NQT Special: The four reasons for poor behaviour and how to tackle them

Apparently, there are two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

When Austrian-born child psychologist and educator, Rudolph Dreikurs, developed his theory that misbehaviour is the result of people feeling disconnected from their social group, he divided the world of misbehaviour into four kinds and developed a simple tool to enable teachers to quickly analyse and begin to manage unwanted behaviours. When students misbehave, he argued, they are seeking to achieve one or more of the following four “goals”:

Attention.

Power.

Revenge.

Hide feelings of inadequacy.

Furthermore, if we look deeper into Dreikurs’ theory then we learn that reward and punishment are not as effective as we would think, and often yield only short-term successes (watch Dan Pink’s TED Talk, Puzzle Of Motivation, and we can see there is much research to prove that reward has a negative impact on tasks which require any level of cognitive skill).