Formação de professores para gestão de comportamento de crianças em sala de aula

Abstract

It is common that teachers complain about student behavior in the classroom, which can affect these children's academic and social lives and increase teacher's stress level. Behavior management training for teachers appears to be an important tool for promoting behavioral changes. The use of a teaching material in training complements the learning of behavioral principles and intervention possibilities. The general objective of this research was to train teachers to manage children's behavior in the classroom and evaluate the trainning and included three studies. Study 1 proposed a systematic review of behavioral intervention procedures in the classroom, to compose the teaching material prepared in the next study. The review had four stages. Firstly, articles were searched using the descriptors “behavior management” and “classroom” in databases. Then, were done the exploratory reading of the title and summary of the articles. The selected articles were fully readed and the inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied. Finally, the analysis and synthesis of the work was carried out. 37 studies were found, of which 32 used the interdependent group contingency. CW-FIT (13 studies) and Good Behavior Game (11 studies) intervention programs prevailed. In 23 articles, teacher training was mentioned. Study 2 aimed to develop and validate a teaching material. The first section of the material deals with the basic principles of Behavior Analysis and the second section presents relevant variables for behavioral intervention. The teaching material was sent together with a protocol to ten expert judges and to 6 participants from the target audience for the evaluation of the domains: Information, Presentation, Layout, Language, Images and Motivation. The results indicate that the Layout and Images of the material are those that require the most revision. In general, reviews of the material Information were favorable. Study 3 sought to verify whether a training program for teachers would be effective in helping them manage behaviors in the classroom. Originally the training was planned to take place in nine meetings. The procedure was divided into: a) Survey of the target behaviors of the intervention; b) Measurement of the control condition; c) Training; d) Measurement of the experimental condition; e) Generalization test; f) Evaluation of training by the teacher; g) Follow-up. The main problem behaviors presented by the students were “talking to peers” (average of 1.6 responses per minute in the baseline and 0.91 in the intervention) and “walking around the classroom” (average of 1.14 responses per minute in baseline and 0.62 in intervention). The behavior of “raising hand to talk to the teacher” averaged 0.45 responses per minute in the baseline and 0.61 in the intervention. The teachers positively evaluated the training and the teaching material. Difficulties encountered at the school and in the teachers' routine required changes to the training format and restricted teacher participation. It is concluded that the teacher training, using the prepared teaching material, and the implementation of the interdependent contingency were effective in managing behaviors in the classroom.