Making Management Affordable

Management Can Be Expensive

I very much wanted to understand how these natural teachers could get so much good behavior from problem students. I especially wanted to know how they did it without working themselves to death.

At this time, we at the university were in the throes of the "behavior modification revolution." We had learned that consequences govern the rate of behavior, and we were setting up contingency management programs for every behavior problem in the classroom from acting out to social isolation.

The real problem, from my perspective, was cost. We were designing individualized management programs for students with problems such as aggression, social isolation, and oppositionalism. Each program was custom-built and required conferences after school, data collection, specialized contingencies, and constant monitoring.

The good news was that these programs worked. The bad news was that they cost an arm and a leg. I once calculated that teachers who were implementing one of our "B-Mod" programs had to spend between 30 and 45 minutes a day just to implement it.

To my mind these apparent classroom successes were, in fact, thoroughly impractical. We had just consumed the teacher's planning period to solve one behavior problem. The teacher had a dozen other problems in the same classroom that were just as serious.

A Teacher Perspective On Cost

I came from a family of teachers - my mother, sister, aunts, great aunts, and many cousins. When we get together, it is like a staff development conference.

Growing up in such a family, I absorbed certain lessons about the teaching profession without anyone ever having to explain them to me. Prominent among them are:

• Teachers work twice as hard as the general public ever imagines.
• The last thing in the world that a teacher will ever have is "extra" time.

I knew from the beginning that if I came up with some hot new classroom management procedure that cost the teacher extra time for planning or record keeping, I could forget it. If a system of classroom management is to truly help the teacher, it must save time. It must make your life easier.