A typical time-out consists of 5 to 10 minutes of sitting at a desk separated from classmates. But for many students, this isn’t a strong enough consequence.

For time-out to be most effective, your students need to feel the full weight of accountability. They need to feel excluded from the class they like being part of.

In other words, time-out needs to be about as much fun as dropping a dumbbell on your toes.

Follow the steps below to give time-out the strength it needs to dissuade even the most difficult students from misbehaving.

1. Teach it.

Your students must know exactly how to go to time-out, what they’re required to do once they’re there, and what they must do to rejoin their classmates. These should be taught and modeled thoroughly during the first few days of school.

2. Make it public.

When a student breaks a rule that calls for time-out—according to your classroom management plan—stop what you’re doing and pause before sending the student to time-out. It’s important that the rest of your students see you following through and enforcing rules.

3. Tell them why.

Every student you send to time-out should understand why. Briefly tell them what rule they broke and exactly why they’re going to time-out. This awareness is the first step to taking responsibility for their behavior.

4. Hide your displeasure.

Let time-out be your consequence. Don’t add to it by lecturing, scolding, or showing displeasure. These methods weaken time-out by lifting the weight of accountability off of your students’ shoulders and replacing it with dislike and resentment toward you.

5. Be matter-of-fact.

Enforce your rules as if you don’t have a care in the world. Student breaks rule, teacher enforces consequence. Make it as simple as that. This helps ensure that the responsibility for being in time-out lies with the student, and no one else.

6. Ignore them.

A student in time-out is responsible to listen and do the same work as everyone else, but is not allowed to participate. Therefore, you and the rest of your students should ignore them. This cements the realization that misbehavior results in being excluded from the class.

Note: This does not mean ignoring the need for legitimate academic help.

7. Let them reflect.

Most teachers remove students from time-out too soon. For most students, five or ten minutes won’t have the desired effect. How long they remain in time-out is up to them (see below), but 20 to 30 minutes or more is not out of the question.

8. They decide when they’re ready.

When a student decides they’ve learned their lesson, they must raise their hand and tell you they’re ready to rejoin their classmates. (You’ll teach them how to do this during those first few days of school.) It’s a good idea to wait 20 minutes before even looking in the student’s direction.

9. Let Them Do The Talking.

When a student says they’re ready to leave time-out, let them do the talking. If you’re satisfied with their level of contrition, smile and invite them back. If not, tell them so. Tell them you don’t think they’re ready and then walk away.

10. Don’t hold a grudge.

After completing time-out, allow the student to return to being a regular member of your classroom—in good standing. Don’t hold a grudge. Don’t treat them any differently. Give them an opportunity to make a fresh start. Trust that they’ve learned their lesson and won’t repeat their mistake.

11. Make it a physical and emotional separation.

Finally, and most important, time-out is at its most effective when students feel like they’re missing something. If you have enough leverage, your students will always feel this way. But there is nothing wrong with reminding them how lucky they are to be in your class.

So when you send a student to time-out, and it’s convenient for you, break out a learning game, laugh a little more, tell some stories. For time-out to be a strong consequence, it must be an emotional, as well as physical, separation.

Note: I wrote an article this week for a website called LearnBoost. They offer teachers an online gradebook for managing and creating lesson plans, tracking attendance, maintaining schedules, and more. The article is called The Real Secret To Effective Teaching. I hope you’ll check it out.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, please join us. It’s free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.

- Smart Classroom Management - Copyright 2009-2011, All Rights Reserved.

In their book, Made To Stick, authors Chip and Dan Heath describe the story of Jane Elliott.

Jane was a third-grade teacher on April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Struggling to explain the tragedy to her students, Jane decided to try something unusual. She separated her class by eye color.

She placed the brown-eyed students in the front of the room and the blue-eyed students in back.

She then explained that the brown-eyed students were smarter and superior to the blue-eyed students and therefore would be allowed extra recess. The blue-eyed students were told that they had to wear special collars around their necks to mark them as inferior.

What happened next affected the students deeply.

