Conlusion about chapter eleven: TEACHER MISBEHAVIOR AND COMMUNICATION Discuss the role/function of the teacher/source in the instructional process Discuss why teachers might misbehave Review the most common teacher Misbehaviors Give an example of each that you have observed in a fellow teacher Give some outcomes of teacher misbehavior on the educational system While much of the literature has examined, investigated, and discussed why, how, and when students instigate problems in the classroom, very few people have examined the impact of teacher misbehaviors in the classroom Perhaps this oversight is because we don't like to think of ourselves as misbehavior problems or as the instigator of misbehavior problems in our own classrooms Often, we as teachers, forget how powerful our presence can be in the classroom The things that we say and will be remembered by our students longer than most of us sometimes would like The first assumption is that "teachers themselves may misbehave" and second "these misbehaviors can become potential sources of student dissatisfaction and resistance" (p 310) They define teacher misbehaviors as "those teacher behaviors that interfere with instruction and thus, learning" (p 310) Most of their work has been with college students' perceptions of teachers' misbehaviors However, Kearney et al., suggests that teacher misbehaviors can occur at any level of education and misbehaving teachers can be found in all grades In this chapter we have adapted some of their misbehavior problems to match teacher misbehaviors found in kindergarten through twelfth grade Again, there seems to be little doubt that teacher behaviors and communication influence a student's behaviors, time spent on task, study habits, motivation, goal orientation, learning, application of subject matter, classroom order, classroom communication, in-class work habits, and a plethora of other variables There seem to be several reasons why teachers misbehave Kearney et al., (1991) suggest that teachers misbehave because they are "unable to relate to students, uncaring, preoccupied with other work, uninformed about course content, fearful about initiating personal relationships with students, outdated, selfish and self-centered, and not committee to the teaching profession" Let's keep in mind the majority of us probably not misbehave in our classrooms, and if we we don't misbehave to the point of interfering with our students’ learning However, there are many teachers who misbehave either intentionally or unintentionally, or out of habit No one is sure why teachers misbehave No one has been able to get teachers who are perceived by others as misbehavior problems to answer why teachers misbehave However, we can delineate some possible reasons why they In conclusion, there are many reasons why teachers might misbehave Some of these causes of misbehavior can be managed or controlled by us However, there are still some teachers present in our educational systems who nonverbally and verbally abuse students and will never admit it Let's review what students perceive as common teacher misbehaviors with an eye toward spotting our own misbehaviors and correcting them There are a wide variety of teacher misbehaviors that can occur in any classroom setting While the landmark study by Kearney et al., only identifies misbehaviors that occur at the college level, we will attempt to generalize their findings to other grade levels In this attempt we will only discuss the common misbehaviors which teachers are likely to commit from kindergarten through high school Kearney et al., was able to categorize teacher misbehaviors into three primary categories In conclusion, the three primary misbehavior categories are incompetence, offensiveness, and indolence A teacher must have a high number of these characteristics to be considered a real misbehavior problem in the system There could also be other misbehaviors that teachers display that impact student learning such as keeping students overtime, early dismissal, unresponsiveness to students’ needs, inaccessibility to students outside of class, not giving students extra help, not answering students’ questions outside of class, and giving exams which not relate to the content or reading Before we label anyone a "misbehavior problem" let's be sure they have a number of the above misbehaviors Usually good teachers will realize when they are becoming misbehavior problems and correct the situation, and poor teachers often don't realize they are misbehavior problems Again, misbehaving teachers are not usually the norms Even some very fine teachers have found themselves occasionally using some of the misbehaviors discussed earlier While the categories range from being absent to the use of poor grammar, the "most frequently cited misbehavior types are (1) sarcasm and putdowns, (2) being absent, (3) strays from subject, (4) unfair testing and, (5) boring lectures" (Kearney, et al., 1991, p 321) While it usually takes a number of the above misbehaviors in order to label a teacher a misbehavior problem, occasionally one teacher could engage in one type of misbehavior to an extreme For example, if a teacher was constantly sarcastic, critical, and hurtful to a student, we would consider this abusive and a form of teacher misbehavior Students will fail to learn as much from a teacher who displays incompetence than from a teacher who is competent The consequences are far reaching for the educational system that maintains and supports an incompetent, offensive, indolent teacher The old saying goes, "One bad apple spoils the barrel." Often the only thing students, parents, and the community remember is the "one bad teacher who spoiled the school." Incompetent, offensive, indolent instructors reflect poorly on all of us Many good educators are often stereotyped in a negative way because of the misbehaviors of the few Educational systems are often stereotyped in a negative way because of the misbehaviors committed by a few instructors In summary, each of us and our systems have to work much harder to override the perceptions both students and parents have of us because of one teacher who used many of the common teacher misbehaviors