Suck It Up

The other day I was speaking with a colleague of mine about the nature of our work in classroom instruction at the university. She brought up an interesting point about certain jobs being demanding, like surgery and the fact that if you're having an "off day" it could have serious consequences for the patient. She went on to say that if we have an "off day " and deliver a so-so lecture, no real harm, no one dies, the next lecture will be better.

It's true, university students are forgiving. I've even shown a time or two to class with serious laryngitis and virtually no voice and somehow the content got delivered, students helped out and I made up for lost time the following week. The same luxury simply does not exist for K-12 teachers. The work of K-12 teachers is so critical that they need to be substituted if they are ill or need to be away. At the university, we simply cancel the class. Imagine that, canceling something people have already paid for. Funny, no one complains, most even celebrate. This supports my theory that education is the one thing where people want less for their money. Odd phenomenon.

So, now for the point of this rambling. In the vast majority of the regions where teachers practice their craft (I get to be one of those teachers again this year at a middle school, teaching some science sections) the students come from low socio-economic circumstances. Their lives are fragile and resilient at the same time. There is high need on the side of the students. Many come from environments where the adults in their lives are unstable, under prepared for parenting and just plain overwhelmed. Their behavior in the home can be unpleasant, there is alcohol involved, sometimes drugs and violence. The last thing these students need is for their teacher to have an "off day".

In K-12 classrooms "off days" do have serious consequences. Maybe the consequence is not immediate, but add up enough of those types of days and somebody can't read, somebody never got past the "algebra gate keeper", somebody else can't pull a paragraph together—let alone the pain of low Standardized Test Scores, API's, and AYP's. O.K., long term pain isn't that bad, besides you get to share it with other teachers. Let's talk "short term" pain.

If the K-12 teacher is a little "off" the energy just isn't there. In a well managed classroom, especially one with high achieveing students, there will be forgiveness. However, in a classroom with lower achieveing students where the behavior issues are still teetering somewhere between stepping on an ant hill and losing the brakes in your car, forget about about creating an environment condusive to learning—pray there are no classroom visitors with any influence over your career.

Suck it up. Whatever is going on in your life (and yes, kids do need to understand that teachers have lives—but that teachers are in control of their lives) back burner it or stay home. Remember, you're important enough to be substitued.

As always - comments and stories welcomed!

Stef

The Code

Break the code, know the code, live by the code. I think from my observations of secondary students that they have codes, very well defined codes they live by. There is something noble in that. They are strict and quick to call each other on code violations. The neophytes are also quick to the learn the codes.

So, capture that code stuff and make it work for you as a teacher. I realize that they sometimes use their code for evil, instead of good—that's where you come in. Let's do some more thinking on this.


Stef

Emotion is Memory Glue

Few would argue that emotion is the single strongest element of the human condition. Most of us remember what we ate for breakfast or what were wearing (things we normally forget) on a day when something truly emotionally impactful occurred. We know where we were when Niel Armstrong walked on the moon, the 911 attacks happened, the day someone we loved or admired died. Noting cements a memory like emotion. This phenomenon has serious consequences in the classroom.

Knowing this we need to remember as teachers that we have the power to emotionally heal, scar, or bolster students. This is especially true of those who come from fragile home situations. Many times it is the troubled ones who give us trouble. It is their way of letting us know how much they need us. We need to think hard about our responses to students, in particular when they cause a disruption or disappoint us in some way. You probably have a memory of a teacher's retort—whether it was directed at you or a classmate.

In another posting I'll write about severe conduct disorder and other antisocial personality disorders in students. Those are important topics for teachers, but that's not what I am referring to here. This is about the day to day that sometimes runs into a blur where we overlook the details of our own behavior.

As always, interested in your thoughts.

Stef

Button Pushing

Students who act out really do not care about your feelings. If they did, they would not act out for fear of offending or hurting you. The "good kids", on the other hand, do care about your feelings and do not want to offend or hurt you, so they comply. This means it makes little sense (and perhaps could exacerbate the situation) to let your feelings be known during a classroom management difficulty. Don't tell them what makes you mad, your blood pressure rise, or gives you a twitch (above all, don't cry or scream). If you do these things you just lost points and they just gained points—yes, it's their game.

I have to say, we learn little from the good kids. This is why I am so grateful to the students who do act out. During an episode there is much to learn about ourselves, the group dynamic, and the individuals at the core of the problem. I love walking into a troubled classroom, I have little purpose in a tranquil environment—unless it's to give input on the quality of a lesson design.

