Incivility in the Classroom

If you're a teacher ask yourself these questions: Ever had a student make disparaging remarks in class? How many cell phones have gone off in your class this year? Do students who fall asleep in class bother you? Do student's come in late or leave early for your class and does this disrupt you? How many textmessages do you think students send and receive while in class? Would that distract you? How about those students who are obviously doing homework for another class? These are just some of the behaviors that have been earmarked as uncivil for some instructors. I know they bother me. But are some behaviors worse than others and just how often do they really take place? Well I'm following St Cloud State's lead in trying to figure that out.

St Cloud State University created a survey that was conducted in order to better understand what is happening in the classrooms on their campus. As part of this survey students and faculty were asked to rate both the degree of severity as well as the frequency of 25 different behaviors. Twenty three of the behaviors are generally accepted to be uncivil while 2 are considered positive behaviors instructors expect from their students. With the developers' permission, I have replicated the survey for use in my interpersonal communication class.

One of the interesting outcomes of the SCSU survey is that there is a difference between what teachers are reporting are happening and what students self-report that they see happening in the classrooms. There's also a difference in what teachers as a whole and students as a whole report as "uncivil" behavior . I think this is a great topic for discussion in my interpersonal class as what some perceive as offensive, others may not. Sometimes students don't understand that their behavior affects those around them. So I plan to have the students take the surveys which I typed up today using the D2L format. Then we can look at the results together and have a discussion about how and why those survey's relate to interpersonal communication.