LOL @ Bhvr Anlsis & Txting ;-)

From a discussion on crisis management at grad school tonight, we got onto the topic of cell phones in schools. Some folks recommended a straight-up ban. I disagreed, and suggested instead we model appropriate use of technology for our students and focus on trying to reduce or eliminate their desire to use phones in class. The conversation moved toward the most frequently witnessed use of cell phones in schools: texting.

I was challenged: How will you take a cell phone away from a girl who hides it in her skirt? What about all the cheating kids do with phones? My basic response was this: if the kids are engaged throughout the class, they’ll be less likely to drift to their phones. To cheating, I said I believed that if cell phone cheating is that rampant in a class, the problem is not the phones, it’s probably either a) the assessment, or b) a lack of classroom management. I tend to agree with the folks who propose teaching appropriate uses for technology rather than outright bans, if for no other reason than that bans rarely work anyway.

As I thought more about this discussion on the ride home, I thought about how neatly the “ed tech” angle ties into an aspect of school psychology, behavior analysis.

Behavior analysis relies on a fairly simple principle we call ABCAntecedent, Behavior, Consequence. If the Behavior is “texting during class”, there must also be some sort of Setting Event or Antecedent – what immediately or not-so-immediately precedes the Behavior. Likewise, there is also a Consequence – what happens immediately after. According to behavior analysts, we can guide behavior by altering the Antecedents and Consequences.

Example 1:

Barbara is an another boring English class. The teacher is not engaging, and rarely introduces any variety into the class. Bored stiff, Barbara goes for her phone to check her messages and text a friend. Her texting, a direct violation of policy, goes unnoticed by the teacher.

Antecedent/Setting Event: Boring class; no engagement.
Behavior: Texting
Consequence: Friend contacted, boredom momentarily relieved.
Verdict: Behavior reinforced – likely to continue.

Let’s switch things up.

Example 2:

Same student, same boring class, same text. Barbara gets caught this time, and is written up. When the vice-principal gets to her writeup three days later, she is assigned detention.

Antecedent/Setting Event: Boring class; no engagement.
Behavior: Texting
Consequence: Short-term: Friend contacted, boredom momentarily relieved. Long-term: Detention.
Verdict: Behavior reinforced – likely to continue. Why? The immediacy of boredom relief outweighs the detention that won’t come for another week.

Rain down detentions on poor Babs; it won’t make much of a difference. More work is also created for the teacher (who has to write the student up) and the vice-principal (who has to deal with the situation). How do we make everyone happy?

Change what happens before the behavior occurs – head it off at the pass.

Example 3:

Same student, same English class. Teacher creates engaging lessons, varies activities and assessments. Makes learning meaningful to students. Teacher alleviates boredom so Babs doesn’t have to. The need for boredom relief is removed; the phone stays tucked away. Babs has no more detentions, the teacher doesn’t have to write her up any more, and the vice-principal can focus on more pressing disciplinary matters.

Sure, these scenarios are a little oversimplified, but not so much so that they’re inaccurate. The moral of the story for me is that the “great cell phone debate” (how silly will this look in 20 years?) is not nearly as much about technology as it is engaging young people. Take away their cell phones and they’ll write notes to each other. Take away their notes and they’ll fiddle with something else. Create an environment that does not engender behaviors such as texting answers to one another, and you won’t have these problems (for God’s sake people, walk around your classrooms and LOOK at your students while they test! Have kids place their phones on their desks if it’s that bad! Let them try to text the answers to essay questions to each other, instead of multiple choice questions, and see how far they get!).

Texting, like all behaviors, serves a function. Remove the need for that function, and it doesn’t matter if you’re Classroom 2.0 or Classroom 0.1 Alpha RC2 – your kids will be with you, and not elsewhere.

7 Comments

  • You speak here like a Brave New Administrator!

    I agree with you that we can stop certain behaviors before the evince themselves, but telling teachers to ‘engage’ their students is a tall order.

    I’ve witnessed far too many teachers impressed with their own instruction. They ‘think’ they are creating engagement, when in reality, their students are like those poor little Gelflings in the Dark Crystal. Slowly, their life force is being sucked away from them.

    Some teachers tend to think silence and complacency from their students is equal to engagement. If they’re quiet, then they are listening, and if they are listening, they must be thinking! I’ve heard teachers tell me this.

    So the problem isn’t cell phones. They are, as you note, just the tool-du-jour to combat an obvious problem that students clearly recognize:

    They aren’t being challenged.

    Obviously, not every student responds well to challenge, but we surely do a disservice to the ones that want, hope, and dream of being an active part of their own learning.

    Maybe we should just text those kids: I C U & I FEEL UR PAIN

  • Oh man, your post already left me in a disagreeable state but then, after I forgot to punch in the anti-spam word, I lost my comment. Ergh. May I suggest a different comment plug-in?

    As best as I remember it:

    ——–

    Oh man. You’ve completely exculpated students for their cell phone usage. Canny move. If a student is texting, it’s a boring class. If a student isn’t texting, it’s an engaging class.

    Breaking out of that circle for a second (which by and large I recognize and agree with) there’s another example to consider:

    Engaging class. Engaging teacher. Student has no temptation to text. The student receives a text.

    Now it isn’t just a matter of the teacher alleviating a student’s boredom; she’s gotta alleviate the student’s curiosity, which ain’t a fair pass/fail benchmark for “engaging lesson.”

