A majority of Oklahoma City teachers revealed they have experienced violent student behavior in classrooms through an anonymous survey the American Federation of Teachers conducted.
The survey took place over a 10-day span in October and received 836 responses from teachers. Over 80 percent of Oklahoma City schoolteachers reported being on the receiving end of violence from a student since the start of this school year, according to the Examiner.
“I am a little surprised by level of violence that this survey has brought to light,” student-teacher Kindra Anderson said. “I have never felt unsafe in a classroom. Although, it does not shock me that teachers are struggling with student behavior because what I am seeing in the classroom is that discipline at school is not followed up with at home. Parents seem to be more disconnected now than ever before.”
Student-teacher Rachel Allen said she is not surprised by the violence.
“Our society has moved into a culture that does not respect authority,” Allen said. “When kids have behavioral issues parents are blaming the teachers instead of the child.”
The survey’s purpose is to bring issues to light that will lead to an amendment in the district’s code of conduct. The need of more discipline methods to be enforced was voted on by 64 percent of survey respondents. Nearly 90 percent of teachers said they are responsible for managing most of the student discipline. Overall, the survey concluded that current disciplinary methods are not solving problems as well as they could, according to NewsOK.
Allison Cassady, a professor of Education at Oklahoma Christian University, was a first grade teacher for five years in Texas, serving for a school whose population was primarily from government housing units. According to Cassady, many of the students had behavioral and emotional disorders that were commonly linked to violence at home.
“A lot of classroom management is prevention as opposed to reaction,” said Cassady. “The more you can establish routines and hold your students to expectation and teach them what you expect, then the more successful your classroom will be.”
Cassady said negative behavior is often used to get attention, rather then inflict actual harm.
“Students that are seeking negative attention need to be taught to seek positive attention,”Anderson said.
Handling discipline within the classroom can sometimes be too much for new educators to take and leads to some leaving their jobs in education altogether.
“Classroom management is at the top of the list for what they call teacher attrition – teachers getting out of the field of education entirely,” Cassady said.
Cassady has experienced violence in the classroom on multiple occasions at a previous job: from a first-grade student punching her in the stomach and kicking her shins to a student throwing a desk across the room and another threatening to kill her with a bomb.
Cassady said these children didn’t know better and lacked the self-control needed to understand that it was incorrect behavior. She said there tends to be more violence in urban district schools like ones in inner Oklahoma City.
“Many Oklahoma City schools are lower income schools where both parents might have to work multiple jobs and there isn’t enough time to spend with their child,” Allen said. “There are many factors that play into school violence.”
Cassady said another cause of the increase in violence may be because of behavioral issues, “We have a higher rate of attention disorders, which a lot of those encompass an impulse control factor,” Cassady said.
Another reason for violent and disrespectful behavior is because students are sometimes the recipients of it in their own homes.
According to NewsOK, there has been a 42.5 percent reduction in out-of-school suspensions in the past two months. Forty-seven percent of survey recipients said they had written between one and five referrals.
Cassady said the reduction might show that suspension is an ineffective form of discipline because students use it as an opportunity to miss school rather than to change behavior.
Allen said misbehavior could be handled in different ways according to what the teacher is capable of keeping in control.
“Every teacher needs to have a discipline plan in place for when aggression does happen,” Allen said. “It also helps when your principal is on board and is willing to back you.”
Discipline should originate in the classroom rather than defaulting to administrative disciplinary actions, according to Cassady.
“There are different philosophies that say as classroom managers and disciplinarians we need to take care of our own problems in our own classroom and not just send kids to the principle, because that sends our power away, we’re giving our power away as teachers,” Cassady said.
Ultimately, Cassady said enforcing discipline consistently could result in changes of the students’ behavior in a positive way.
“When you see a child turn that corner and finally realize ‘oh, okay, this teacher really does have my back and has my best interest,’ it’s a pretty powerful thing,” Cassady said.
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