Classroom Management Issues

Classroom Management Issues—Day to Day Tenor of the Room

I keep classroom management issues, or, more precisely, the tenor or activity level of the room, constantly in awareness. Are the students excited, absorbed, interested, and enjoying learning? We all hope so. Sometimes, however, teachers work with distracted, bored, and angry students. Teachers must deliver a lesson plan while maintaining awareness about how their students seem to be feeling.

The tenor of the room guides the teacher in selecting how to deliver the lesson plan. For example, I do not ask students to read a textbook if they are sleepy or bored. A group activity or discussion could wake them up. Then, after they have come around, assign the reading. I reserve some room for improvisation in planning and delivering each lesson, because I cannot predict tomorrow’s mood. When I judge correctly, matching the type of lesson (reading, activity, group work, lecture, etc.) with the mood of the students, the lesson goes over well. When I don’t judge the classroom disposition correctly, or, more likely, become so enthralled with a lesson that I don’t pay attention to the student’s mood, I end up working harder to keep everyone engaged and focused.

What to do right now:

If students are:

• Bored or sleepy, try a group or partnering activity.
• Feeling exhausted and overworked, try a skit or a funny story that relates to the lesson. The lesson may also need to be broken down into smaller chunks. Or send the kids to the computer lab with a webquest created for your current unit.
• Overly excited and scattered, try a short lecture or a read aloud. Follow that with a silent reading assignment.
• Distracted, try to refocus students using music or art.

Group work or partnering, assignments using technology, drama or storytelling add interest and excitement to the classroom. Lectures, read alouds, music and art calm down and focus students. Reading a textbook, if set up correctly with introductions to the material, also calms students down. Do you want to energize or calm and focus the kids? In my student teaching I was often overly ambitious. These students could handle an hour-long lecture on the British Civil War I thought. These were the best students in the school, bound for the top universities in California. Their vapid stares by the end of class and poor performance on a subsequent exam proved that I was wrong. I made two mistakes—lecturing for too long and not breaking the material down into smaller pieces. Similarly, teachers often respond to the pressure of high stakes state testing and copious state standards by talking too much and jamming too much material in a lesson. The results—glassy-eyed students and ghastly test scores—confirm that teaching less achieves more. Students learn and retain more when the curriculum is delivered in a variety of ways and broken down into smaller chunks. If there is extra time in the lesson, check for understanding and re-teach as necessary. In other words, pursue depth of learning over breadth of learning. If you and your department have skillfully mapped out the curriculum beforehand, covering the requisite breadth will probably take care of itself.

Classroom Management Issues—General Overall Environment

Looking at classroom management issues more globally, independent of the day-to-day moods of the students, teachers can plan an environment based on their personality and instructing style. Teachers must find a general approach to running the high school classroom that sets limits, yet feels caring and warm to both teacher and student. See Figure I, Teacher Personality Versus Amount of Structure, below.

Figure I

Teacher Personality Versus Amount of Structure

                                    Teacher Personality

                                    Warm and Empathic

                                               

           

Amount of Structure                             A

Low                                                                                                                             High

Cold and Uncaring

Figure I borrows from the ideas of systems theory. The X (horizontal) axis is the amount of classroom structure, especially rules and procedures. The Y (vertical) axis stands for teacher personality characteristics. Point A is Spinrad’s ideal management style for the middle class high school classroom. The Y axis, warmth and empathy can be observed by how often the teacher smiles, jokes with students, asks about their family, friends and extracurricular activities, self-discloses, responds to student questions, comments on problems (in and out of the classroom), clowns and acts in a self-depreciating manner, goes off topic to attend to a “teaching moment,” creates class jokes, signs yearbooks, performs in rallies, writes and uses music and drama (and other emotion-based devices), and lastly, visibly enjoys teaching the material and the interacting with students. Most teachers cannot exhibit an elevated amount of warmth for every class—it takes too much energy and few of us feel this loving day in and day out. The students would also object. Many adolescents prefer a more business-like tone from adults. However, I recommend that teachers consider working on the warm and empathetic side of the cold to warm continuum. If the classroom is mildly inviting, students will want to stay.

What to do right now: decide in advance how much and what you will self-disclose and how much privacy you want for yourself and family.

The X axis, the amount of classroom structure—rules and procedures—can be found in how the teacher arranges the room; writes, explains, and practices rules and procedures; and punishes infractions. Teenagers need and crave some structure, but too much dampens creativity and openness of ideas, turning the classroom into a bureaucratic labyrinth instead of a place for learning. Who wants to go to school at the DMV? So here too, I prefer to teach in the middle of the continuum, leaning slightly more towards structure, as shown in the placement of point A. Teachers can increase structure by modifying the layout of desks. Turning tables or desks toward each other decreases structure. Desks organized in rows, faced toward the teacher increases structure. Reviewing rules and procedures throughout the year and enforcing them increases structure. Routine tasks such as writing lecture notes on the board before class or always showing a PowerPoint at the start of class increases structure.