    “Make better lessons” is as simplistic as “take their cell phones away,” just in the other direction.

    Students have gotta learn that when they read and reply to that text they are initiating a conversation, which if they are already in one (whether between boss and employee or teacher and class or student and student) that’s rude.

    Your scenarios there give ’em a free pass.

  • Oh man, your post already left me in a disagreeable state but then, after I forgot to punch in the anti-spam word, I lost my comment. Ergh. May I suggest a different comment plug-in?

    As best as I remember it:

    ——–

    Oh man. TWICE now. First yer spam plugin and then Edublogs takes some downtime and my comment’s gone AGAIN. Lucky I copied it up beforehand.

    Antecedent: Damian writes something interesting.
    Behavior: Dan writes a lengthy, thought-provoking comment.
    Consequence: Dan’s comment is deleted.
    Verdict: Behavior extinguished.

    The post as best as I remember it:

    ——–

    Oh man. You’ve completely exculpated students for their cell phone usage. Canny move. If a student is texting, it’s a boring class. If a student isn’t texting, it’s an engaging class.

    Breaking out of that circle for a second (which by and large I recognize and agree with) there’s another example to consider:

    Engaging class. Engaging teacher. Student has no temptation to text. The student receives a text.

    Now it isn’t just a matter of the teacher alleviating a student’s boredom; she’s gotta alleviate the student’s curiosity, which ain’t a fair pass/fail benchmark for “engaging lesson.”

    “Make better lessons” is as simplistic as “take their cell phones away,” just in the other direction.

    Students have gotta learn that when they read and reply to that text they are initiating a conversation, which if they are already in one (whether between boss and employee or teacher and class or student and student) that’s rude.

    Your scenarios there give ’em a free pass.

  • Thanks for stopping in, guys!

    @Ken: I haven’t yet figured out how to break folks of the “silence = engagement” fallacy. It’s not one I agree with, but one that tends to be more popular than I’d like.

    @Dan: Your point and example are well-taken. My admittedly oversimplistic scenario only works if the setting event is a boring class, and the function of the behavior is to alleviate boredom. That’s why I also advocate, as I noted in the first paragraph, for modeling and discussing appropriate uses of tech (including cell phones). Do all this, and engender an atmosphere of respect for one another in your classroom (while making it clear that social “texting” during a lesson is as rude as socializing during a lesson), and I think you’ll reach enough kids to minimize the classwide occurrences of the behavior.

    I don’t wish to give anyone a free pass; even in a boring class, if a student texts and is breaking a rule, they should be subject to the appropriate disciplinary measure. My beef is with the effectiveness of the punishment: will it stop the kid from texting the way a more engaging environment (or more attentive teacher) would? I still say no (teenagers aren’t always known for their ability to think rationally in the long-term).

    What I’m talking about is altering the environment to minimize the desire/opportunity to text so that we don’t even have to get to that point, thereby saving everybody some headaches. Let’s make the behavior less likely to occur. That’s not to say that texting kids = boring class/teacher. But we’d be fooling ourselves if we didn’t at least consider that to be a possible contributing factor.

    I think a combination of the two – creating an engaging environment AND teaching/modeling appropriate use – should be sufficient. It won’t completely eradicate the texting issue (can we try banning notebook doodling next?), but I think it will reduce it significantly.

    And yes, to address both of your points, “make class not boring” is easier said than done. But I know I’ve been working my ass off toward that goal for years. I may not always be successful, but I’m always working on it, as I’m sure you guys are – shouldn’t we all be doing that anyway?

    Sorry about the technical difficulties, by the way; I didn’t even know there was a spam trap on here. I haven’t pimped by blog with any add-ons other than what Edublogs gave me; I’ll have to have a look under the hood here. Thanks for sticking it out, though!

  • NB: The points I raise in the above comment are aimed at the general ed. population, and fail to take into consideration the vastly different needs of the special ed. population, particularly resource room-style classes. As William Shakespeare once said, that there’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

    PS: Congrats to Dan for leaving the 100th comment on this blog (even if it did happen due to Edublogs borking your 99th comment).

  • My comment doesn’t give enough credit to your point that creating engaging lessons is the absolute most effective form of classroom management.

  • Okay, so making ‘engaging lessons’ is really easy to say and I’ve attended plenty of conferences (and I think even an unconference, but I wasn’t quite sure, but that’s an issue for another day) where people roughly my height implore that the seated souls listening rush back to their classrooms and create lessons that look nothing like the presentations they’ve listened to, but everyone gets back to their classes and winds up just scratching some body parts b/c they are so gosh darn confused about where to begin.

    Here’s the kick in the rump: They’ve begun. I’ve witnessed plenty of teachers give blah-humbug lesson and they meet with me to reflect and cry. They want to do something different. They express boredom just teaching the content; they don’t even want to think about what it must’ve been like for the students. So we plan and consider and we come up with a new way.

    Note: new, not a guarantee for ‘better’.

    And away the teacher goes, teaching content and skills in a new way that, at the very least, is more engaging to her. That’s a big, big step in achieving increased student engagement.

    An attempt at something new and a ‘less-than-stellar’ result is far, far better than no attempt at all. It’s overly simplistic, but let’s face it, it’s spot-on.

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