Attendance, Behavior, Cell Phones: The ABCs of Why Teaching Has Gotten So Hard
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder breaks down the three biggest factors making teaching harder than ever: chronic absenteeism, behavioral challenges, and cell phone distractions.
Key Takeaways
- Attendance is collapsing - Chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, and schools struggle to get students to show up consistently
- Behavioral expectations have eroded - Weakened discipline policies leave teachers without tools to maintain a productive classroom
- Cell phones are a constant distraction - Devices compete with instruction all day, and many schools still lack effective phone policies
- These three factors compound each other - Absent students miss behavioral expectations, present students are distracted by phones, and teachers bear the burden of all three
Transcript
Why has teaching gotten so much harder?
I think it's three things, attendance, behavior, and cell phones, ABC.
And I think together, those three factors explain this just shocking poll finding.
This new survey from Morning Consult found that the number of teachers who would recommend the teaching profession.
I think that's a great kind of gut check for how teaching is going.
Like, would I recommend that my own child go into teaching as a profession?
Would I recommend that somebody else embark on this career?
The number of teachers saying yes to that is now at a record low since the pandemic.
And if you look at this graph, you can see that just one year ago, we were at a record high.
It was much, much higher.
And now we're barely in the double digits in terms of how many people would recommend the teaching profession.
And I think it comes back to those three things, attendance, behavior, and cell phones.
And they're deeply linked together.
See, students are not coming to school and they're not making nearly the progress that they need to.
And that's discouraging to teachers and also very disruptive to the teaching itself.
When a lot of your kids are absent, you can't make the progress that you're used to making and that you feel like you need to make with your class.
That has an impact on behavior.
Kids do not behave as well when they are feeling behind, when they are feeling disconnected, they haven't been there consistently.
And behavior has a whole lot of other things going on with it, too, where we've tried to pull back on consequences.
We've tried to use restorative practices.
We've tried to do all these things that seem less punitive and seem like they might keep kids in class more, but they have the effect.
of worsening overall behavior worsening learning and i think worsening attendance and then the third piece is cell phones cell phones are a huge distraction huge disruption and i've seen other polls from morning consult that said that it's i feel like it's really discouraging based on what these polls are saying to other students that a lot of kids are on their cell phones so i think we've got to urgently solve the cell phone problem i think that will help with the attendance problem and i think we've got to do everything we can on behavior because all these problems are intertwined with one another.
Let me know what you think.