I came across this blog post about labelling children and the consequences (you can read the article here: https://theconversation.com/labelling-kids-the-good-the-bad-and-the-adhd-31778 )
This reminded me of a case of a young child that sticks in my head for many years now. And I always love to tell his story, when I give workshops on classroom managment.
How often do you come to the teachers' lounge and you hear teachers discussing a certain child and how their behavior is incredibly disrupting or how slow this child is or how funny this kid thinks he is? And how often do you find yourself treating this very child as neutral as all the others when you have to teach him?
As a teacher trainer I don't know all the children that my teachers are teaching. They let me know when they have a problem with a child so I can give them advice on how to deal with him or her. Funny, that you barely never hear about how great a child is ...
Anyhow, I avoid to get to know the names of the children who are - according to everybody else - bad news, because it may happen that I step in if a teacher is sick and find myself in this class. And I don't want to step in there and be prejudiced. This may not be a method for everybody, but it works perfectly with me. Why am I doing this?
Many years ago there was this little 3 year old boy. Let's call him Sam.
Sam was a pretty active child from the beginning, but the more time he spent in school, the worse his behavior got. Normally, it should be the other way around.
Back then, the school had the traffic light behavior chart system, which means you start with "green", then you go to orange and eventually red if your behavior was not all that great. So this child always (!!) ended up with red. And after a while he just didn't care about it anymore, because he would get "red" anyways at the end of the day. I was wondering why the traffic light thing worked for the others, but not for him - and then, what could be done to help this little fella.
I had a close look at his behaviors and the behaviors of the teachers and my own behavior with him. And I realized that we were all pretty quickly judging. When somebody made a noise, it was automatically him (but we had no proof, it just came from the corner where he was sitting, it could have been the other 3 kids around him), whatever was going on, it was automatically him, because every teacher (and even the parents) had in their mind that this kid is a trouble maker and who else could it be?!
You know, the problem with this is ... never punish for something you didn't see with your own eyes, because even if you are 99.9% sure that it was him, there is that 0.1% that it wasn't him. And you punish the wrong person. So what now? I'm punished for something that I didn't do, so I might as well act up and get punished for something that I really do, because obviously there is no difference and I'll have a lot more fun this way. I'm the trouble maker anyways.
Sounds logic, doesn't it? How much would you care about being a good student and paying attention, if everybody thinks low of yourself anyways, either with your behavior or with your performance. If you believe that everybody thinks that you are stupid anyways, why should I care and try to write As, obviously it's not something people think I can do. After all, I'm just a kid and the adults should take care of me and if they already don't trust that I can do it, then how can I start to believe in myself? I'm just a small child.
As soon as I realized this pattern, I thought about how to deal with him differently. And I added a card to the traffic light system. The pink card. This was a card you would only get, if you did something really awesome! So I would look at this particular child and try to find whatever good he did and praise him (a lot!!). Even if it was something completely normal, like putting a pencil back in the box, I would tell the entire class about what a great job Sam did! And I would give him a pink card. Now, this may sound crazy to you, but it seriously changed him from one day to the other. He was so surprised to have a pink card and so happy, that he literally did everything (!) to not lose it.
He became the greatest kid in the entire class, organising everything, helping everybody, being a real teacher assistant. Believe me, he was not like that before. From being the most feared child of all the teachers he became one of the most beloved.
I tell you this little story to show you first hand, how labelling children can have a direct influence on them and that we as teachers have to be very careful with how we label children - good or bad.
And that we as teachers have to always check ourselves as well and question ourselves and our methods at all times, because we are only humans and we can make mistakes and we have to be more aware of this, because we are teaching the future generation of this world.
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