What is Misbehaviour?

Misbehaviors are behaviors that disturb the classroom’s learning environment. There are many different types of misbehaviors, but most of them occur for the same purposes. According to Bennett and Smilanich, these four goals are “attention, power, revenge, and assumed disability.”

The most obvious one would be gaining attention through misbehaving. Students misbehave in order to gain attention because they believe that when others are paying attention to them, they are being acknowledged by others (B &S.) “Power” means students continue misbehaving even after the teacher asked them to stop. These students feel the need to be in control of a situation in order to feel important to others in the classroom. They also want the teacher to lose the authority in the classroom, therefore, they try not to listen to the teacher’s instructions. They want the teacher to feel embarrassed. According to Bennett and Smilanich, revenge means that the student only feels important when s/he is hurting someone physically or emotionally. The student hurts others in order to balance his/her own feelings of being hurt. Lastly, “assumed disability” refers to student’s feelings of helplessness. S/he is basically “invisible” because s/he does nothing except show up for the class (B&S.)

In order to prevent misbehaviors in the classroom, the teacher should create a belonging environment for all the students. When a teacher can successfully create the feeling of belonging for every student in the class, students would be able to connect to one another fairly well. Hence, the relationships between not only the students themselves, but between the teacher and the students would improve. By improving the relationships between everyone in the classroom, the students’ self-recognition should be improved as well. Once a student has improved his/her self-recognition, misbehaviors would not be the only way to “gain attentions.” Soon, s/he will realize that the best and most effective way to gain attention from the class is to behave good and have good relationships with one another.