I desire enough structure so that the class is perceived as safe with the teacher in control. Students must know a few general rules and procedures and abide by them. That is all. Teachers have the power to add or subtract structure as they wish, based on the maturity of the students and the class interactions. Younger students or classes with a critical mass of rebellious or unruly students require more structure. Mature students that collaborate and find creative solutions need a teacher who will loosen structure and step out of the way. Thus I find it foolish to ask most 15-year-olds to brainstorm, since they cannot handle the freedom. Similarly, teachers perform a disservice when they keep well-behaved, gifted high school seniors away from disorderly but creative group projects.

Teachers may adjust the amount of classroom structure in the same class over the course of a year. Most teachers tend to relax structure and punitive sanctions over the course of the school year, starting the year on the strict side and loosening up later if the students can handle the freedom. Teachers must find the level that works for them and the students. I have seen classrooms with the strictness of San Quentin State Prison and others that remind me of the chaos of Grand Central Station at 5PM on a Friday. Since structure must change with differing circumstances, I don’t always find the proper level. During a chaotic outdoor event I asked some of my sophomores to move to a different spot. The art teacher told me to leave them alone—they were fine where they were. He was right—for his style of teaching.

What to do right now: The teacher can and must adjust the amount of structure to fit his or her style and fit the needs of adolescents. These students respond positively to firm limits and a feeling of safety in the classroom but also require enough freedom to encourage creativity and exchange of ideas.

Who to Call When the Limits are Tested

Adolescents will test the structure and limits set up by the teacher, since this is what youth do in modern American culture. How should an educator react? Teachers have not been trained as policemen, drill sergeants, or probation officers. Lacking preparation, beginning teachers and occasionally veterans throw the book (figuratively) at the offender, sending him or her to the office for relatively minor infractions. Sending a student to the assistant principal (AP) for chewing gum gives both the student and the AP the message that you, the teacher, cannot handle minor discipline issues on your own. No, instead, the teacher must handle all infractions except the most draconian. You were there, and the AP wasn’t, and you know the context of the infraction. Does this kid always act like this, did the incident serve as a challenge to your authority, and do you want to keep the power vested in you or give it away to an AP?

An AP must be brought in if a student threatens physical harm to self or others (and you may be required to warn the intended victim as well) and in incidents involving extreme defiance and controlled substances. District policy occasionally takes the discipline procedure out of the teacher’s hands, as in cases of plagiarism or vandalism. Sometimes a few kids take over a class, especially if the teacher is a powerless substitute, and then again the AP must be called. In most other cases, in a role similar to parenting, the teacher serves as lawmaker, judge, and executor of classroom discipline and must handle the problem herself.

Proper Discipline When the Limits are Tested

A good dishwasher uses the least amount of muscles, soap and water to get the job done. Using too much is costly, an inefficient use of resources, prematurely exhausting, and may even damage the Teflon pans. Similarly, using the least amount of punishment necessary to change a student’s behavior leads to a focused, successfully-paced lesson and maintains the effective mood in the classroom. Teachers also support the adolescents’ sense of justice when they see minor infractions followed with appropriately light punishments. Figure II, below, illustrates how different interventions affect the pace of instruction in the classroom.

 

Figure II

Interventions with Problem Behavior, Least to Most Interupting

A staring at the problem behavior or nonverbally asking the offending object to be put away

B joking about the problem behavior without looking at it

C walking over to where the problem behavior is occurring while continuing to teach

D asking the disrupting student an assessment question on the task at hand

E nonverbally asking for note, gum, cell phone, Ipod, etc. to be surrendered to teacher

F saying the student’s name in a barely loud enough voice for the student to hear it

G writing on the board or telling the class that every minute of disruption will be added to the time they must stay in class after the bell rings and following through OR writing on the board or telling the class that every name written down will get in-class detention writing Latin verb conjugations or an equally odious task

H shut down—standing silently and staring at the class, waiting for them to react

*I taking a student outside to discuss his/her behavior

J writing a referral during class and calling for a yard duty escort to send the offender to the office or calling an administrator to the classroom

K taking a student outside and calling the student’s guardian on a cell phone—the “nuclear bomb” intervention—very disruptive to class time and interrupting the pace of learning

*The class should be able to see but not hear the actual lecture. The teacher must use acting skills, appearing angry for the class but not sounding angry to the misbehaving student. Notice that the teacher avoids wherever possible public humiliation, since it works poorly with adolescents who so badly need to “save face” among their peers.

