The Impact of Natural Selection on Human Behavior

circumstances where educators described many students as being “challenging” or, in more extreme cases, “at risk” of dropping out of school. Even when I was teaching in more mainstream schools, there were typically one or two students in my classes who were not interested in school; as a result, their behaviors were often disruptive. I found that in most such instances, there were ways to connect with these students and to have a positive impact on their attitudes and their behaviors.

This book is based on extensive research in the fields of influence and persuasion as well as my decades of experience in K–12 education, much of it working with students considered at risk. It presents a range of influence and persuasion strategies and illustrates how K–12 teachers and administrators can use specific strategies as tools to positively impact the attitudes and behaviors of all students, even the most challenging ones. You will learn how to be tactical in your approach to students by exploring what psychology teaches about effective influence tactics, how game designers use payoff strategies to get people to keep playing, the techniques highly successful sales and advertising people use to persuade others to do what they want them to do, and even how professional hostage negotiators ensure peaceful outcomes. In the following sections, I explore the importance of influence tactics and how I’ve crafted my approach to applying them to students’ benefit. I then outline how I’ve structured and organized this book to help you do the same.

TACTICS AND INFLUENCE

I’ve dedicated most of this book to the exploration of soft tactics and how teachers and administrators can effectively use them in a classroom. In Influence: Mastering Life’s Most Powerful Skill, Kenneth Brown (2013) defines soft tactics as those that support a target’s autonomy:

They attempt to get someone to think or act in a certain way by making that alternative more appealing than others. These tactics include attempting to persuade with reason or with emotion, complimenting the target (ingratiation), and offering an exchange. (p. 76)

In other words, soft tactics work to get the student to cooperate with you willingly. Soft tactics are very effective in positively influencing student behavior and attitudes over an extended period of time, and they’re quite different from hard tactics, which Brown (2013) describes as an “attempt to get someone to think or do something specific by metaphorically pushing them in that direction. These tactics include making reference to formal authority, building a coalition, and applying pressure” (p. 76). A teacher who announces to a student, “You should do what I tell you because I’m the teacher,” or a teacher who threatens to send a student to the principal’s office or to call home is using hard tactics. As you will discover in chapter 14 (page 171), these strategies can sometimes be effective in getting students to comply in the short term, but they seldom have any positive long-term effect.

Although I use examples from a variety of contexts and sources, I examine the tactics and techniques in this book primarily through the lens of classroom teachers. You will see how effective these tactics are in a school context, with students from elementary to high school, even with those students who are the most challenging. Through real-life examples and the application of a wide range of research, you will learn various strategies to effectively influence the students in your classes to become cooperative and successful in school.

Teachers and administrators who read this book and utilize even a fraction of the tactics described herein will see a significant improvement in their ability to positively impact student behaviors and achievement. To be clear, this is not a book about classroom management but one about behavior and influence. While there are certainly some strategies included that can work for an entire class, I mean for you to use most of the strategies I describe with an individual student or with a small group of students.

As well, when you read this book’s strategies, you will likely find some that immediately attract you; you will

see a natural fit with both your teaching style and the students you teach. There will be other strategies that you may instinctively dismiss as unworkable for you and your teaching situation. Some beginning teachers may look at a number of these tactics and find gems, while a teacher with extensive experience may see these same strategies as being somewhat obvious. This is understandable and expected. Teaching is contextual, and every teacher and every situation are unique. You will find the ideas in this book range from relatively simple and low risk to much more sophisticated and complex (and sometimes high risk), and you should implement only those tactics that you feel comfortable with—the tactics that you believe have a high chance of success in your particular teaching situation. My goal is to give you a smorgasbord of persuasion and influence tactics that can work with students—when used appropriately. Only you know which of these tactics is most likely to work with a particular student in your unique teaching context. The choice is yours.

At this point, you might ask, “Why should I take on the burden of trying to work with some of the most challenging students in my classroom?” Certainly, it is much easier to write them off or throw them out of class when their behaviors go too far. Teaching students who come to school well-fed, clean, and eager to learn is certainly a lot of fun. But it is akin to a doctor telling their patients to only visit when they are feeling healthy. Just as it’s the sickest patients who need a doctor the most, it is the challenging students who need you the most. I argue it is one of the highest possible goals for teachers to assume the responsibility for teaching the most difficult students in their classes. And while doing this work can certainly be a heavy burden to carry, please don’t dismiss doing it because it is difficult. As teachers, we all need something heavy to carry. It not only makes us stronger, but there is solace to be found here as well. You may say to yourself, “I may not teach the most engaging classes, and I may not make the most creative assessments, but at least I refuse to give up on the most difficult students. That alone gives me value as a teacher.”

Inspiration is an important motivator for all teachers. For example, I keep a starfish hanging on the wall beside my desk. I do this because it reminds me of the following story—a popular adaptation of “The Star Thrower” by Loren Eiseley (1969):

A man was walking along a deserted beach at sunset. As he walked, he could see a young boy in the distance. As he drew nearer, he noticed that the boy kept bending down, picking something up and throwing it into the water. Time and again, the boy kept hurling things into the ocean. As the man approached even closer, he was able to see that the boy was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time, he was throwing them back into the water.

The man asked the boy what he was doing. The young boy paused, looked up, and replied, “Throwing starfish into the ocean. The tide has washed them up onto the beach, and they can’t return to the sea by themselves. When the sun gets high, they will die unless I throw them back into the water.”

“But,” said the man, “you can’t possibly save them all. There are thousands of starfish on this beach, and this must be happening on hundreds of beaches along the coast. You can’t possibly make a difference.”

The boy smiled, bent down and picked up another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, “I made a difference to that one.”

In Beyond Order: Twelve More Rules for Life, psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson (2021) states, “Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens” (p. 181). I would paraphrase this, work as hard as you possibly can with at least one challenging student, and see what happens. If you choose to pick up the heavy burden of working with one (perhaps two?) of the more difficult students in your classes, in doing so, you will have established a close relationship with one of the most fundamental virtues of the teaching