The research, involving 377 primary and secondary teachers drawn from across the country and led by Blaise Joseph from The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), found an average of approximately nine minutes of every half hour of teaching time was spent dealing with student misbehaviour.
This is equivalent to 12 weeks of lost learning per year, he notes.
The former teacher says the scale and frequency of the problem amounts to a crisis.
“[Student misbehaviour is] severely eating into the amount of time that teachers have to teach and students have to learn, and I think it explains a large part of why such a large portion of Australian children don’t have adequate literacy and numeracy skills.
“It’s a huge part of [our education system’s] problems in this country, and for that reason I think we need to prioritise fixing and improving student behaviour in Australian classrooms,” Joseph, education director at the CIS, says.
More than half of teachers reported losing at least one-fifth of instructional time, while some 16 per cent said the majority of their lessons were sacrificed to dealing with poor behaviour.
Just three per cent reported misbehaviour didn’t consume their teaching time at all.
And rather than more serious behavioural incidents, it was pervasive low-level disruptions that were most widespread.
Almost 60 per of teachers reported students talking when they were not supposed to in most or all lessons, while 44 per cent said students called out in a disruptive way in the majority of classes.
Answering back or challenging teacher’s instructions and arriving late to class were among other common disruptions.
“…individually each of those incidents might seem small, but they really add up over time and accumulate to a huge amount of learning time lost,” Joseph says.
“In Australia we are so used to rowdy student behaviour that we aren’t shocked by it, and it’s almost considered acceptable in some contexts – and for that reason we can get to the point where we’re losing such a huge amount of time to student disruption in classrooms, while teachers themselves just think it’s normal.”
Interestingly, most teachers reported being confident in managing misbehaviour, and more than 60 per cent said their schools were calm and orderly every day or most days.
Yet teachers’ confidence on this front does not signal an absence of misbehaviour, Joseph points out.
“A classroom may therefore appear manageable and relatively orderly while still experiencing repeated interruptions that impose a substantial cumulative cost on learning,” the study reads.
Low-level disruptions are most often annoying for teachers and severely impact on the sequence and flow of a lesson, Jospeh adds.
“The teacher can’t get into a good flow, and the students can’t get into a good flow because they can’t focus due to all the interruptions, and it just makes the learning environment lack order and calm.
“And I think from the teacher’s perspective, it can just be so frustrating, when they’ve made a big effort to prepare the lesson, they’re probably confident in delivering it, but then all these individual student misbehaviours end up taking up to a third of the lesson.”
Student misbehaviour also appears to be a significant workplace wellbeing issue for at least 10 per cent of teachers, the study found, with one in ten saying it negatively affected their health and wellbeing to a great extent in the past week.
Tellingly, three quarters of teachers said it had at least some detrimental impact on their own health and wellbeing.
“I think anecdotally we’ve probably all heard many stories of teachers being worn down after having to deal with student misbehaviour over time.
“So from that perspective it’s not surprising that this data [reflects this],” Joseph says.
“It is also interesting that … female teachers were almost twice as likely as male teachers to say that the student misbehaviour in the past week had negatively affected their health and wellbeing to a great extent – I think that’s also concerning.”
This finding aligns with a growing body of recent research which has flagged the widespread escalation in sexist and misogynistic behaviour directed towards teachers by students – a phenomenon that has been reported across all states and school sectors and which most often echoes the language, attitudes and worldview of online ‘manfluencers’, the likes of Andrew Tate.
Joseph says his research is not about assigning blame, and that many teachers successfully manage challenging behaviour every day.
Rather, he says the national challenge is to establish a school system in which high expectations of behaviour are a given, schools have effective approaches for teaching and maintaining those expectations, and persistent disruption is not seen as inevitable nor allowed to escalate further.
“Government and system-level policies also matter: expectations and policies governing responses to serious misbehaviour, including suspensions and expulsions, can either support or constrain schools in establishing consistent approaches…” his study argues.
Previous Australian and international work has emphasised the importance of explicitly teaching good behaviour as a curriculum in its own right, as well as establishing consistent routines across the whole school – together these lift expectations and create a culture of positive behaviour where calm and orderly classrooms conducive to learning are simply the norm.
According to Joseph, Australia should establish a behaviour curriculum alongside a regular national survey of teachers on student behaviour, which draws on the UK model.
He argues this would give us a better understanding of the situation in schools and provide information that could be used to inform behaviour policy.
Joseph says just as we have early intervention in literacy and numeracy, behaviour should be no exception.
“This low-level misbehaviour we’re talking about can escalate into much more serious misbehaviour such as violence if we don’t intervene earlier,” he flags.
“The example I often give is that if a student punches another student they’ve probably shoved another student multiple times before it got to that point and got away with it.
“And if they’ve been shoving other students before that they were probably being very disruptive and disrespectful to the teacher in the classroom for an extended period of time and didn’t face any meaningful consequences.
“So … I think we also need early intervention in behaviour to ensure that it stays at the low level and doesn’t escalate to much more serious and potentially violent incidents,” he contends.
Yet Swinburne senior lecturer Melinda Davis has criticised the study’s ‘crisis narrative’, saying it does not help schools.
“The suggestion that a third of lesson time is ‘lost’ to student behaviour simplifies complex educational and social challenges into another crisis narrative for schools to solve and is not only hyperbolic but unhelpful,” Davis contends.
Impactful teaching is not solely about delivering uninterrupted content for a full lesson, she says.
“Teaching that has lasting impact on young people is cognisant of the complex lives students have beyond the classroom,” she says.
“This means lessons may involve behaviours that may appear to disrupt the delivery of content but might be promoting the significance of relationships by responding to student needs.”
According to the former school principal, concerns about growing misogyny in classrooms are worthy of serious attention and may indeed constitute a crisis, but stronger evidence is needed to support claims about its prevalence.
“…Women teachers deserve a far more nuanced discussion about gender, authority and school culture, one that centres their voices and lived experiences.
“Without that analysis, findings such as these risk generating concern without providing meaningful insight or solutions.”
