Problem behaviors in the classroom

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

Here's the deal. I don't have behavioral issues in my classes. I really don't. Whether that's due to the kinds of classes I teach, the fact that most of my students share similar backgrounds, the way my class activities tend to build a sense of community, or a quirk of my personality I don't know. Whatever the reason, I just don't contend with the issues other professors seem to have.

That said, problem behaviors do crop up for many professors, so I do think that establishing classroom norms is useful, particularly if your class covers controversial topics or if you have students with widely disparate backgrounds. 

There's nothing new about this idea, of course; I've been to countless teaching workshops over the years that discuss the importance of norms and strategies for establishing them. Nevertheless, these workshops have always lacked a theoretical framework for creating cooperative groups.

My approach to establishing classroom norms, then, would be to draw on the work of the late Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom. In her work on community-based resource management, she uncovered a core set of institutional principles that need to be in place for groups to function cooperatively. It turns out that the same principles that help, say, farmers manage an irrigation system or villagers sustainably manage a community forest, apply to virtually every cooperative group endeavor. While having these principles in place does not guarantee prosocial behavior, lacking them usually spells disaster.

Rather than a completely open discussion about norms in the classroom, then, I would structure the conversation to focus on what Ostrom called "design principles." Very briefly, these, adapted for the classroom, are:

• • Shared values
    • People cooperate more when they have shared values. These help to establish a sense of group identity and common purpose.
  • Congruence between benefits and costs
    • Groups tend to fall apart quickly when some people perceive that they are doing all the work while other people are reaping the benefits. Effort and rewards need to be distributed evenly.
  • Students have procedures for making their own rules
    • Just having a group discussion about classroom norms establishes this principle. Even so, having procedures in place so these rules can be revisited and amended if necessary is a good idea.
  • Regular monitoring of the classroom environment
    • Are people abiding by the norms? Are the established norms actually working? Are they honoring shared values? Some kind of process has to be in place to ensure things are working as intended.
  • Graduated consequences
    • If there are no consequences for violating norms, then there's really no point in establishing them in the first place. However, consequences needn't be harsh. Indeed, in most cases just letting the violator know that their transgression has been noted is enough to bring them back in line. It's nevertheless a good idea to have more serious consequences waiting in the wings if gentle reminders don't work.
  • Conflict resolution mechanisms
    • Disagreements in social groups are perfectly natural. It's important, then to have mechanisms in place that can resolve those conflicts quickly and fairly.
  • Minimal recognition of rights by authorities
    • If a class works to establish norms that honor their shared values only to have a professor impose their own rules, then what's the point? While it's reasonable, I think, for a professor to have some input during the process, that input should be in an advisory role, not a dictatorial one.
  • Nested enterprises
    • The norms established by the class should apply whether the class is having a full discussion or whether they're working in small groups or individually.

There is a lot of research to show that groups that have these institutional principles in place perform better than those that don't. I would expect, then, that a class that establishes norms informed by Ostrom's design principles would be highly cooperative, functioning at a much higher level to achieve the course objectives than classes with student-informed norms that neglected to consider these principles or, worse, in which rules were simply imposed by the professor.

Another advantage to following Ostrom's design principles is that regular monitoring and making adjustments if necessary are built into the system. Refinement, then, isn't an extra consideration. It's part of the process, and feedback comes not just from the professor's observations, but from students all along the way. Naturally, reaching a consensus about 8 institutional principles will likely take longer than simply voicing some preferences about whether people should raise their hands to speak in class, but the norms that are established along these lines are likely to be far more enduring. Just as importantly, consciously considering each principle becomes a teachable moment in its own right.