Class Struggle

If you accept what was said by primary and pre-school teachers during the week, our classrooms are under siege.

Teachers are up against rising levels of punching, swearing, kicking, hitting, biting, verbal abuse and other disruptive, depressing behaviour in younger and younger children.

"As a senior, experienced teacher these children are demoralising and destroying my enthusiasm to provide an exciting and vibrant programme," said Judy Firkins, who has been teaching for more than three decades.

She told the annual meeting of the New Zealand Educational Institute, the biggest teachers' union, that she has been punched until bruised, struck with objects and has to restrain children in her class of five- and six-year-olds from attacking each other.

Her address was delivered to rousing applause - many teachers, it would seem, are feeling under attack.

Also raised was an NZEI survey which found one in seven primary school teachers were hit by students last year and 58 per cent were involved in aggressive verbal confrontations.

It's scary stuff. A rising tide of very young, very aggressive children, and teachers who are feeling more vulnerable than ever in the classroom.

Hang on a minute, says Kevin Knight, who doesn't buy their complaints. Knight is an educational psychologist and another veteran teacher, of 30 years, but who now runs a private teacher training institution in Christchurch. He also travels the country giving seminars on behaviour management in the classroom and says he gets grateful feedback from teachers.

What he says boils down to "Don't blame the kids - it's the teachers who are not handling their classrooms well."

Knight is not saying teachers are not good. They are sincere, honest people who care about their charges. It's just that the art of classroom management has slowly been eroded as school environments have changed radically. If there has been a rise in aggression and violence in children, it's only minor, he says firmly.

Told about the NZEI survey, that one in seven teachers had been hit and that some teachers are finding such incidents emotionally and sometimes physically stressful, Knight mutters "What a load of crap. Oh, God, did they get brushed in the corridor, did they?"

He is quick to follow with the comment he was not minimising what some teachers are feeling, saying there is no doubt there are extreme children in the system.

"But the fundamental solution to it is in advancing teachers' skills in behaviour management."

Society is not going down the gurgler, he believes, and is pretty much as it has always been.

But classes are more disorderly. Many teachers have lost the art of what he calls "moments of respectful formality", where a teacher can get a whole class listening, with no one talking, no one walking around and everyone being very polite.

"When you find a teacher who can get a moment of respectful formality in their class then it's very unlikely you're going to get the extreme behaviours."

A troubled child will still surface at times, he says, but they won't surface as often. Gaining that elusive moment is difficult to explain, he says, but it certainly can be taught.

The best way to see the effect is in a school which has interchanges of teachers, where you have a class taught by one teacher from 9am to 10am, then by another the next hour.

The same child who is causing a lot of grief, who comes to school with a lot of baggage, who is aggressive and abusive, behaves very differently with the different teachers.

In the first class you might think, "Oh, my God, how does the teacher cope?" says Knight.

"The child is all over the place, pushing other children, throwing work around, refusing to do what he's told and you think 'I totally understand what they're talking about at the NZEI conference. This is hard yakka. This teacher deserves double pay.'

"But then you go into the next class and you think 'what the hell's happened here?"'

The child may not be perfect but is behaving. He has become manageable.

A teacher controlling a class properly can manage children from the most dysfunctional homes, says Knight. Bad behaviour has nothing to do with a school's decile rating.

"All hell can be breaking loose at home, you know, uncle's got a P lab in the garage and all this sort of horrible crap and they come to school and they are managed so successfully that whatever's going on at home doesn't replicate at school."

Sometimes Knight will use a walkie-talkie or cellphone to walk a teacher through how to bring their class under control and says it's amazing how quickly it can be achieved.

"It's just a matter of knowing what to do and getting feedback as to how you're doing it." And the NZEI, he says, needs to stop looking at social change as the explanation and start looking at their members.

Knight is not a lone voice. Professor David Fergusson, founder of the Christchurch Health and Development Study in Otago University's psychological medicine department, does not believe violence and aggression in children is worse, though he views the solution slightly differently.

It's been known for a long time 5 per cent to 10 per cent of children have conduct disorders and anti-social behaviours, he says. The priority should be to diagnose and treat them. Below them, however, is another and, in some ways, more complicated layer of problem behaviour and this layer has been exacerbated by changing classroom management styles.

Teaching the teachers how to manage classes may mitigate some of the problems, Fergusson believes.

The school system has switched from the traditional, authoritarian and at times repressive system to an increasingly liberal system.

Traditional restraints are no longer allowed but they have not been replaced with alternative technologies to deal with problem behaviour.

Neither Fergusson or Knight are advocating bringing back the rod or strap. They say these were ineffective and only used by teachers who did not have control.

What Fergusson would like to see is the Ministry of Education instigate experiments to see what works. One approach would be to assume teacher training issues were the problem and assist there. Another could look at whether child behaviour, not teachers, was the problem and try some of the new behaviour techniques already on the market.

He is talking about programmes such as Triple P, a positive parenting programme from Australia, and Incredible Years, a Canadian programme to reduce childhood aggression and behavioural problems. But there is no point in just having these programmes available, says Fergusson. He has long thought psychologists should be available for clusters of schools to supervise and administer programmes and to assess and refer children.

This is not rocket science, says Fergusson. Neither is it rocket science that if classroom environments encourage childhood expression, a valid expression of childhood is aggression. If there are not mechanisms to control aggression it will win, and aggression is contagious. It does not take long for a child to learn that if they are being hit they should hit back.

He says, a little bemused perhaps, that teachers are no longer allowed to get hold of children, pick them up by the seat of their trousers and sit them down hard.

Fergusson could not help a chuckle when told kindy teachers were also concerned about abusive pre-schoolers. Toddlers are not called the terrible twos for nothing. Two years of age is the peak age for human aggression, says Fergusson. They are the world's biggest fighters, batterers and bullies.

Graham Woodhead, another veteran teacher with 30 years experience, rejects the idea that teachers have lost their skills. Just look at the number of dysfunctional families in society, he says.

"Some of us remember when there was one murder a year, now there's over one a day. I think that suggests something. You've got drugs out there that were never heard of, never invented, literally. The aggression in society was nowhere near what it is at the moment."

In the classroom the number of children who are disruptive is increasing, the level and type of disruption is increasing and this is symptomatic of society as a whole, he says.

Woodhead concedes some points. Teachers have not lost the skills but the means of classroom management. The world has gone politically correct - nowhere more so than at school.

"We have to be so careful now. Before we make any decisions on behaviour management or consequences we're looking ahead as to what will be the ramifications if we make the wrong move."

Children know their rights, he says. They can - and frequently do - quote chapter and verse of children and young persons legislation and threaten to call the police.

Whether you lean toward the teachers' views or the psychologists, it seems something must be done. The Post Primary Teachers Association added their concerns yesterday, saying in a statement that violence against teachers is one of the major issues affecting teachers' well-being and and job satisfaction.