Positive Reinforcement

As one with a background in behaviorism may attest, reinforcing desired behaviors achieves more than punishing undesired actions. A reinforced student is a happy student and will repeat the reinforced behavior (by definition). Some teachers give out primary reinforcers such as candy. However, explicit (external) reinforcers may take the place of the more powerful and long-lasting implicit (internal) reinforcers. Teachers should give students an acknowledging smile and kind word for a job well done, but I do not think candy or overly effusive praise works well as a reinforcer. Will the student still perform if the reinforcement is not given? I find the best reinforcers include doing interesting work and receiving immediate feedback for that work. Both of these are implicit reinforcers. Grades work well as a reinforcer, and a teacher that gives frequent assessments, whether or not they are marked in the grade book, employs a powerful tool.

These reinforcers, work that is inherently interesting and performance feedback, also duplicate the behavioral contingencies students will encounter later in life outside the classroom. Few of us get paid every day, but most teachers get to learn something new and receive daily feedback on our performance. Reinforcers work better than punishment. Punishment doesn’t tell the student what TO do, only what NOT to do. Punishment produces side effects such as anger and sullenness and so should be used sparingly. Does the problem behavior require an intervention at all? Some bad behavior will go away if ignored for a minute.

When to Use Punishment Instead of Reinforcement

Punishment MUST be used occasionally, and the teacher that tries to survive on using only reinforcement in a class of unsocialized adolescents will have a harder time than the father trying to logically convince a two-year-old in the grocery store to stop throwing things off the shelf. Secondly, teachers must punish poor behavior occasionally or it loses its ability to serve as a deterrent. We do not have our students for an unlimited amount of time and cannot afford to waste any-- that ten-minute disruption may be 20 percent of the class time. Punishment works quickly and it works well in shutting down unwanted behavior. I have noticed three types of adolescent misbehavior in the classroom and have labeled them bravado, shutdown, and clowning. The teacher can determine which of these types is at hand by monitoring his own emotions.

Bravado

The student full of bravado uses loud profanity and boasts, also loudly, of fighting or sexual prowess, or substance abuse. The student wants to impress others with his toughness and show that he’s not afraid of this teacher or any rules. Other students will watch closely how you react, and if you do nothing this obnoxious behavior will spread to other students. When you have one or more of these students in a classroom, teaching feels a bit scary, like you are a warden in a prison. I rarely see this type of misbehavior if I have the student for a semester or more. Almost always, the student is in summer school or I am a temporary teacher, a short-term sub (or student teacher). Anecdotally I have noticed more bravado in mixed sex rather than single sex classrooms.

What to do right now: Resist the urge to publicly mock or confront these students, because they then feel forced not to lose face These kids often respond to adults that have relations with them. You don’t have that relationship. If you have time, find someone that does and you will have all the leverage over this student that you need. This might be a coach, another teacher, a parent, or the assistant principal. Until you find this person, stay calm and dignified and ask the student to quiet down. If he still doesn’t behave, write a referral and with little fanfare send him out of the classroom or to the office.

Shutdown

This student refuses to cooperate—won’t read, won’t do the writing assignment, and won’t participate in any form. Her mind is elsewhere, not on your class. Often the student will attempt to cheat if worried about her grade. When you have one or more of these students in a classroom, teaching feels tiring—the student is capturing all your energy.

What to do right now: Often the student is showing learned helplessness rather than purposely acting out, so a kind word may be the best intervention at first. If the student is not suffering but has decided to fail, get numerous respected adults to remind the student to get to work. These adults could include the student’s family, coaches, or other teachers the student likes. Thirdly, make a deal with the student: “You will pass if you do…” and keep your agreement. Lastly, perhaps this student and the rest of the class could benefit from a more engaging lesson or some partnering work. You can’t beat fun.

Clowning

This student wants attention and wants to stop working. He may become a hero in the eyes of his fellows by finding a way to allow everyone else to stop working too. He gestures, jokes, ridicules, belches, makes faces, and throws things behind the teacher’s back—in a summary steals the attention that should be on the assignment or the teacher. He turns serious and significant discussions or debates into a mockery. The teacher has great difficulty focusing the class. When you have one or more of these students in a classroom, teaching feels exasperating as your best efforts are deflected and you are unable to build up a head of steam. What to do right now: Try your best to stay on track by ignoring the offending student while exhorting the class to get back to work. In more extreme cases, send out the aberrant student or give him a special job to do around the classroom or on the critical class assignment.