Among teachers surveyed from across Ontario, 42 per cent reported instances of classroom incivility happening daily.onurdongel/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Students getting up to pack their bags before the bell rings. Others talking to friends during a math lesson. And more of them showing up late to class. A new survey run by researchers at Brock University has found that these types of disruptive behaviours have increased ever since students returned to school in person following pandemic-related interruptions.
In Ontario, schools were closed to in-person learning for 135 days in total, longer than any other province. After that period of on-and-off online learning, educators surveyed noticed a marked deterioration in the social and emotional skills of students – and spoke of the challenges of bringing them up to speed on appropriate classroom behaviour.
“We really need to be paying more attention to this,” said Natalie Spadafora, a postdoctoral fellow who led the study at Brock, adding that rude habits are a potential precursor to higher levels of anti-social behaviour and bullying.
Ms. Spadafora and her team surveyed about 300 Ontario students, who were between the ages of 9 and 14. They also conducted a retrospective survey of 100 primary-grade teachers about the changes in behaviour before and after schools were shut down.
In their recently published paper, they found that students reported significantly higher levels of classroom incivility in 2022 compared with three years prior. The team had been collecting data on peer relationships in the fall of 2019, and returned to the same schools in the Niagara region again in 2022. Students were asked to rate how much they engaged in a list of behaviours, including packing up books before a lesson was over, sending text messages during class, reading or playing a game during a lesson, eating during class, sleeping in class or talking when they should not.
Among teachers surveyed from across the province, 42 per cent reported instances of classroom incivility happening daily. Only 6 per cent said this type of behaviour occurred prior to March, 2020, when COVID-19 arrived to Canada.
Jacob Scheier: I loved my teaching career. COVID normalization stole it from me
Further, almost 70 per cent of teachers rated classroom incivility as moderately serious or very serious in the 2021-22 academic year, compared with about 30 per cent before COVID-19.
“A lot of times these actions are brushed off as not that big a deal, and often times individually they’re not. But then cumulatively, we know students tell us that when lots of people are doing it, then it’s hard for them to pay attention in class,” Ms. Spadafora said.
One teacher surveyed spoke to how the lack of structure in an online classroom’s day made it difficult for students to adapt when they returned in-person.
Another observed that learning loss was also affecting classroom behaviour: “I think a lot of students missed out on the social skills we teach from year to year. Add that to increased work expectation of being in-person and lower academic knowledge, and it is reflected in the uncivil behaviour.”
A third said that the incivility was adding to the lost learning time, as she increasingly had to “abandon” lesson plans to deal with disruptive students.
“You would hope that by now it’s not quite the same,” Ms. Spadafora said of the increased incivility, “but it might still be heightened compared to what it was in 2019.”
Alison Osborne, president of the Ontario Principals’ Council, said that she, too, has heard from educators who have been struggling with incivility among students, especially as they transitioned back to the classroom after a period of online learning.
A survey from the Toronto School Administrators’ Association, which represents 1,000 principals and vice-principals, found that student behaviour was more challenging than before the pandemic, and that a reduction in staffing as well as an uptick in educator absences made the task of managing that behaviour more difficult.
About 74 per cent of principals said they had challenges with student behaviour and about 80 per cent said they did not feel equipped to maintain school safety because they are not properly staffed.
Ms. Osborne said educators are still needing to teach students simple routines: listening during story time in kindergarten or responding to adults who greet them as they leave the school bus.
“We’re still having to teach kids how to do things that maybe previously they came to school knowing how to do,” she said.
Ms. Osborne added: “We try every day, and we show up and we’re doing the work with the kids every day, but it’s just not improving as quickly as we’d like to see it improve.”