As I
think about my career plans for next year when I will begin work as a first-year
high school math teacher, I am both excited and nervous about taking on
teaching’s many demands. Managing a classroom full of twenty students will be a
challenge which I would like to prepare for as much as possible. So when I was
asked to research a classroom management strategy for NCTQ, I jumped at the
opportunity.
During
my research, I came to learn of a classroom management strategy called the Good
Behavior Game (GBG); it was developed in 1967 by a novice fourth grade teacher
named Muriel Saunders. The GBG creates a functional, engaged classroom by
rewarding groups that best exhibit defined behaviors, such as following
classroom rules.
Education
is a field in which only one in 1,000 studies is replicated even once (Makel and Plucker). In contrast, the effects
of the GBG have been replicated in over 50 studies between 1969 and 2015. Each
study has proven the GBG’s effectiveness in reducing disruptive behaviors in
pre-K through 12th grade and in producing longer-term positive effects on
academic performance.
After
doing my own research on the GBG, I set off to determine how many of my future
colleagues will likely have learned about the strategy as they enter classrooms
around the country. The results were surprising. Of the 12 classroom management
textbooks evaluated in NCTQ’s classroom
management report,
including popular texts such as Marzano’s Classroom
Management that Works and Wong’s The
First Days of School, not a single one mentioned the Good Behavior Game.
While
I didn’t have ready access to a larger sample of textbooks, I was able to
estimate that approximately two percent of teacher candidates are exposed to
the GBG in their preparation courses. To arrive at this estimate, I looked
through all of the citations of Barrish (the seminal study of the
GBG) to find 16 classroom management textbooks published in the last 10 years
which reference the GBG. I then developed an inventory of the textbooks used in
90 classroom management courses. Of those 90 courses, only two use one of those
16 textbooks.
Why is
the GBG ignored in teacher prep when classroom management is so critically
important for novice teachers? NCTQ’s classroom
management reportprovides a full discussion, but in short, teacher educators promote
engagement as the be-all and end-all of classroom management. Approaches that
rely on behaviorist principles—such as the positive reinforcement at the heart
of the GBG—are belittled or ignored.
How wrong is it to deprive new teachers of an
approach that can allow them to be more effective instructors and their
students to be more successful learners? The Good Behavior Game is a useful, research-driven
strategy that I am fortunate to have learned before beginning my future
teaching career. The fact that so many of my peers will not have had the same
opportunity is an embarrassment for the field of teacher prep. Perhaps more
programs will benefit by adding this useful strategy in their preparation
curriculum.
