Stop Saying Behavior Is a 'Teachable Skill
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that framing all behavior as a teachable skill removes student accountability and places blame on teachers when students misbehave.
Key Takeaways
- Behavior isn't a skill like reading or math - Students who misbehave usually know the rules; the issue is choice, not knowledge
- This framing blames teachers - If behavior is a skill, then misbehavior means the teacher failed to teach it
- Accountability requires agency - Students must be treated as people who make choices, not as passive recipients of behavioral instruction
Transcript
Stop saying that behavior is a teachable skill.
It sounds right, but it's wrong.
Here's the thing.
When we're talking about behavior in schools, what we mean is behaving yourself.
What we mean is not doing things that are not allowed in school, especially things that hurt others or seriously disrupt learning.
Not doing those things is not a skill.
In fact, not doing anything is not a skill.
Skills are things that you do, like throw a football or solve a math problem.
They're not things that you don't do.
And self-control is a thing, but it's not a skill.
It's not right to call it a skill.
And when we treat it as a skill and treat it as specifically a teachable skill, then we end up taking responsibility for fixing student behaviors that we cannot fix through instruction.
And I think that's where a lot of schools are going wrong with behavior is they're trying to use instruction for non-instructional purposes.
problems.
They're taking a problem of executive function.
They're taking a problem of self-control.
They're taking a problem of personal choice.
When a student is making a decision to behave in a certain way, the school is reframing that as an instructional problem and then wondering why that doesn't work.
Why can't I teach you a lesson on how to not punch people?
Well, probably because you already know how to not punch people it's not confusing it's not complicated and most of the time the student does not punch people so that's where it's pretty obvious that this is not a skill the student can and does almost all the time not do the thing that we want them not to do a skill is not something you don't do a skill is something you do so you can develop skills around self-control you can develop skills around de-escalating yourself and solving problems with other people but the idea that refraining from bad behaviors is a skill has the whole idea backwards and is just a contradiction in terms like this is just not the right concept to use to think about behavior and that's frustrating to us because like it's kind of the when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail syndrome as educators we like to see every problem as an instructional problem, right?
We're good at teaching.
We can teach things.
We can teach lessons.
We can give examples.
We can practice.
We can teach routines and procedures.
We can teach expectations for behavior.
But when a student is not behaving for whatever reason, it's not an instructional issue.
And when we repeatedly frame it as an instructional issue, what we end up doing is we end up blaming educators for failing to teach, right?
If your students don't learn the content that you are supposed to teach, well, it's kind of reasonable to look at the teaching, right?
Maybe that's part of it at least.
But when teaching is not at all a part of it, when we have that part wrong, it is completely inappropriate to blame the teacher, to ask the teacher, what did you fail to teach?
What need did you fail to meet?
for this young person so that they behaved in that way.
We have to stop trying to avoid the fact of personal responsibility and avoid the fact that decisions are made by the individual and that behavior is under the control of the individual, not something that teachers can teach.
You can teach expectations, but you can't teach not doing something as a skill.
It's not a skill.