So bottom line, keep your feelings to yourself (I guess you could engage in primal screaming in the solitude of your car on the drive home to relieve pent up feelings). Breathe deeply, constantly remind yourself that they are kids, they need you, and you are exactly where you need to be. Pretty empowering, huh?

What all kids care about the most is whether or not you care. Many of them build walls around themselves just to see if you'll break through.

As always, your comments are encouraged.

Stef

Health, Why Wait?

We would teach a lot about health if there were a state standardized, high stakes test associated with that content. As it stands we just have the high stakes of students under-educated in healthful eating, exercising, life style, and self-reliant general personal health maintenance. High blood sugar, low levels of protein, irregular eating patterns, and inadequate water consumption in concert with sporatic (if any at all) heart-pumping excercise lead to behavioral challenges in the classroom and a long term societal burden.

So, if we know all of this, why are we waiting for a standardized test to move us forward? Why wait for legislation to force us? We're teachers, we have a moral obligation to model and teach proactive health maintenance. We are already witnessing grossly over-weight teen girls opting for lap band surgery when such conditions could have been avoided by simply knowing how to eat and exercise. We see young men, really young men, O.K., kids with their bellies wabbling over their pants.

We live in a country where there is a gym every few blocks, dozens of over the counter diet aids, and lots of out of shape people wandering around. When I was a kid growing up in the sixties, there were no gyms, well just those "body-builder" places, I didn't even know anyone using a diet aid, and everyone was thin. Back then folks probably smoked and drank too much, but that didn't apply to middle schoolers, but it does now.

Teachers can, and I predict will turn this around. Apparently, parents can't, the government can't, I don't see anyone from private industry stepping up. Teachers will do it.

Stef

Creative and Successful Beyond School

I now know what it would take to get rich. All I need is a nickle for every story I have read or heard about an individual who is anywhere from mildly to wildly creative and successful who has tales of frustration in K-12 school. Don't get me wrong, most of these stories include that "one teacher who . . ." Not all of them, but most of them speak of the teacher who recognized and developed the talent, the spark, the what later became a life story of creativity and success. I am reminded of movie producer Spielberg who needed to skip school to take photographs at sunrise in the desert, so his mom drove him to do that. Country singer, Marty Stuart tells a story of getting in trouble in a history class as he retorted to his teacher, "I don't want to read about history, I want to make history!" He went on the road at 13 years of age to start a prolific music career. In a hospital emergency room, the physician was chatting it up with me about what I do for living and then went on to tell me it wasn't until he was in 7th grade that he earned his first "A".

This tells us a few things. It tells us as educators to be that "one teacher who . . ." It tells us that there is bubbling potential in students that goes unrecognized and later erupts as undesired classroom behavior. It tells us that the "one size fits all" approach to education is about as realistic and attractive in our industry as it is in the fashion industry—it's not.

We have the power to customize.

As always, comments welcomed!

Stef

Mean, Cranky, Yelling Behavior

This is a short entry today because it is simply a report of what a middle school student told a colleague of mine after school. He said, "I have never liked school". My colleague is one of the "cool dudes" after school and kids like to swing by and help clean up his lab or just hang out. After the boy made his announcement, my colleague asked the boy why he wasn't happy with school.

The boy went on to explain that at home his mom is always mad and when he goes to school his teachers are always mad too. My colleague was empathetic, but tried to reason with the boy as well. He explained that kids' behaviors often cause "mean" or "cranky" behavior in adults and sometimes they yell, even though they shouldn't. The boy just replied that he couldn't take it anymore. This worries me.

Interested in your thoughts.

Stef

The Power of the Unknown, or Know When to Ear Bite

The beginning of a new academic year is our own version of "Happy New Year". We are filled with anticipation, hope, and even resolutions (i.e., "This year I won't let those kids . . ."). The students on the other hand simply wrestle for a day or two with the "unknown". Then that charming timid behavior that borders on the polite begins to dwindle. Take advantage of it—but in a nice way.

Let's take a lesson from packing or herding animals. I talk about this frequently while teaching pre-service or coaching in-service teachers. One of my favorite examples of getting the "young ones in line" is the wolf pack. Remember, discipline is "for their own good", in the wild it is a matter of survival. Wolves don't think about it, they just know it instinctively. When one of those youngsters starts to "test" (like students on the 2nd or 3rd day of school, once they have you all figured out) the alpha wolf just bites an ear—message sent, "get back in line", no love lost.

Find your own way to "ear bite" straight away before a bad behavior becomes a habit or spreads like a pandemic disease. Initially they'll respect you, ultimately they'll thank you.

