Day -11: On Discipline

My mom told me that a friend of hers who sometimes reads this blog said, "It's amazing that she doesn't have any discipline problems!"

I definitely don't mean to give that impression. I definitely do have discipline problems, if that means students who give me headaches, who interrupt/annoy/upset/hurt other students and/or me.

I am not a natural classroom manager. Thinking up curriculum ideas is easy for me, as is building relationships with students, seeing gaps in students' understanding and then planning interventions to fill in those gaps, making connections between content areas, trying out new instructional strategies, and lots of other parts of teaching. Not easy as in a cakewalk, but easy as in, while it's intellectually demanding, it builds on natural strengths of mine. Classroom management I do by sheer force of will. I will myself to establish a limit and enforce it. I try to will myself (when I'm feeling well-rested, anyway) to enforce those limits calmly without getting visibly angry, but I am not very good at that. Juan definitely knows he can get an emotional reaction from me if he pushes hard enough.

I remember when I was interviewing for my first teaching job 14(!) years ago (OK, it was just a summer program, but still), I said that I thought engaging curriculum was the foundation of good classroom management. I still believe that, in part. If students find the work they are doing meaningful and interesting, they are much less likely to get into trouble.

The only problem is ... that has been taken away from me. I have so little control over the curriculum I teach now, that I can't rely on my curriculum to limit discipline problems. But I still do my best. For whatever I'm teaching, I try to think up a meaningful end-product that students will show to some audience, even if it's just to each other. I can feel the difference in students' energy and focus when they are rehearsing a play they are about to perform for another class or even just putting finishing touches on their biographies that (after we share them in partners) I'm just going to pin up on the wall. I can't think up a great final product for every random grammar subskill I have to teach, but nonetheless, I try to tie isolated skills to a meaningful context whenever I can. I try to vary the pace of the day, too - mixing in lots of opportunities for whole group instruction, work in small groups, work in partners, and individual work, and I think this balance help some students get in the socializing time they need.

The part of classroom management I'm best at, as is probably apparent from the kinds of stories I write about in my blog, is the relationship-building part. I do think having strong relationship with students and their families is an essential precursor to good classroom management. Obviously, I don't have to eat lunch with students or go to their first communions, but building relationships with my students is actually my favorite part of my job, so it's no hardship for me to do that - though it does take time. But when a student knows that I know his parents well, that definitely affects the students' behavior.

I think another key to classroom management is a well-established set of routines and procedures. I might not be quite as good at this as I'd like to be, in fact I was lecturing my students just today about how they really should understand the rules for our end-of-the-day homework time by now! But I know clear expectations and predictability make a huge difference.

About a week ago, I felt like the end-of-the-year behavior slide was setting in, that restlessness that students and teachers alike feel as vacation approaches. I felt like I had been battling with students too much, so I cracked down. The most extreme example of this crackdown was last Wednesday when my class was walking across the playground to visit our first grade buddies, and I made us turn around and go back to our classroom without ever going to buddies because students were playing around in line and (potentially, anyway) distracting other classes. This consequence, while obviously not the fairest since all students were punished, worked (or at least stopped the problem and refocused the class on learning for the moment) because I gave it very dispassionately, and instead of giving a long lecture, I talked briefly about my decision and the reasons for it, and then moved on and started students on a math activity instead.

Our school uses this uniform system of consequences. The first time a student is doing something inappropriate on any given day, the student gets a warning. The second infraction during that same day is a 5-minute timeout. The third time is a 10-minute timeout. The fourth time is a timeout in another classroom plus a phone call home. And the fifth time is getting sent to the office. During my little crackdown this week, I started giving more consequences for small things like whispering when it was time to listen silently, etc. It has worked to allow me to teach more, for the most part, but it does get tiring to enforce.

A week into the crackdown, though, and its benefits are wearing off. Eventually students see that getting sent to another room for a timeout isn't all that bad (at least in some students' eyes). Juan has come to accept that consequence with little protest. He will always start crying, though, if he reaches "Level 5" and I send him to the office, which I've done three times this year, I think.

Each year I become a little stricter, and that's for the best, I think.

Everyone (i.e. their past teachers and their P.E/science/music/computer teachers), say that the class I have this year is challenging in terms of discipline issues, so I'm curious how my classroom management would feel with a new class next year.

There is a part of me that hates being the enforcer of limits, that knows how cool my students are as people and wants them to be engaged all the time, that blames myself if they are more interested in goofing off. But when there are 31 kids in one room who are often supposed to be doing the same thing at the same time (no matter how much I try to differentiate), the teacher has to be a strong enforcer of limits or nothing gets done. That's the one part of teaching that I wasn't sure I could do, and it has not been easy for me to learn how to do. So in some weird way, learning to be at least a passable enforcer of limits is something I'm proud of. And I can count on Juan to test just how good I am at navigating the love and limits dance each and every day!