Action research project

Bad habits inside and outside the classroom

Nowadays, the world where we live is facing a hard situation regarding the habits that thousand of students adopt in the school context (both inside and outside the classroom).

This post is a call for awareness in order that families, teachers and the rest of school staff act together as a team trying to solve the aforementioned behavioural problems that our youths are currently having.

Here you can find some examples of inappropriate habits that students have inside the academic context.

• The ‘mobile-dependence’. This phenomenon is becoming more frequent in classrooms. The mobile phone is among the technological tools with the greatest presence in the market. During a period of scarcely 10 years, it has gone from being almost non-existent to being the device most used (and desired) by adolescents. Its physical characteristics as well as the psychological processes involved in its use explain both the fascination it elicits and the abuse or dependence it can come to provoke or encourage in adolescents. Sadly, this phenomenon decreases face-to-face interaction among students and disturbs the normal and  fluent teaching-learning process, leading to more distractions and increasing attention deficit.

• Lack of care of classrooms materials. Students sometimes do not value what they have in their classroom. What is more, they do not feel their classroom is a place where everything must be cleaned and tidy. That is the reason why teachers can find rubbish, chalks, papers on the floor, chairs that are not in their proper place… Thus, it is important to organise the classroom and to make students understand everything has its own place.   

• Focusing more on their classmates than on their teachers. Students tend to pay more attention to their friends during the lessons instead of listening their teachers. They think it is more important to share moments with other students and that is one of the reasons why they lose some important information that the teacher says in class.

Now, talking about the bad habits outside the classroom, we have the following examples:

• Doing dangerous things aimed at having a picture of themselves doing something risky for their “Instagram” or “Facebook” profiles. In this example the teeneger is hanging from a tree`s branch and their friends were looking at him laughing and taking  pictures of his “monkey abilities”.

Here you can find an example of inappropriate habit that students have inside and outside the academic context:

• Bullying: It’s a worldwide problem. Bullying has many manifestations, many forms, and many victims. But they all have one thing in common: people get hurt and it needs to stop. Bullying has a negative impact on everyone involved; the target, the bully and the bystanders. Sadly, this phenomenon increases step by step every single day. As a teacher, we have to know how to stop bullying in schools: encouraging peer-to-peer relationships, mediation…However, bullying is more likely to occur outside of class or between classes when students focus on interacting with others classmates.