The amount of time spent on negative behaviors in some schools is extraordinary. I wonder how much time a teacher or a principal spends per week on behavior. Let’s say every student is on the school campus for 7 hours per day, 5 days a week…or 35 hours.
According to research on ChatGPT (which can be argued, but raises a good point for
discussion) states that an average teacher spends 10-20% of their time dealing with negative
behavior or negative classroom management issues. This is the correction of negative behavior.
That is 3.5 to 7 hours a week of correcting negative behavior. No wonder why we are
exhausted by the weekend. As an assistant principal, 3.5-7 hours of negative behavior correction seems quite high to me as I walk through classrooms and hallways every day. If this average, I would aim to say in our school teachers spend 1-2 hours per week dealing with behavior correction.
What I do know is if we only focus on correcting negative behavior, we will only get more
negative behavior to correct. As Peter Drucker so eloquently states, “What gets measured gets managed.” We measure our behavior data. Teachers know the following data monthly in our school:
● Behaviors per day, week, and month
● Time of the day with the most and least behavior occurrences
● Location of the most behavior occurrences
● Students with the most frequent behavior (usually requiring a plan for more support)
● Historical data (what was the data like last year, two years ago, or 5 years ago)
If we stopped there with behavior correction and communication, we may only be able to
manage the data and keep it the same. Rarely managing behavior gets us what we want…a
reduction in negative behavior.
We need to spend time where we want to see improvement…POSITIVE BEHAVIOR! When we
move from management of behaviors to nurturing leadership of behaviors we can see long term improvement in our data. What does this look like?
In our school our goal is to spend more time nurturing, acknowledging, tracking, and celebrating the positive behaviors that occur in our school than negative. We focus on magnifying strengths and not highlighting weaknesses! We acknowledge student positive behaviors individually, small groups, classrooms, grade level, and even schoolwide. Let’s compare what we do between negative and positive behaviors.
“What gets measured gets managed.” — Peter Drucker
Time spent acknowledging, celebrating, and reinforcing the repairing of relationships.
The time spent on negative behavior was significantly impacted as we moved from managing negative behavior to creating positive leaders. Reviewing your classroom and school’s leadership opportunities is another place to start.
Ask the question, “How many different types of activities, tasks, jobs, and opportunities do
students in our school have to be leaders?” Of course, the quantity of opportunities may vary
with age, as well as the number of adults who can lead and manage the systems you
implement. Within this aspect lies the crux of the issue.
When staff state they do not have time to implement these positive behavior systems, schools get stuck in the management of behaviors in a reactive manner. The question then becomes, where do you want to spend your time?
I believe schools that can make this shift work from being reactive behavior managers to
proactive leader providers understand why time needs to be spent on the positives. In future articles, we will dive into the steps a teacher and school can take to create leaders and
decrease negative behaviors in a school.