The brown-eyed students started discriminating against the blue-eyed students. They became “nasty” and “vicious” and taunted those wearing collars. Within a single school day, friendships were lost.

The following day, Jane reversed the experiment. She told her class she had made a mistake; the blue-eyed students were the superior group. Upon hearing this, those with blue eyes cheered and ran to place the collars on their now-inferior brown-eyed classmates.

While in the inferior group, students described feeling “sad,” “bad,” “stupid,” and “mean.” They were so affected by the negative label that even their academic performance dropped.

Studies done on Jane’s students ten and twenty years later showed that they were “significantly less prejudice than their peers who had not been through the exercise.”

What Jane Elliot did was remarkable. She took something abstract to her students—discrimination—and turned it into a concrete experience.

This made her lesson stick.

Making Classroom Management Sticky

One reason why teachers struggle with behavior is because of the way classroom management is typically presented to students. Traditional approaches like directed teaching and lecture style are slippery, conceptual, and hard for students to grasp.

When it comes to classroom management, scratch-the-surface teaching isn’t going to cut it. To make your rules, expectations, and procedures sticky, they must be made into an experience.

Here are two simple steps that do just that:

(1) You Show Them How

This is a critical first step to experiential teaching and one of the most powerful strategies you can use. To get your students to meet your expectations and behave as you desire, you must show them exactly what you want.

Have your students follow you as you go through the process of turning in homework or lining up to go to recess or being asked to go to time-out. Walk them through every detail. Show them how a good student listens, learns, and behaves.

Put yourself in their shoes—literally. Wear your hair different, put on clothes popular with your students, carry a backpack. These props lend authenticity and detail to the experience and act as hooks along a memory map.

(2) They Show You How

Now it’s time for your students to practice what they’ve learned. Have them show you how to turn in homework, line up, or go to time-out.

Test them on it.

What does good listening look like? How do you ask a question? Show me how you get ready for literature circles. What does it look like to break rule number three? Make them prove to you they understand your rules and procedures by actually performing them.

Classroom management is more effective when students are able to experience what you want from them—rather than merely being told what you want.

Time consuming? It’s good teaching. Go through both steps every time you teach a rule or procedure, and you’ll be happy with the results.

Further Reading

Although primarily a book about marketing, Made To Stick is a good resource for teachers. It covers six qualities you can use to make your lessons stickier.

For more information on experiential teaching, there is an entire chapter devoted to it in the book Dream Class. It’s called, “Show Them How.”

Also, I mentioned in passing that Jane Elliott’s experiment resulted in lower academic scores for those in the inferior group. If you want to know how to do the opposite: raise test scores by changing how your students think, see the chapter titled “Transform Limiting Beliefs.”

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, I invite you to become a member of this site. It’s free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.

- Smart Classroom Management - Copyright 2009-2011, All Rights Reserved.

Confidence is an important trait in a teacher, but so is humility. Although I don’t subscribe to the belief that a teacher never truly arrives or can never reach a high level of excellence, I do believe in the continual need to be self-aware of one’s mistakes and open to new ideas. A dose of humility keeps us flexible and willing to try a different approach when the current one isn’t working.

Having written that, I must be especially careful with my upcoming statement. I don’t want to appear as though I’m singing my own praises because this couldn’t be further from true. Doing so would be off-putting. Few things offend me as much as a braggart. This next statement, however, is important to the discussion, so please forgive me if it sounds boastful. It’s not intended to be. Here it goes:

In nearly 20 years of teaching, I’ve never sent one of my students to the office because of a behavior issue.

This isn’t something I’m especially proud of, nor is it a streak I’m purposely trying to extend. It is simply a byproduct of my strong belief that every time you send a student to someone else for a behavior issue (i.e., the principal, vice-principal, or counselor), you weaken your authority and, consequently, your ability to handle future problems.

The only exception to this would be an incident involving dangerous or grossly insubordinate behavior, which would need to be documented. Still, you would want to be the point person when deciding upon a consequence, in collaboration with your principal, and delivering the resulting verdict to the student and his or her parent(s).

