Perspective Taking in the Classroom

This week's article summary is article summary, a follow up on last week’s summary about classroom management, is about how teachers can use ‘perspective taking’ in dealing with students who act up in class.

Similar to a recent article summary in which I contrasted the teaching styles of my 6th grade and junior history teachers, classroom management systems similarly run the gamut from strict, no nonsense discipline to more collaborative, flexible classroom practices.

As with most things, effective classroom management involves bits and pieces of different techniques and strategies with the ‘firm-but-fair’ style being the most effective.

The recent study from Johns Hopkins discussed below grounds classroom management in classroom relationships, specifically between the teacher and his/her students. When this relationship is strong and trusting, classroom management and student behavior are better. 

Perspective taking is an additional tool where the teacher empathetically thinks about why a misbehaving child acts up and how he/she may feel about the way in which the teacher dealt with him/her. Viewing misbehavior and consequences/punishments through the eyes of the child can help a teacher better understand a wayward student, further enhance that relationship, and ideally improve the child’s behavior.

I have always subscribed to the Positive Discipline tenet that everyone wants to behave, fit in, and get along well with others. Yet even though we all want to behave, there are sundry reasons why people act out, push boundaries, throw tantrums, and mistreat others. (I’m currently dealing with this with my 3 and 5 year old granddaughters.) There have certainly been a few students I’ve had through the years that seemed innately obstinate, yet most of the troublesome ones simply needed me to better understand and relate to them. (You like me may have had similar experiences with colleagues.)

It’s not always easy for a teacher to see an incident through a child’s lens, as there are often strong emotions (exasperation, anger, etc.) involved. Still, as the article concludes, perspective taking is one classroom tool we can use to strengthen our relationship with that child, which in turn leads to better classroom management and student behavior.

Joe

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One of the most vexing dilemmas for teachers is finding the best way to respond to students who misbehave. Experts argue over whether the best classroom-management approach is a consistent, strict discipline or a more forgiving response where students discuss their grievances with an adult’s guidance, a process called restorative justice. Who can blame  teachers for feeling confused and ill-prepared to manage classroom disruptions?

In this column, I’m going to explain an idea that steals a page from marriage counseling: perspective taking. Its advocates advise teachers to put themselves in the shoes of their most perplexing, misbehaving students and simply imagine what they are thinking and feeling. 

It might seem far-fetched that a simple, imaginative exercise inside the mind of the person who isn’t misbehaving – the teacher – would make any difference to the classroom atmosphere. But a Johns Hopkins study found that students of teachers who were so trained reported better relationships with their teachers and earned higher grades. “We know, unequivocally, one of the best things that anyone can do for classroom management and for teachers to be effective at their jobs across a whole array of outcomes, is to improve teacher-student relationships.”

The theory is that students’ need or desire to misbehave might be reduced if they feel a positive connection with the teacher at the front of the classroom. 

In the Johns Hopkins study, kindergarten through ninth grade teachers received a 90-minute workshop. The session resembled a theater workshop. Teachers sat in pairs and were instructed to begin by thinking about their most frustrating student with whom they often had conflicts. “There’s some child who takes up like 70, 80, 90 percent of your emotional bandwidth.”

Teachers were then told to think of a particularly puzzling behavior or an incident with the student and tell her workshop partner about it. Then, the teacher was asked to retell the story from the child’s perspective. If I were a teacher in this workshop, playing the role of the student, I might say, “Mrs. Barshay always picks on me. I think it’s because she doesn’t like me. She’s out to get me. I think she’s just mean.”

For many teachers the juxtaposition of the two perspectives got them to internalize. “This is more of a two-way street. And I’ve gotten sort of sucked into my own perspective, a little too much.”

A couple of months later, teachers who had taken the workshop reported more positive relationships with their students than teachers who hadn’t taken it. Students in their classrooms, similarly, reported more positive relationships with their teachers.

A 90-minute session on understanding someone else’s perspective will never be a complete answer to student discipline.  And, more broadly, all of these preventive discipline ideas are not a substitute for the need to react to student disruptions in the moment. But it’s an interesting theory that appears to do no harm, and this thought experiment might be a helpful addition to the teacher’s toolbox.