25 Biggest Mistakes Teachers Make and How to Avoid Them

Mistake 1: Inappropriate Discipline Strategies
This teacher was very physical.
Her tactics exemplified the
cycle that the more one uses phy sical
punishment, the more one will need
to use physical punishment. In addition,
she appeared to be one of those
female teachers who had difficulty
understanding the nature of the
development of young males and
their typical behaviors. This is evident
in the constant, repetitive punishment
of this child on a daily basis.
This type of physical abuse is what
made it necessary for some school
districts to abolish corporal punishment.
If this teacher had to make
a child stand against a wall every
SCENARIO 1.6
Sneaking a Peek
day and miss recess, she was obviously
an ineffective disciplinarian.
She did not decrease the undesirable
behavior.
The constancy of this child’s inappropriate
behavior suggests that it
was behavior typical of a first grader.
Experienced teachers would take
a developmental approach to the
child’s behavior to ascertain which
behaviors are typical and which ones
are intentional misbehaviors. Eff ective
teachers would help the child focus
on appropriate behaviors as they work
together to temper natural behaviors
that are not compatible with classroom
activities.
The worst experience during my school years happened when I was in first grade. I was
an innocent child back then. One day, this girl was looking at my paper during a spelling
test. The teacher said I had let the girl look. I ended up locked up in the coatroom. The
teacher turned off the lights and left me there. That was the worst experience.
Almost daily, some teacher
somewhere falsely accuses a
student of some action. The pain of
false accusation is compounded when
the teacher acts on his or her false
assumption. In this scenario, the punishment
was extreme and probably
traumatic for a very young child. A
first-grade child is very imaginative
and can conjure up all sorts of terrors
lurking in the dark. Leaving the child
in the dark room was unconscionable.
In a situation like this, wise teachers
would try to be fair and give the
student the benefit of the doubt. They
would instinctively know that the student
may have let the other student
look on her paper or the student may
not have had any control over who
looked on her paper. In such a case,
no one should be punished if fault
cannot be established. It would have
been better to move the student who
was looking on the other student’s
paper and find out if that student had
some questions about the assignment.
The teacher could offer the student
who was “cheating” more assistance
with the assignment and
thereby reduce the need to “ cheat.”
Good teachers often circulate among
students as they are working. The
teacher’s presence is usually an effective
deterrent for would-be cheaters.
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