Comments and stories welcome!

Stef

Body Language

I have a confession. I am one of those people who really likes that roughly 3 feet of space around me at all times. It's not that I am unfriendly (at least I don't think I am), it's just that personal space is important to me, I just don't need to be that "up close and personal". I have learned, however, in my never ending quest to determine the perfect combination of conditions to optimize classroom teaching, "up close and personal" is often preferred by students of certain cultures and especially at the middle school level. I have learned to adjust.

So, that's my body language issue—and we all have them. In my credential courses and while coaching classroom teachers, I spend time on this topic. Pre-service and in-service teachers are surprised to learn a few things that I am about to share with you. What follows is a brief, by no means complete (but it's a start) list of body language "messages" we send, here goes:

1. Shifting your weight to one side communicates being unbalanced, so center your weight.
2. One or both hands on the hips is "posturing" if you stand that way too long (especially with both hands and while raising your voice) this communicates agitation and is provoking.
3. If you want others to speak up, especially after you have been talking for awhile, "turn it over" to the class (or audience) by extending your hands, palms up.
4. Breath deeply and walk slowly when something goes wrong, class gets noise, kids horsing around, whatever—never rush over to an incident, or it will worsen.
5. Never touch a student, just make contact with the desk, you will get the compliance you're looking for, especially if you keep on teaching while standing there leaning against the his/her desk.
6. When you want someone's attention, like the kid in the back who just cannot reign it in and quiet down and stop talking, square your hips and shoulders toward that student and look directly at her/him without speaking. You'll get the compliance and most likely another student or the rest of the class will tell her/him to stop interrupting the class. Be sure to always say, "Thank you" when you get compliance you seek.

That's enough for now. There is a huge amount of research on this topic and some fairly good videos on U-Tube to illustrate some these points. Become a student of body language, observe your peers, both the "pro's" and the "strugglers", I'll bet their body language is very different from one another.

When you have moment, share some of your body language observations with us!

Stef

Diagnostics: Teachers are Good Medicine

Your case load is high, I know that. For high school teachers a case load of 180+ students is a norm, for middle school teachers 160+ students is business as usual. And, much like a physician you are expected to administer treatment of one sort or another to each of the individuals with which you come in contact. The big difference though between you and the medical practitioner is that you see all of your "patients" in one day and in clumps of 30-40 at a time.

Under these conditions triage is the order of the day. There are times when the classroom becomes chaotic like a hospital emergency room, but the triage "team" is you and nobody else. We need to ask ourselves, even when we are consistently successful with this seemingly impossible situation, how long can we continue without wearing ourselves out? At what point does our own health begin to degrade? When does our unfaltering commitment to resolving our students' "ills" erode our personal relationships? This is serious stuff. We need to take care of ourselves.

The secret is to become really good with diagnostics. As quickly as possible we need to figure who falls into which segment of the "80/20%" categories. Let me explain. For the most part, 80% of our students are in no immediate danger—they may develop symptoms later, but for now, they're fine (just keep an eye on 'em). Then there's the remaining 20%, of them, 15% are showing symptoms, while not acute, they are chronic and deserve your attention. The final 5%—they're the one's showing acute symptoms, either instructionally, behaviorally, or most likely both.

That 5% is 2 or 3 students in a class—that's manageable. If we really work on diagnosing those students and prescribe appropriately, we can begin to get a handle on the situation. We'll have many more conversations about this on the blog throughout the year. For now, remember this, teachers are good medicine.

Stef

The Liberated Teacher

If teachers are "respected professionals" (as they are told they are in the intro of a professional development session) why do we keep telling them what to do in "professional development" workshops? I am still focusing on classroom management/ discipline here, but I think we need to think about this phenomenon. All workshops provided for teachers feed into the classroom conditions and teachers need to speak up when they know for certain that a strategy may spell disaster in the classroom.

It is professional to contribute in a professional development session if a teacher has direct experience with a strategy (whether good or bad). That is what "development" is, anything else is merely indoctrination and that is not professional. Any professional development that allows for collaboration between teachers only around what is presented says teachers don't know enough to collaborate on their own about what they know—man that bothers me! Let me tell you why.

Initially, I have done more professional development workshops than I care to count and it is always extremely critical to me to learn about my audience ahead of time. I want to know what they already know—taking nothing for granted. Now we can develop and that goes for me too because it is always an matter of exchange.

