Student Attitude Adjustment or Teacher Attention Adjustment?

Like a lot of teachers, believe that attention-seeking students needed attitude adjustments. So when kids acted out, teachers not only punished them but also preached to them about changing their attitudes. But nothing changed until, the best way to modify someone else's behavior is to modify your behavior. 

In particular, we needed to start focusing our attention on constructive behavior at the expense of disruptive behavior rather than the other way around. These are a few suggested ways:

Give attention to attention givers. Students who act inappropriately do indeed deserve attention, since acting out can be a sign that children need help. But they don't deserve attention at the expense of students who are acting appropriately. It's a fire that needs to be put out now, either ignore it--which can often extinguish it--or address it at a more opportune time. Sometimes, however, even though you may ignore students' behavior, some of their classmates may indulge it. It often helps in such cases to focus your attention on the attention givers rather than the attention seekers. Talk to students one on one about the consequences of letting someone else take them off their games, and collaborate with them on strategies for staying focused on learning. Students' inappropriate behavior subsided once their classmates ignored it. No audience, no antics.




Leverage all available attention. Attention is attention, and since there's only one of you and 30 or so students, be sure to give kids opportunities to get their attention needs met from each other--in constructive ways, of course. 

Communicate non-verbally. The more you're able to meet students' attention needs with actions rather than words, the more orderly your classroom. A smile, a scowl, a thumbs-up, a thumbs-down, a raised eyebrow, a note, close proximity to students needing redirection or assistance--just a few of many non-verbal ways to give students attention without any disruption.

There's no way around it: all children need and deserve attention. And how you manage a classroom full of kids vying for attention can make or break your overall effectiveness as a teacher. So if students aren't acting the way you want them to, pay attention to what you're paying attention to and how you're paying attention to it. We may discover that: it wasn't that students needed an attitude adjustment; we needed an attention adjustment.