The Importance Of Student Misbehavior

Classroom behaviour is one of the problems of the teacher on how to handle or how to manage their class. Student misbehaviours such as disruptive talking, chronic avoidance of work, clowning, interfering with teaching activities, harassing classmates, verbal insults, defiance, and hostility , ranging from infrequent to frequent, mild to severe, is a thorny issue in everyday classroom. Teachers usually reported that these disturbing behaviours in the classroom are intolerable and stress-provoking, and they had to spend a great deal of time and energy to manage the classroom.

In fact, student misbehaviours retard the smoothness and effectiveness of teaching and also impede the learning of the student and his/her classmates. Furthermore, research

For example, in the United Kingdom and Australia, researchers defined classroom misbehaviors as behaviors which are disruptive to classroom order and cause trouble to teachers, such as making nonverbal noise, disobedience, talking out of turn, idleness/slowness, non punctuality, hindering others, physical aggression, untidiness, out of seat, and verbal abuse . In the United States, James conceived students misbehaved when they “either did what they were not supposed to do or did not do what they were supposed to do” (page 9), ranging from fooling around as mild misbehavior to fighting as severe misbehavior. In the Caribbean contexts, student misbehaviors in classroom included those disruptive behavior which hampered teaching, and learning, such as classroom disconformities, verbal and physical hostility, defiance of authority, task avoidance, inappropriate use of school property, inconsiderate interpersonal relationships, overreactions to normal situations, and technological related factors. While classroom misbehavior is generally interpreted as disruptive and improper behavior that adversely affects the order, teaching, and learning in classroom, it is noteworthy that the range of student misbehavior varies across cultures. Particularly, as respect for authority, conformity, and obedience are highly valued in the Chinese school context,

Therefore, it is necessary to understand more about the definition and conception of student misbehavior in Hong Kong. This need is particularly acute when we realize that adolescent behavior has changed tremendously with the advance in technology. Through the Internet, it does not take long to popularize certain misbehavior in young people. Against the above background, a recent study was conducted in Hong Kong Chinese schools by Sun and Shek, which showed that most of the classroom misbehaviors reported by the teachers included doing something in private, talking out of turn, verbal aggression, disrespecting teachers, non attentiveness/daydreaming/idleness, sleeping, habitual failure in submitting assignments, and out of seat. These findings suggest that classroom misbehaviors can be defined as those behaviors that involve rule breaking, violating the implicit norms or expectations, being inappropriate in the classroom settings and upsetting teaching and learning. The findings also matched with the categorization of misbehavior as off-task, disruptive, and unruly behaviors. Off-task behaviors like doing things irrelevant to the class learning, or daydreaming and sleeping, are regarded as classroom misbehaviors. These misbehaviors would become disruptive if their