Over the Rainbow
Why You'll Never Find the Pot of Gold at the End of a Behaviour Chart
Behaviour charts look so fun, so playful. They’re bright coloured, and they decorate the classroom wall. Sometimes there’s a rainbow. Or a traffic light. Children’s names or sometimes their faces are moved up and down. But parents tell me that their children see them in their nightmares.
They say that their children wake up in night, worried that they’ll be on the cloud again, for all to see. Or they tell me that their little boy comes out of school every day mystified as to what other children do to get on the rainbow, because he just can’t do the same. They tell me that their children worry in the evenings about being demoted, that for some it is a constant preoccupation. Even those who are always in the ‘best’ group worry in case they’re not there tomorrow. One mother told me that her son knows exactly how many behaviour points everyone else has – and he can’t miss it, because that’s what the class White Board defaults to. He knows that he only has half the number of the ‘best student’ and he think that that is because he’s not as good as her.
For behaviour charts are about shame and anxiety. They won’t tell you that on the packet, but the way that they work is that if a child doesn’t do what the teacher wants, they are publicly shamed. Shame is a very intense emotion, and it’s not surprising that children want to avoid it. They get anxious about that awful feeling which they know is coming if they can’t sit still, or don’t finish their Maths, or if they jump up and answer a question without putting their hand up. That is literally how these charts are meant to work. Children want to avoid shame, and the fear of shame means they change their behaviour.
Adults can switch shame on, but it’s not so easy to turn it off. Children carry that shame with them after the day is finished. They learn to think of themselves as bad, or as not as good as the other children – and that learning sticks. By the time they are teenagers, some fo them they think they’re useless. They think there’s no point in trying, because they’ll never amount to anything.
Behaviour charts look so innocent and fun. But behind the cheerful primary colours is something more sinister. They are tools which use shame and anxiety to control. And there will always be side effects of that.
Some people will defend behaviorism in schools on the basis that workplaces uses behaviorism too - but it’s different: workplaces pay employees, and employees can quit.
If children wish to be in behaviorist schools because it will better prepare them for a certain kind of life, fine; but there is no justification to impose it on children who do not consent to it
I remember doing placements when training as a teacher in the early 2000s and rewards and sanctions were a big part of the ‘behaviour management’ module. The implication was that if you didn’t make the children behave, there was no way that they would do it naturally and the onus was on the teacher to ‘manage’ the behaviour, ie make them sit still and comply.
I have used star charts in my class but with a points system where children could collect points to get prizes and a variety were on offer so those who found ‘behaving’ difficult could easily collect a few points for a small prize and those who ‘always behaved’ could collect longer for a bigger prize. This promoted the idea of saving up for something but didn’t penalise those students who couldn’t. I’m still not sure it achieved what I hoped but I felt it was a less shameful way of promoting good behaviour which is what the school wanted and I was graded on.
As a parent I’ve been on the receiving end of rewards and sanctions with both my autistic boys. Eldest liked to follow the rules and never had a meltdown in school, but because he didn’t have behaviour issues, he went under the radar and never got rewarded for the amount of effort it took to keep that up. Youngest has a PDA profile and found it impossible to cope with the amount of pressure to maintain ‘good’ behaviour which resulted in him not being able to attend school at all. He will carry the belief that he is ‘the worst child ever’ with him for a long time - this is what he internalised though it’s not what the school intended or ever said directly.
Personally I wonder when this trend for ‘behaviour management’ changed? When I was at school 40 years ago, there were no extrinsic rewards and very few sanctions - you could have to miss a playtime for badly disruptive behaviour but few students were disruptive. Yes, the teacher was God and maybe stricter than now but I don’t see that much difference. As a teenager, it was rare to get detentions - they were a pretty major event, yet last year my 11 yo got a lunchtime detention for forgetting a ruler (?!)
Perhaps if we credit our young people with the skills that they actually have and respect that they are people in their own right, along with accepting that if they can do well they will, we can recognise that ‘bad behaviour’ will not be solved by shaming, only by identifying the underlying issue that is making it impossible for that child to meet those expectations in that moment.