Praise instead of licks

The study, completed one month before Britain will pass a law giving teachers "a clear legal right" to discipline unruly pupils, found that praising pupils is a far more effective method of maintaining discipline than scolding them. As reported in yesterday’s Sunday Newsday, teachers in Britain have been sceptical of this study, arguing that its recommendations cannot work in the case of very troublesome students. And there is no doubt that teachers in this country would scoff even more.

After all, ours is a culture where poor student performance is often explained by the student being "harden". When asked about the causes of student misbehaviour in a 2004 survey on delinquency in schools carried out by Professor Ramesh Deosaran, 34 percent of teachers put the blame on parental neglect, 13 percent on peer pressure, seven percent on poor school management, and five percent on poor teaching. Interestingly, the same percentage of teachers at both the composite and the ‘prestige’ schools — seven to nine percent — blamed "negative student attitude" and "poor academic performance" for delinquent behaviour. But, when asked what should be done to lessen delinquency, the teachers’ responses were contradictory — 40 percent of them recommended better school management, 15 percent said teaching should be improved, and just 14 percent recommended more parental involvement. In other words, there was a mismatch between blame and solutions.

Professor Deosaran also found that there was nearly unanimous support from teachers and parents for corporal punishment "with some controls". But this just reveals the unenlightened attitude of most adults towards young people in our society. There is no effective education system anywhere in the world which uses corporal punishment as a method of teaching or to maintain classroom discipline. Indeed, the British study found that, after teachers were trained in how to praise and reinforce good pupil behaviour, 94 percent of the students ended up obeying their teachers. In Trinidad and Tobago, luckily, the Education Ministry has been steadfast in its refusal to allow corporal punishment to return to the nation’s classrooms.

The British study concluded that, if students had to be punished, the punishment should be "mild and irksome" — for example, keeping the student back for ten minutes of the lunch break. But what this country’s teachers clearly have not learned is that student discipline is best maintained by creating a learning atmosphere for their charges. The first requirement here is to create what modern educators call "a climate of delight" in the classroom. Children must feel relaxed, welcomed, and emotionally secure, because learning simply cannot take place otherwise. Although Professor Deosaran’s survey did not deal specifically with this issue, he did find that 40 percent of students at urban senior comprehensive schools felt uncomfortable at school, as compared to a mere ten percent at the girls prestige schools.

But the changes needed to improve our education system cannot happen unless teachers are trained to handle student misbehaviour and, more importantly, trained in using innovative methods to make students interested in their lessons. Such training is the responsibility of the Education Ministry, and then the school itself must facilitate teachers in using the methods and means they have learned. Without such reforms, the nation’s schools will surely continue to be incubators for misbehaviour and academic failure.