Teaching – what a wonderful profession, a teacher gets the privilege of shaping the “minds” of the future.  What a powerful profession to have the ability to make or break a student’s mind and/or emotional welfare one grade at a time.  I watched a group of first grade students fall apart,  break down and begin to cry at the thought of being reprimanded for their behavior.  This same scenario was true for a group of 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th graders.  There is a classroom management technique known as “the walk of shame” in this writer’s opinion.

Members of a particular social media platform went ballistic  when the mother of a child beat him in the street for participating in criminal behavior and she posted it on social media;  there were approximately 167K comments for the child who had his hair cut off by his mother – posted to social media; yet another incident where the father beat his daughter for what seemed like an hour over inappropriate posting on a social media cite – it was re-posted more than the 10 Commandments and the beating was favorably noted.

Yet, did you know your elementary children are taking “the walk of shame”, it lives and breathes in most elementary school.  The “walk” goes a little like this – Ms. Ruler is teaching a class when she notices Corey is talking to Shaniqua again after either a verbal warning or “the look” is given to him.  Ms. Ruler interrupts the class and states loudly to Corey what is the rule about talking during class?  Corey’s face is changing from a playful 3rd grader to an face of sadness, as Ms. Ruler tells him to get up and move his ice-cream stick from the Green cup to the Yellow cup.   Corey has to take the “Walk of Shame” across the floor as everyone watches and move his ice-cream stick (that has always been associated with “sweet fun”) from the Green (I’m a good student) to Yellow – (Better watch out)!

This scenario depict a common method of a public shaming behavioral systems. The intention of shame-based behavior systems is to create a disincentive for the student and the rest of the class by making the offending behavior public.

Shame as a Behavioral Modifier

Open disgrace truth be told, disgracing of any sort – would best be named a discipline as opposed to a result. It is an extraneous and torment based procedure planned to offer uneasiness to the standard rule breaker. Likewise with any discipline, disgrace can have the transient impact of debilitating certain behavior. It will, be that as it may, have just a frail long haul sway on decreasing undesirable conduct and a negative long haul impact as far as achieving behavioral change. Also, utilizing disgrace to adjust behavior will have various potential undesirable outcomes.

Praise vs. Shame

Chalk, K., & Bizo, L. A. (2004) suggested as an alternative to the walk of shame that, “We differentiate between positive and specific praise. Positive praise refers to an expression of positive affect or approval about behaviour. This could involve affirming a correct answer or giving ability or whole-person feedback. Specific praise expresses positive affect but also contextualizes behaviour. This involves precisely stating or describing the praised behaviour and possibly discussing the effort strategy or rule used by the pupil (Dweck, 2000). There is a growing body of work that shows that praise is under-utilized in the classroom and frequently delivered at rates unlikely to affect behaviour. Thompson (1997) argued that the potential of attributional messages in teachers’ praise is not being exploited to maximum effect, citing research by Blumenfeld, Hamilton, Bossert, Wessels, and Meece (1983) who found less than 1% of communications in the classroom consist of attributional feedback and that these are generally procedural, reactive and negative to children’s behaviour rather than providing information to the child about why their behaviour is or is not appropriate.

Did you know this was occurring with your children in grades K-6? Have you attended any Open House meetings in your district? If you do attend do you ask questions? Do you know what questions to ask that will affect change?

After reading this will you ask your children questions when they get home? Will you call the teacher, the principal or the Board of Education vs. waiting for them to tell you when the next group meeting will occur.

Get in involved, surely your child deserves more from you…

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