Peer Influence Matters

A few days ago I wrote about the real problems caused by distractions in the classroom. Today I’d like to focus on other ways students can be affected by their peers.

In my sophomore world history class (probably the most challenging class I’ve ever had the opportunity to teach), there are a handful of particularly bright students failing. They’re what some of my former colleagues would have referred to as fence riders.

The idea behind fence riders is this: in any given class, there is a small group of students who will act like scholars no matter who is around them. There is another small group of students who will act just the opposite no matter who is around them. In a class like the one I’m describing, squelching negative behaviors from the latter group early in the semester is key to avoiding something just short of a classroom management apocalypse. But the horsemen of my doomsday ride the fence, rather than horses, and there are a lot more than four of them. They base their behaviors on the behaviors of their peers. And I’m noticing a trickle-down effect.

I have a small handful of students (group 1) in that class who will deface and steal my property; run, jump, and throw things around the room the second they notice my eyes are not on them; and use swear words toward each other and toward me - often with impunity since I have neither the time nor energy to follow up with every misbehavior.

There is another slightly larger group (group 2) of students who exist just next to the students in group 1 on the mis/behavior continuum. Were they at the end of this continuum in my class, the worst one might witness would probably include off-task behavior and the occasional cuss word. But when group 1 has lowered the expectations for positive behavior with my tacit approval (as it’s obvious to all students that I cannot follow up on every single misbehavior, especially the ones I don’t see) to such depths, the behaviors of group 2, group 3, and group 4 (on the mis/behavior continuum) becomes that much worse. Even those students who normally achieve at high levels in other classes regularly allow themselves to be distracted from their work and rarely turn anything in.

One of those normally high achieving students (we’ll call him Sean) began the year in my class with an A. Every assignment was dutifully taken care of; he stayed after school a number of hours working on the material; and he always paid attention in class. After a few months, his effort dropped off precipitously. He now spends most of his time in class joking and avoiding his work. I haven’t received an assignment from him in nearly two weeks.

A negative classroom culture established by a handful of disruptive students has, in many ways, defeated my efforts thus far. I was new to the school at the beginning of the year (with no curriculum) and dreadfully unprepared for the onslaught of disruptive behavior that came my way. I’ve retreated, amassed my reinforcements, and begun my counterattack after realizing that my attempts at improving the class through democratic discussion were routinely being subverted by those group 1 students, the ones that few other students have been brave enough to stand up to or speak out in front of.

My point is this: peers play an enormous role in a student’s education. A student like Sean would excel with me as a teacher in a classroom full of highly achieving peers who would look down on him for not turning in his homework. In his reality, he’s failing. Adults don't warn their children about the negative effects of peer pressure for nothing; it can have powerful impacts on a person's behavior.

But contrast that reality with assumptions being made by educational policymakers. In our nation’s capital, DC Council Chairman Kwame Brown is drafting a bill that would recruit “effective” teachers (as judged by IMPACT) in wards 2 and 3 to work in DC’s most underprivileged schools, in wards 7 and 8. In New York City, Michael Bloomberg recently said that in a perfect world, we would double our class sizes and pay teachers twice as much (since there would be half as many). Effective educators are more important variables in a student’s education than his or her peers, the thinking goes.

Policymakers are missing something: experience, and the perspective that comes with it. Mr Bloomberg needs to know that doubling the class size in an affluent school where students are highly motivated, and pressure each other to perform academically, might not do society all that much harm. But double it in my environment and you may as well just stop trying to educate altogether and spend the money somewhere else. (It reminds me of the summer I spent teaching English to seventy 12, 13, and 14-year-old Liberian refugees in a hot West African schoolhouse with no windows. I walked away from that experience positive that the only person who learned anything in that room was me.)  Mr Brown would do well to consider the immense number of variables that contribute to the quality of a given learning environment and the factors that led to those teachers in wards 2 and 3 being labeled “effective” in the first place (I highly suspect one of the most important was the students in front of them).

Despite the deluge of teacher-is-the-most-important-factor talking points gushing from politicians’ mouths these days, there is, as always, significantly more to the story. Teacher quality is undoubtedly extremely important. But treating it as if it were the only factor that matters does irreparable damage to both the meaningfulness of the discussion around school reform and the quality of education our students receive.