Education expert Ben Sacco says teachers doling out harsh punishment can actually worsen classroom misbehaviour
Education expert Ben Sacco explains why teachers who hand out detentions to disruptive students could just be making their classroom discipline problems worse.
Chewing gum in the classroom. Rudely muttering while the teacher delivers a lesson. Lashing out violently. Taking videos without permission on a banned mobile phone.
When a child acts up in class, they are the ones who take the blame – with stern words, time outs, detentions or suspensions.
But what if the teacher’s disciplinary approach is actually amplifying the classroom chaos, not calming it?
Educational expert Ben Sacco believes too many teachers miss opportunities to build connection and stop the behaviour before it even starts.
He says the disruption is made worse, not better, by teachers who don’t know that an angry young boy is enduring domestic violence at home or a distracted year 9 girl is battling an eating disorder that leaves her dehydrated and struggling to maintain concentration.
Sacco wants to disrupt the age-old “my way or the highway” method of handling disruptive behaviour in the classroom by challenging teachers to change the script.
In fact, he even goes so far as to say that the punitive approach is “autocratic” – and causing even more damage.
“Most of the situations that are causing escalations in our classrooms are where people are tagging kids as the problem, their behaviours are the problem and therefore they’re disrupting the learning,” says the former teacher and deputy principal, who spells out his quest to change the narrative in his new book, Disruption in Schools: Understand Me Before You Mark Me!
“I’m calling it out and saying that the educational professional in the room actually has an opportunity to respond rather than react because it’s the reaction that can become a trigger for the student, which can escalate a situation.
“If teachers understand appropriate ways to respond to behaviours of concern or perceived disruption in a room then we can actually slow down this blame game that it’s ‘always the child’, particularly if a child has experienced trauma.”
Sacco, a 41-year-old dad-of-two who has 20 years’ experience in the education sector and now runs successful consultancy Education Economy, says the system currently seems to be moving in the opposite direction towards a more draconic approach.
Social pressures are urging teachers to crackdown on unruly student behaviour.
“Teachers are keeping kids in at recess for not finishing their work,” Sacco says.
“Or teachers are writing up students for ‘defiance’ when they don’t follow instructions straight away. It’s about survival in a system that expects calm, compliant classrooms without acknowledging what students bring with them,” Mr Sacco says.
“There is a push nationally for more rules about behaviour and that’s supposed to solve any issues. But ask yourself, ‘Where is the evidence showing that trying to operate environments and schools like we’re still in 1930 and banning stuff is actually working?’,” he says.
“Unfortunately, some teachers think that when a kid says something like a swear word, then that deserves an expulsion. We really need to take a step back, refer to school policy and calmly respond in these cases.
“I’m of the view that if we make schools tougher through more rules, it’s not going to end well. It’s when we intervene with very autocratic rules that it escalates.”
Through his work in schools across the country, Sacco has witnessed some challenging behaviours. Students fighting at high school. Primary school kids banging on windows or doors and tipping chairs.
He says violence, intimidation and aggression are on the rise.
“We’re seeing young people take to sorting their issues at times through physical aggression,” he says.
“And that can be scary for other kids and also the teacher. There’s confronting behaviours around the inappropriate use of social media. There’s verbal abuse or verbal threats between young people who believe that’s how you solve issues today, by threatening the person. We’re seeing much more of that play out in classrooms than ever before.”
But Sacco also has been privy to the power of changing the script when it comes to disruptive behaviour.
In one school he worked with, a group of reckless girls mindlessly destroyed a sanitary pad dispenser in their school’s toilet, ripping it from the wall and scattering the period supplies installed to help students from financially tough backgrounds.
Instead of cracking the whip, the school’s “amazing” deputy principal took a calmer, more empathetic approach. She gathered the year 9 girls and appealed to their sense of justice.
She explained the impact on girls whose families struggle to afford period care – or maybe don’t care about their daughters’ needs. She urged them to open their hearts.
“The deputy principal says a lot of girls have come up to her after that saying ‘thanks for the conversation, it made it real for us’,” Sacco says.
“There has been no incidents in the toilets at that school in the last term. I just think that’s a beautiful example of the preventive mindset and how powerful it is. We’re putting in place preventive measures and they’re helping to inform our kids around things they just never thought about. That’s what good teaching and great school leadership is.”
Sacco says the “mindset shift” begins with refusing to see disruptive behaviour as the work of a “problem child” and instead understanding what triggers it. What is happening in the home? What has the child been exposed to – or even forced to endure?
Some children are dealing with situations of trauma, abuse or neglect that many adults would struggle with.
“If they are given extreme consequences that are disproportionate to the behaviour of concern, it can have a negative impact on their trust in the school and their teachers,” says Sacco, who has written two children’s books designed to help kids navigate unfamiliar situations or deal with unpleasant feelings.
“It might look like they’re being disruptive, not listening, or they’re angry, but it’s actually that they’re dealing with grief and loss.
“Adults can struggle to handle some of the things we deal with at age 30 and 40. And we’ve got kids under the age of 12 being asked to just ‘get it’. I just think it’s really unrealistic and sad of us to do that – personally and professionally.”
Sacco says there may even be a much more innocent explanation for behaviours. Perhaps the child who swears and acts out on sports day is just mirroring what they witnessed from passionate spectators at a weekend football match.
“They’re playing out that kind of same passion. But we’re missing the part where we explain to young people there’s different settings (where) we do different things. And that’s a really good life lesson around how we interact with other humans,” he says.
“We’re missing out on opportunities to help our young people know when you interact in a certain way and understand your audience. Swearing at a teacher isn’t acceptable, it can be hurtful to be on the receiving end. That said, if it was a slip-up, we can treat it as a teachable moment.”
Violence and disruption are being blamed as factors in falling teacher retention rates in Australia, with a 2022 federal government action plan for the profession marking “keeping the teachers we have” as one of its key priority areas.
Despite the challenges, Sacco is still full of hope for the profession, which he says is in a state of “regrowth and regeneration”.
“I definitely don’t believe we’re in trouble,” he says.
“In fact, a new study has found that teachers are actually less dissatisfied with their careers than widely thought, and the rate at which they leave the profession is lower than almost all other occupation groups.
“To keep the forward-moving approach we need to ask ourselves ‘Are we doing things because they matter and promote happiness and engagement and student outcomes or are we doing things that are negatively contributing to burnout and compassion fatigue and lack of motivation?’
“I’m trying to help people feel less like they’re going home tired and exhausted and help teachers stay in the profession. The alternative is dreadful for us, we have a further shortage and our kids suffer and our national education system suffers.”
Sacco insists his is not a “soft” approach. And it doesn’t mean children should get away with outrageous behaviour. When it happens, it needs to be addressed for the safety of the child, their classmates and the teacher.
But he says his methods – rooted in “body and brain science” – help to build a relationship between teacher and student that stops the behaviour before it starts in a classroom environment.
“Children can manage life adversity and learn at the same time and teachers can feel the joy of their teaching,” he says.
“We need good leaders, not micromanagers that are hurting our profession.”
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Originally published as Education expert Ben Sacco says teachers doling out harsh punishment can actually worsen classroom misbehaviour
