Do as I Say, Not as I Do' Never Works in Schools
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why modeling expected behavior is far more effective than simply telling students or teachers what to do.
Key Takeaways
- Actions speak louder than words - Students and teachers learn more from what leaders do than from what they say
- Model the behavior you expect - If you want teachers in classrooms, be in classrooms yourself; if you want calm responses, model calm
- Telling without showing breeds cynicism - People quickly stop listening when words don't match actions
Transcript
Do as I say, not as I do pretty much never works with kids, right?
When students see one thing in our example and hear something else in our words, what are they going to pay attention to?
They're going to listen to our actions more than our words.
And I think one of the strange things that's happening with school discipline lately is that we're relying more than ever on words to do the teaching and to do the expectation setting.
And I think that's just kind of fundamentally doomed to fail because students take what we do much more seriously than what we say.
So think for a moment about the discipline practices in your school right now.
Are they reliant on telling students what to expect and what they should do and how they should act?
Or are they reliant on clear action and clear consequences for violating expectations?
And I think...
This is one of those things that we know as parents we can't really get away with.
You can't really get away with saying that kids should do one thing, and then we set a completely contradictory example.
They're going to follow our example, not our words.
And I think with school discipline in particular...
We should kind of expect what we're seeing now, which is that when we say, you know, you can't act like that.
You can't hit somebody.
You can't fight.
You can't be violent in any way.
You can't be disrespectful.
We say and say and say and tell and tell and tell.
But what we're showing is the opposite.
We're showing that, yes, in fact, you can do those things.
You can do all of those things.
You can do them all in one day.
You can do them every single day and you will go right back to class.
That, I'm very concerned, is the message that we're sending to our students when we don't put consequences in place.
And we're creating kind of a mystery about what the real expectations are.
Rather than say, here are our expectations.
Here's what is going to happen if you don't follow them.
Here are the consequences that you can expect.
We're really just kind of...
inviting kids to guess and to find out for themselves what the consequences are going to be.
And often the consequences are, we're going to talk to you more if you didn't listen to us the first time we talked to you.
And we never actually show them anything.
So they don't believe us when we tell them what we're going to do, and then we don't actually do it.
So let me know what you think about this.
Are we doing too much telling and not enough showing when it comes to school discipline?
Let me know.