It’s important to define challenging behaviour in the tutoring room. It’s unlikely that you will come across aggressive, violent, or uncontrollable children. However, you will come across behaviour that challenges your ability to be able to tutor a student and/or make a professional relationship with them.

A lot of what we will cover in this lesson is scattered in other lessons as well, but it is important for us to gather up all the aspects that define challenging behaviour and look at it in isolation. It is our aim to minimise the impact of challenging behaviour by changing how we look at it, in order for it not to hinder your ability to tutor and for the student to receive the maximum benefit from your lessons.

Fundamental attribution error

Before we launch into the issue of challenging behaviour, we need to explore biases in human thinking. A bias is something that steers us to have a particular idea or attitude. It can also steer us in one direction when we are needing to make decisions. It is important to understand that while we may be aware of some of our biases, many will be unconscious and out of our awareness.

A simple way of understanding a bias is to think of a weighted dice. If a dice is normal, it has the same chance of landing on a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. However, if we attach a weight on the inside, say to the 6, it will tend to land on the number 6 when we roll it. The dice is no longer fair, it has a bias towards the number 6. Would you be happy for your family member to use that weighted dice to play a board game with you, and you use a normal unweighted dice?

Humans can also have biases, a sort of weight attached to our thinking. Biases are beliefs that are not based on facts or evidence such as women are less able to cope, when many women can cape well. Men are not able to be sensitive, when many men are.

Biases can also be cultural; people from western cultures don’t care about their education. This is a general bias that is not true. People from Asian cultures care too much about their education and parents are pushy. This is also untrue and not based on facts.

The fundamental attribution error is a bias that all humans have when they try and explain behaviour. The term attribution is used by psychologists to mean how we explain other people’s behaviour: What do we ‘attribute’ that behaviour to?

Attributions are either dispositional or situational:

• We have a dispositional attribution (within the person). We take someone’s behaviour and explain it thorough their own set of quirks and traits, which drove that behaviour.
• We have situational attribution (outside of them). We say the behaviour happened because of the situation they were in. The environment, circumstances and the context of where they are.

Let’s see it in action.

You are trying to tutor a young student; they are rolling their eyes, disengaged and clearly don’t want to be in the room. You may think this student is rude, spoilt, doesn’t have any work ethic, is disinterested and bored. These attributions are dispositional. They are saying it is something about the student that is stopping the lesson from happening.

A situational or external attribution is thinking something might have happened to that child that day, maybe they are being bullied at school, maybe they have been given work that’s too hard or too easy before. Have they had an argument at home that day?

The fundamental attribution error is:

When we are trying to understand and explain the cause of someone else’s behaviour, we do so by making the cause their personality (dispositional attribution).

When we are trying to understand and explain the cause of our own behaviour, we do so by making the cause situational (external attribution).

The fundamental attribution error is that we tend to use dispositional attributions all the time when explaining someone else’s behaviour, rather than situational attributions. Even when situational attributions are more available to us.

This means we overlook the possibility that people’s circumstances and situations are shaping their behaviour.

One thing that tutors tend to overlook when explaining their student’s behaviour is the 1:1 relationship itself. Sometimes being in a 1:1 relationship feels too intense to the other person, so that intensity and uncomfortableness is shaping the behaviour. Some children would be more relaxed if they were in a group of three or there was someone else in the room.

This fundamental attribution error is consistently seen when we are working with students with dyslexia. Dyslexia is not a personality trait or a set of behaviours that can be explained due to personality features.

However, when you listen to people talking about a student’s struggle in the classroom, you will have heard attributions of behaviour (not meeting target grades) caused by their personality traits or personal reactions. Unable to try, fear of what’s coming next, being bored, lacking motivation, disinterested, because he’s a boy, because she’s a girl and as always, the worst label; because they are lazy.

Very rarely do we hear of people talking about working memory, processing capabilities or phonological awareness limitations in day-to-day speech, even from dyslexia teachers.

The way to override your own use of the fundamental attribution error is to have awareness of the bias and monitor your own explanations. If you are stuck with a student, or just to test your biases, write down a list of attributions for your student’s behaviour. Are the attributions situational or are they mainly dispositional?

Check your biases as frequently as you can and tell other educators if you hear the bias in others.

For those of you who would like to read more about these biases and how they shape our attributions, this paper by Lee Ross explains attribution theory well.

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Behaviour as communication

The single best way to deal with challenging behaviour is to view the behaviour as communication.

If we view behaviour through the lens of communication, it becomes something we need to be curious about and listen to, rather than something to squash and adapt. By viewing behaviour this way, we don’t need to try and change the behaviour, we need to try and understand what is going on underneath it. What is the student is trying to express about what they are learning and how they are experiencing you tutoring them?

What are the students telling you about their situation (situational attribution) and what are they trying to tell you about their feelings and thoughts (internal attribution)?

Use behaviour as a guide or as a type of compass to what might be happening with your students.

Attachment style

Have a look at these attachment aware school videos:

Watch Video 1

Watch Video 2

What led to our understanding and knowledge of attachment?

Back in the 1950’s James Robinson used a 16mm hand-held camera to study the reactions of children who were separated from their parents when admitted to hospital. In the 1960’s his wife Joyce joined him in the investigations of children being separated from parents.  They noticed that when children were separated from parents in hospital, they became distressed, and these children displayed difficult and distressing behaviours.

