How can teachers discourage inappropriate conduct? (Wing Institute Original Paper)

Decreasing Inappropriate Behavior Overview. Teachers place inappropriate conduct at the top of the list of challenges they face. Unacceptable behavior ranges from problematic speech to violence. Evidence supports a continuum of strategies to decrease inappropriate behavior, beginning with the least intrusive and progressing through increasingly restrictive interventions. A simple but effective intervention is explicit student reprimand, a brief correction defining the error and explaining how to improve. Performance feedback is a more formal strategy that uses comments, charts, graphs, and reports to assist students analyze and improve performance by specifying expected behavior, unacceptable performance, and the consequences for each. Basic to reducing inappropriate conduct is planned ignoring (extinction), or withholding attention when misbehavior occurs. A multiform intervention is differential reinforcement. It combines reinforcement for appropriate behavior and ignoring misbehavior in various arrangements by increasing desired behavior to replace or decrease misbehavior. Systems that award points for appropriate behavior and remove points for misbehavior (response cost) are also effective. A more restrictive option for serious disruptive conduct is time out. It is the removal of a student to a less reinforcing environment when undesired behavior occurs.

Citation: Guinness, K., Detrich, R., Keyworth, R. & States, J. (2020). Overview of Decreasing Inppropriate Behavior. Oakland, CA: The Wing Institute. https://www.winginstitute.org/classroom-inappropriate-behaviors.

Link: https://www.winginstitute.org/classroom-inappropriate-behaviors