Task 2 - Education - Student Behaviour

Remember that the word count in IELTS is a minimum of 250 words for task 2. In order to get a higher score, 250 words will not be enough to achieve a 8 or 9 score and will require a lot more!

Question: In many countries schools have problems with student behaviour. What are the causes of this? What can be done to solve this problem?

Answer:
No school or educational institution is perfect and every single place of learning will at some point experience problems with student behaviour. In some cases, the problems are minor; for example, low level disruption in the classroom. In other cases, the problems can vary, some can be exceedingly severe with drug addiction and severe physical assaults being perpetrated on school grounds. The causes of the varying degrees of bad student behaviour are varied and complex, but once they are identified, solutions can thus be proposed to effect positive change.

Some educational commentators place the blame for student delinquency on the schools themselves for creating the problem. They cite examples of bad teaching where monotonous styles can cause students to lose interest and thus as a result start to disrupt lessons. The curriculum has also been targeted as not being relevant to modern student needs and interests which means that is requires updating to have more in common with the “internet generation”. The solution proposed for this would be to involve students directly in the way that school education is designed and allow them to help shape the way the way their own education is conceived, created and delivered. Methods of teaching could also be changed to focus more on students and cater for different ways of learning. Even the hours of study could be changed to better suit the teenage body clock and teenage lifestyle.

The schools however are not solely to blame as the family of badly behaved students must also shoulder some of the blame. Good behaviour starts at home with the parants and if parents spoil their children and let them get away with everything and anything, the end result will be children who are absolutely out of control. It is hardly fair to ask schools to deal with this problem which is one that they did not create. The best way to improve this situation would be to education parents so that they know the best psychological approaches to take when dealing with child behaviour and thus stop behavioural problems from getting out of hand or hopefully, stopping them from occurring in the first place.

One final reason is that the problems could be due to problems in the brain that then cause bad student behaviour. This kind of illness is called ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and some medical professionals think this is a serious problem for which medication is used to then bring student behaviour back to normal and enable this kind of student to behave better. Many schools and parents in the United States take this problem very seriously and medicine is given routinely to quite a few students to try and improve student behaviour.

To conclude, there are many reasons for student behaviour that help to explain why not all students behave well at all times in the classroom. There is also a good way to deal with each aspect of each single cause, further research is needed to try to make sure students have no real excuse for not concentrating and not working hard at school.
(514 words)