Secondly, while coaching teachers, I have witnesses some difficult classroom situations where teachers have jumped in feeling pressure to implement an instructional or management strategy before they are ready to or before they understand why it is appropriate or not. In the end the teacher tells me with disappointment, "That's what I learned in a workshop".

So teachers, liberate yourselves. Weigh the outcome of a professional development. Make the strategy your own, question it, tweek it—you're a professional and you know stuff. You are either experienced in the classroom or you have recently come out of an accredited teacher preparation program—either way, you know stuff. Share your stuff.

That's enough from me, now it's your turn.

Stef

First Impression

Ever wonder what you look like to kids? Do you think about what you want to look like to kids? I'm actually not sure where I'm going with this, it's just that I've been thinking about it. When I get around a bunch of teachers I don't know, I wonder about it. Oddly enough, the same thoughts go through my head when I get around a bunch of teachers I do know.

One thing's for sure, teachers are always the ones in comfortable shoes. That in itself sends a message. I am fairly certain (at least I've read plenty of research to support this, so I talk about it in my teacher credentialing classes because I want my "teacher-in-the-making" students to be aware) we can enhance our ability to manage a class by the way we dress, our body language, the tone of our voice, and as strange as it may seem, lastly by the words we use. More on this another time.

It concerns me that teachers (many of them) don't put much work into preparing their "professional image" for the day. Then they wonder why kids don't listen to them, respect them, defy them. It matters what you look like (unless you have a major rep' and then you can get away with more). Secondary students especially take note of the last time you wore the blue plaid shirt, the overly relaxed nature of your outfit, the "datedness" of what you're wearing.

If you mean business in the classroom, and you should, then dress the part. It doesn't have to be fancy or expensive. It should fit well, be coordinated, up to date, and age appropriate. It says you care. The truth is, kids don't really concern themselves with what you know, it is whether you care. The skillfully prepared lesson says you care, so does how you present yourself.

Teachers Are My Heroes

Today's was just an average morning drive on the freeway when my attention was captured by a bumper sticker on the car ahead of me. There were many bumper stickers (all positive, Earth protecting, socially aware, the stuff we feel good about) on the back of this car, but there was one, strategically placed in the middle, just under the license plate. That sticker read, "Teachers Are My Heroes".

I know this doesn't have anything to do with classroom management/ discipline, or maybe it does. It just seemed overwhelmingly important to talk about. So what types of students think heroic thoughts about teachers? In the end, maybe the most challenged ones reflect on us and see us as their heroes. I would have driven up next to that car with all of the bumper stickers and rolled down my window and risked being perceived as a manic stalker and asked the driver about his motivation for purchasing and posting that sticker, but that wouldn't have been responsible driving.

That's it for now, super heroes!

Stef

Nervous Laughter

Man it's irritating when those students laugh out of turn and laugh at anything! I have heard that from a lot of teachers and at first I simply reply, "It's just an adolescent thing, they're silly". But in truth, there are many reasons why we laugh. One of those reasons is nervousness. When we are unsure of what is expected, when we are inhibited about speaking in front of peers, we're nervous and that can result in laughing.

The more the teacher becomes visibly irritated by the laughter, the more the laughter, the more the irritation, instruction takes a backseat once again. So, as usual I am not going to tell you how to fix this. You don't need me to do that because you can do that for yourself by knowing the possible "why" for the laughter—nervousness. Now, what would you do proactively to reduce the conditions leading to nervous laughter? What would you do to reduce classroom anxiety/nervousness? What are some of the things we do as teachers, even unknowingly that contribute to the necessary and sufficient conditions to yield unwanted laughter?

Think hard about the conditions you want to create in your classroom at all times. The best thing about classroom conditions is, for the most part you're in control—well, except for the day the HV/AC goes down, the phone rings off the hook, the Internet crashes . . . .

Stef

You Did What?

Perhaps we should spend more time simply reflecting on our own "school-going" past as a method for understanding the goings-on of our students. Let's think back on the worst behavior we ever exhibited in middle or high school. What motivated us? Did we just wake up that morning and decide to be disruptive? Do our students do that? At what point do they put the knife in their pocket, the drugs in their sock, the alcohol in their backpack?

It is well worth speculating and investigating—it gets us to the "why" of behaviors we wish would never occur. Knowing the "why" always gets us to a place where we can begin thinking prevention, if we're lucky, and intervention for certain.

So, you did what as a student? As for me, I just talked too much—way too much, repeatedly thrown out of the school library too much. What motivated me? I honestly thought I had something worth saying. Nothing has changed, now I blog.

Stef