I suggested to my colleagues that if we really want to focus on “behaviour for learning”, instead of “sweating the small stuff” we should return to the principle of the subverted phrase’s original form and not sweat the small stuff. We should only enforce rules we can all justify on the basis of their necessity for learning. Anything that goes beyond that minimalist remit should be jettisoned.
There was immediate pushback. For example, I was told, students do learn less when out of uniform. We see it every charity non-uniform day. But I argued that such disruptive behaviours are likely not caused by the lack of uniform, but by that lack of uniform being a novelty. If we want to avoid such outbursts in future, one possible way could be to eliminate uniform entirely. In the meantime, even if there are more disruptive behaviours on non-uniform days or when people are not complying with uniform rules, it should remain the disruptive behaviours we address, not the clothes they happen to be wearing at the time.
If students chat in the corridors as they move from lesson to lesson — who cares so long as they get to the next class on time? If they don’t, then it is not the chatting to their friends we should be sanctioning, but the time management. They should be told off for being late, not for being social. And even then, if they are late but have not missed anything significant, do they need to be told off at all? After all, I am frequently late quite intentionally to the cinema, because I have no interest in being a captive audience for a bunch of pointless commercials before the movie actually starts. But I am never late for the theatre because I know that curtain-up means curtain-up: the show is starting at the time on the ticket and if I am late I will miss it.
I truly believe the era of super-strict teachers thinking consistency is a virtue needs to end and be replaced with a more Aristotelian and fluid approach to school behaviour, based on practical wisdom and guided by the question “does this behaviour actually impact on learning?” Not on neatness, aesthetics, rule-following, or other arbitrary fetishes that frequently guide school behaviour policies, but on learning.
Most importantly this approach provides students with actual justification for compliance instead of just coercively enforcing it. Treating students like human beings who have to be reasoned with and can’t simply be pushed around by some ageist notion of adult authority. We want to take your phones away, ask you to be in this particular room at this particular time, and tell you not to talk right now not just because we can, but because all these things are necessary for you to fulfil the very purpose of your being here. Anything to which we cannot say that is, frankly, none of our concern. Where it doesn’t impact learning, we should allow students the free reign to do things their own way. (Don’t worry — safeguarding is covered by this approach too, as people can’t learn if they are suffering a mental health crisis, being neglected or in a bad domestic situation, or if they are being bullied, hurt, abused, or discriminated against, etc.)
Behaviour in schools is usually seen like a case of competing extremes: either the students are allowed to get away with everything, or they must be super-strict on enforcing any rules they think are important. The middle ground of being insistent rather than consistent, not on inflexible rule-worship but on how best to mutually achieve a well-communicated shared goal that is agreed in dialogue between students and staff, would mean schools no longer wasting time sweating pointless small stuff to tyrannically coerce compliance, and, instead, allowing students to be their authentic and messy selves as much as is possible in compatibility with working together to ensure that everybody learns. An approach which allows students and teachers to learn compromise, flexibility, and how to work towards a greater good for all rather than selfishly thinking only of ourselves.
After all, if it is behaviour for learning we are asking for, we must then ask what it is we want our young people to learn? For me, I’d rather they learnt how we are all individuals inherently tied up collectively in a community of other individuals who need to think about the impacts of our actions on others and treat everybody with respect and dignity than that they learn simply to do what they are told, regardless of its coherency. I would rather that they learn to demand a rationale for anything they are asked to do instead of simply comply unthinkingly or out of threat of being punished. And I would rather we modelled what it is to be a good person than what it is to be “well behaved”.
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