There are old videos of these separations on YouTube. However, these videos do not make easy watching and are highly distressing for many viewers. It’s important to remember that at that time, parents were not allowed to visit children when they were in hospital as it was viewed to be detrimental to a child’s medical care. The Robinson’s also investigated the separations that occurred during the second world war due to evacuations.

They found three key findings in their research.

Key Findings:

• Young children separated from their mothers experience a range of emotions including sadness and aggression.
• The provision of a positive caring environment can mitigate almost all adverse reactions to separation.
• The provision of alternative care can provide the stimulus to new relationships.

At the same time, John Bowlby a child psychoanalyst began to theorise that children have an attachment to their caregivers and this attachment is fundamental in how a child relates to others and continues to relate to others when they are growing up.

Video about John Bowlby:
Watch Video

1.

Bowlby said that children’s earlier experiences of being in a relationship and how safe they felt within their first relationships they made (normally the mother) creates a sort of mental blueprint, or a set of relationship instructions, for all other future relationships.

2

Bowlby called this blue print an ‘internal working model’ of attachment. So, the baby builds their internal working model through the relationship with their primary caregiver (normally the mother) and then uses the same model for all other important and significant relationships.

3

Bowlby said that babies can either form secure relationships, believing that people are generally good and trustworthy or, they can form insecure relationships, believing that people will hurt them, let them down or are just not worth trusting.

The important thing to remember about Bowlby’s theory of attachment is that attachment is a biological process that every baby goes through to bond with their mother in order to survive. Without being attached babies cannot feed, develop and thrive. Without any form of attachment there is a severe threat to a baby’s survival. Attachment is an innate process we all do and did to survive.

Later a psychologist Mary Ainsworth wanted to investigate Bowlby’s attachment claims and performed the famous Strange Situation test.

Watch Strange Situation Video 1

Watch Strange Situation Video 2

Strange Situation

Hopefully you have watched the videos about the Strange Situation test. The experiments are old, but they are still repeated to this date.

The point of the experiment is the reunion. How does the child respond in the reunion?

Secure:

Children who are securely attached are unhappy and distressed when the parents leave and can be comforted and quickly soothed when the parents return. Children trust the parent will return and are also able to trust other significant adults if the parent is not around.

Insecure avoidant:Children with avoidant attachment styles tend to show little distress when the care giver leaves (or self-manage the stress) and show little joy in the reunion. They do not reject the comfort from parents, but do not seek it out either.

Insecure ambivalent:These children will be considerably distressed when separated from caregivers but will also not be able to be comforted by them when the caregiver returns. The child may even reject the parent or may direct aggression towards them.
As these children grow older, they are often described as clingy and over-dependent.

Insecure Disorganised:

This attachment style is mainly associated with children who have been abused or who have suffered an early trauma. The children do not have a consistent pattern when it comes to reunions and separations. They become confused when the caregiver returns and often act dazed and confused or disorganised in their approach.

Children who have early attachment issues may find the 1:1 nature of the relationship more challenging at first. Perhaps they find it hard it hard to trust you, engage with you and see you as a safe adult. This is especially true for children who have suffered early trauma or are looked after children and in the care of Social Services.

However, you may find once a child has made a bond / attachment with you they then become anxious, ambivalent, or resistant because that is what their working model is used to doing. Thus, you will have to work to engage with the student in a different way and re-establish (as far as possible) that you are a safe adult who does not intend to let them down and relationally hurt them.

Separation anxiety:

This course is not going to go into huge depth about separation anxiety as it deserves a course of its own, but separation anxiety is a common stage for both primary caregivers and young children.

Toddlers go through a clingy stage where they just want one of their parents. Parents also can be very attached to their babies and toddlers and get anxious at even the thought of being separated.

However, for some children (and some parents), this anxiety at being separated can last longer and thus the early years at school are impacted by one (parent or child) or both (parent and child) suffering from separation anxiety.

This anxiety is more than missing someone, it is debilitating anxiety that stops a child from learning. Or, if a parent is anxious, a child may feel guilty for going to school and will still be unable to learn. The fundamental years of learning; all the initial concepts are missed as the child tries to cope with anxiety and overwhelming feelings. Children who come to you with separation anxiety may struggle to leave their parent and want the parent in the room.

What is the student used to?

We need to always ask ourselves what the student is used to in terms of adult responses to their actions. If they have a patient parent who encourages them and waits, the child will feel rushed if you apply any time pressure. If the child has an impatient parent who gets cross and angry if the child is seen to be taking too long, the child will get anxious if they feel they are being too slow.

If a child has a parent who wants the child to feel happy all the time, then they may finish tasks or solve problems for their child as soon as the child stops to think or becomes upset. These students will struggle when they are left alone to solve problems on their own.

Parenting is a complex task and we should never judge a parent for any responses, very often they are unconsciously repeating the responses they got from their parents. However, we must always remember, that the child has a set of expectations of what it is like to be with an adult and how that adult will behave towards them, especially in a 1:1 situation.

It is your job to model patience, encourage thinking and foster academic resilience to enable students to feel safe. Also, you must facilitate your student to be able to be vulnerable enough to be open and confident enough to try when they are unsure. Just remember, the student may be experiencing this type of learning space for the very first time with you, so they may take a while to learn what is expected of them and what they can expect from you.

Remain curious

In dealing with challenging behaviour and seeing the behaviour as communication, we always need to remain curious as to what is trying to be communicated. Remaining curious is the only way to proceed if you want to establish a connection that will foster learning.

As soon as you can see a student, understand them, and then show that student they are understood, all the challenging behaviour goes away.