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Causes of Discipline problems
DISCIPLINE
PROBLEMS AND THEIR
CAUSES
Classroom Management
Lecture 2
The Role of the Home
 Various home experiences have an influence
on children’s behavior.
 If parents spent little time at home, children
may seek unsuitable social experiences
elsewhere, experiences that sometimes have
devastating consequences.
 Factors such as divorce and poverty, as well
as physical and mental abuse, can adversely
effect children’s ability to function properly.
 Children from dysfunctional families face
enormous adjustment problems at school.
Damage to Self-concept
 Development of self concept in children begins
long before they start attending school.
 The confidence with which children enter school
will have been either enhanced or diminished by
various home experiences.
 Children are able at an early age, to perceive
their own helplessness when compared with
larger and more capable adults.
 Teachers can often be overwhelmed by the
discipline problems with which they have to
deal.
 They cause some of these problems
themselves.
 Some of the problems they face are an
outgrowth of problems at home and in society
or conditions and administrative procedures in
the school.
Four aspects of dysfunctional
families
 Damage to self-concept
 Attention deprivation
 Love deprivation
 Excessive control
Damage to Self-concept
 The very foundation of children’s growth
depends on their achieving a positive image of
themselves as they form their identity.
 Achieving the image involves developing a
sense of personal control over their lives.
 Dysfunctional families provide little or none of
the emotional support children need to develop
this control and children from such families
experience extreme personal problems.
 The success in school of children from
dysfunctional families is greatly limited.
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Attention Deprivation
 Children who don’t get enough attention at
home often compensate by seeking attention
from their teachers.
 Most children receive their parents attention
only when they misbehave.
 Children from such homes discover that their
bad behavior is a sure way to get attention they
crave.
 These conditions encourage unacceptable
behavior discourage acceptable behavior
Excessive Control
 Excessive control at home may also create
discipline problems in the school, when the
level of control has been extreme.
 Human beings need freedom, they want to
control their own lives, also want control
others.
 The conflict between the children’s desire for
freedom and the parents unwillingness to allow
it may actually encourage the children to rebel.
The role of the Society
 Gang members
 Peer pressure
 Racial identity
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Love Deprivation
 Similar to attention deprivation.
 Children consider attention to be an indication
of how much they are loved.
 They feel unloved when parents are too
occupied to give them sufficient attention.
 Children often interpret the lack of time spent
as lack of caring.
 Children deprived of love often causes
discipline problems as they try to satisfy this
need.
Excessive Control
 Rebellion at home may extend to the school
and other areas of society.
 In dysfunctional homes, parental control may
take the form of abuse, whose symptoms can
show up in children as extreme rebellion,
criminal behavior, or withdrawal.
The Role of the Society
 Family influences on discipline problems are
interrelated.
 Rejection at home may encourage to search
elsewhere for acceptance.
 Rejected children are often attracted to gangs
(certain gangs have accepted behavioral
norms).
 A gang may satisfy a child’s need for attention
and for an identity.
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The Role of the Society
 A problem often associated with gangs, but
certainly not limited to them is drug abuse.
 Using or selling illegal drugs not only influences
students’ behavior directly but also alters he
general atmosphere of the school.
 Drug abuse and its associated violence have
become so severe in many schools that school
official must enlist help of law enforcement.
The Role of the Society
 Racial problems also contribute to growing
unrest and conflict in society.
 In larger cities, civil unrest along with forced
integration and other factors have stimulated
”white flight”( white population leaving urban
areas). this has created city areas populated
by the black poor and other disadvantage
racial groups.
Instruction without context
 Educators may fail their students if they
teach concepts as though they abstract, self
contained entities.
 Outside the school, children learn by
acquiring information in a real life context
and applying it to new situations and
experiences.
 In school, however, students may be
expected to manipulate symbolic information
and to apply it in ways that detached from
the real world.
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The Role of the Society
 Peer pressure which is part of everyday life at
school, contributes significantly shaping
student’s behavior.
 If their peer group considers school as joke,
students may go along with the crowd and put
little effort into their studies.
 Even the kind of music children play may be a
source of conflict between the and their
teachers.
The Role of the School
 Teachers usually consider students to be the
source of school discipline problems.
 Teachers and administrators can invite
discipline problems if they
 Instruction without context
 Failure to teach thinking skills
 Non-acceptance
 Competitive grading
 Excessive coercion
 punishments
Failure to Teach Thinking skills
 When children are consistently unable to solve
their problems, they often seek to escape them
through alcohol or other drugs or various thrill
seeking activities.
 If higher-order thinking skills were regularly
taught in the schools, a good deal of frustration
and failure, as well as behavioral problems,
could be avoided.
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Nonacceptance
 Without realizing it, many teachers convey
non-acceptance to some of their students.
 For example, when teachers force students to
do a task in a prescribed way, they implicitly
show a lack of confidence in the students
ability to make decisions about their own work.
Excessive Coercion
 Much is said by teachers and school
administrators about teaching children to be
more responsible.
 Ironically, a common assumption behind many
school practices is that children are unable to
govern themselves or even how to learn how
to be self regulating.
 The apparent inability prompts teachers to give
them excessive guidance and to exercise too
much coercive control.
 The result is increased rebellion by students.
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Competitive Grading
 Many schools foster competition between
children through the use of grades.
 Only a few students, however, are consistently
good at taking tests.
 The rest must find other means of bolstering
their sense of worth.
 Many of them conclude that they are less able,
they would say “dumber” than more successful
peers. And are therefore less valuable.
Punishment
 The method of discipline used by teachers and
administrators may itself contribute to
discipline problems.
 Historically, punishment is how society has
dealt with infractions.