Who’s in Control?
Following is something I posted to a question on teachers.net about getting kids under control:
On 9/24/08, Juli wrote:
> Please help me out here. I have 16 boys in a class of 21.
> They aren’t openly disrespectful, but refuse to stop
> talking. When I go through my discipline steps and take 20%
> for each offense, then they get angry and disruptive even
> more so. How do I get these kids under control?
That’s a lot of boys! But back to your question of how to get kids under control…
First off, having control over other people, even kids, is an illusion. Control over another person only happens in two ways: 1) The other person allows it. 2) One person has more power than another. At younger and younger ages, kids are proving that we can’t force them to do much of anything. For sure you can’t force someone to learn. And after a certain age you can’t force anyone to do anything against their will, unless of course there is an imbalance of power.
So how come some classrooms are “under control” and others are not? In my opinion, it all boils down to a balance of motivation and influence–student motivation and teacher influence. Other than their anger over losing 20%, how is your rapport with them? If you don’t have rapport, you don’t have influence. People won’t care about anything you say until they know you care about them.
To what degree is learning being impacted by the talking and anger? If there is very little learning taking place, you need to do something drastic. What you do will depend on you and your unique personality.
My classroom management is based on caring and problem-solving:
1. I take a sincere interest in each student and set a tone that is fun, friendly, firm, and consistent. Kids will do anything for the people they care about–this is the heart of the motivation and influence that I talked about above.
2. I have one rule based on the idea of problem-solving. Choose safe behavior that supports the learning
expectations. If students choose behavior that is unsafe or unsupportive they are creating a problem that gets in the way of learning. The person who creates the problem is the the one who needs to fix it. The students comes up with possible solutions and chooses which one to try. But before it gets to the problem stage, I ask reflective questions to redirect the behavior, “How is your behavior supporting everyone’s learning right now?” or “When might be a better time to do that so that you can support everyone’s learning
right now?”
My ideas have developed from several sources… Marvin Marshall’s Discipline without Stress, Jim Fay’s Love and Logic, Fred Jones’ Tools for Teaching, and the Wong’s First Days of School. Most recently I’ve been influenced by Tom Carter’s ideas about the role of the alpha leader and the importance of safety and support for learning. (http://teachers.net/mentors/classroom_management).
