Life Is Full of Provocations — A Student's Behavior Is Never the Teacher's Fault
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that blaming teachers for student misbehavior ignores the reality that provocations exist everywhere and self-control is the student's responsibility.
Key Takeaways
- Provocations are everywhere - Life is full of triggers and frustrations; learning to handle them is part of growing up
- Behavior is the student's responsibility - Even if a teacher is imperfect, the student's choice to misbehave is their own
- Stop blaming teachers - The narrative that 'the teacher caused it' shifts accountability away from where it belongs
Transcript
All right, I know I've been talking about this a lot lately, but I think this is a really important distinction to make, that teachers can never actually cause a student to get violent.
I think we have to keep in mind that that is always the student's choice.
And certainly we've all maybe known people who are not so great at getting along with students and maybe kind of provoke them a little bit.
And certainly we have a professional obligation as educators to do our best not to provoke our students and put them in a position where they're going to really struggle to react appropriately.
But at the same time, we have to recognize that life itself is full of provocations.
And we can do everything in our power to control what students experience in the school environment to minimize those provocations.
and minimize their need for self-control and you know we certainly do that nobody is out there trying to provoke students just to kind of put them through the paces and give them an opportunity to practice their self-control like i really do not believe that is happening what i do believe is that teachers are human and some teachers have better uh kind of self-control and self-awareness than other people so again maybe you know so i can think of some people i've known that that maybe do get on kids' nerves a little bit more than they should.
But that does not mean that they caused the behavior.
Again, life is full of provocations.
And part of our job as adults, part of our job as educators, part of our job as parents is to help students cope with those provocations in appropriate ways.
And we see every day students get on each other's nerves.
We have to help them figure out how to get along with each other.
And Even if we were to tolerate everything that happens in school, every reaction, if we were to take total responsibility for every student's every reaction to anything that occurs and say, well, it's completely my fault that they behaved in this way.
What good would that do the student the moment they walk out the door into the world that is full of those things that are quote unquote going to set them off?
I think if we forget that, that it is about individual choice and individual self-control, then we're not going to set our students up for success.
And we're going to blame ourselves for things that are not our fault.
Let me know what you think.