This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 172 of a Cult of Pedagogy podcast.

In this episode we're going to explore ways we can help students meet their needs at the fourth

tier of Maslow's hierarchy, the esteemed level.

I want you to think for a minute about a spitball.

A pea-sized ball of paper wadded up maybe even inserted into a drinking straw and then shot

at an unsuspecting student in some classroom on any day in history.

It usually has the intended effect of annoying the target student and if the kid doing the shooting

is caught often results in a reprimand of some kind. It also satisfies a more important goal.

It gets that kid attention. One phrase I hear teachers use a lot when they talk about problems

with classroom management is attention seeking behavior. Our students do things that interrupt

instruction, distract their classmates, or at a more serious level even end up causing harm

to themselves or others. We punish, we yell, we write names on the board, pull students into the

hall, call parents, and these responses kind of work to reduce some of these behaviors.

But if we could actually get to the root of why students do these things, beyond the simple

and dismissive explanation of they are just trying to get attention, we might be able to eliminate

even more of them. It turns out the root might be found on the fourth tier of Maslow's hierarchy

of needs. My guest today, educator and author Connie Hamilton, is exceptionally good at figuring out

how small moments in the classroom little shifts we make in the way we interact with our students

can make huge differences in the quality of their learning. This is Connie's second time on the

podcast. In episode 141, she talked about how we can get our students to stop saying I don't know

and get more specific about their points of confusion. Today, we're going to look at how

student needs on Maslow's fourth tier explain their attention seeking behavior or sometimes the

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