Witnessing a fight, being challenged and cursed at, and learning a student has brought a weapon to school are all examples of behavior that must be overseen by an administrator. All other behavior related issues should be dealt with solely by the classroom teacher.

Every time you send a student to the office, you’re communicating to your students that you don’t have full command of your classroom. In effect, you’re saying, “I can’t handle the problem myself, so I need to find someone with greater authority who can.”

Do this enough, and you’ll begin to question your ability to control your classroom. Sending students to the office will hurt your teaching confidence.

Furthermore, by allowing someone else to handle a behavior issue from afar, you cede control by taking a pass on the opportunity to teach an important life lesson. And that someone else, presumably the principal, often has his or her hands tied.

Principals are too busy to monitor students placed in time-out around the office, so they must rely on stern lectures and assurance from the student that the behavior will change. Both are weak methods of behavior management-made weaker because the student may not even see the principal for several days or weeks.

Being a principal doesn’t make a person better able to handle behavior problems. This idea of sending students to the principal probably stems from our childhood. I know I’m showing my age and mid-western upbringing, but I can remember seeing kindergarten classmates sent to the office by the teacher to get a swat from the paddle-wielding principal. We were terrified of him.

This notion of a single person having enough influence (i.e., fear) to affect the behavior of students in every classroom is long gone. Sure, principals may be able to provide a temporary fix, but the classroom teacher has a much greater potential to influence students and their behavior choices.

Moreover, as I mentioned before, when you send a student to the principal, your students will no longer see you as the final decision-maker. The result is a loss of a certain level of respect, especially from those who have a proclivity for behavior problems.

Your students need to see you as the ultimate authority in the classroom.

It’s important to note, however, that it is an authority that engenders respect (i.e., an authoritative style), not resentment, which is often produced from an authoritarian style of classroom management.

If you’ve read my book Dream Class or noticed the hints revealed in some of the other posts, you know that I reject such domineering methods. There is simply no need for them. Like sending students to the office, they don’t work in the long run and contribute nothing toward making lasting behavioral changes in your students.

- Smart Classroom Management - Copyright 2009-2011, All Rights Reserved.

Modeling is so effective that it should be among your most often used teaching strategies.

When most people think of modeling, they envision a teacher standing in the front her class performing a task she expects from her students. For example, if she were modeling an art project, she would most likely make the project herself in front of her students using the same materials they would be using.

There is nothing wrong with modeling in this way. It can be effective, especially if the students are attentive and the project is interesting. However, you can supercharge the effectiveness of what you’re modeling, regardless of what it is, by adding an important element: explicit detail.

Adding detail to your modeling exercises is easy to do, doesn’t take any extra work or planning, and happens to be a lot of fun. Let me explain how it works and then show how it can make your classroom management plan more effective.

Adding detail simply means taking modeling to a more exact degree than you or your students are accustomed to, making it highly specific and realistic. To use the example of the art project, instead of making the project in the front of the classroom, the teacher would do the art project at a student’s desk with the students circled around in close proximity.

Instead of merely constructing the art project, the modeling session might include clearing off one’s desk, lining up to pick up the art materials, and acting out common scenarios, including what not to do. In other words, the teacher would put herself in her students’ shoes, from start to finish, and model everything they would need to do, including eventualities, in order to complete the project successfully.

Though important, modeling the actual making of the project is the least important aspect of this example. It’s the peripheral stuff–the stuff that teachers typically don’t model–that is the most important and will make the greatest difference to your teaching.

Detailed modeling won’t take the creativity out of art or any other subject. On the contrary, when you use detailed modeling, you eliminate distractions, allowing your students to focus on learning, as well as their individual creativity. Furthermore, students love this way of teaching. It’s fun and participatory, and they always know exactly what is expected of them–a comforting thought indeed.

Students’ knowing what is expected of them is a critical part of any successful classroom management plan, and detailed modeling does just that. Too many teachers are vague in this regard. It’s unfair and breeds contempt to hold students accountable for something they don’t fully understand.

But the real power of detailed modeling comes from the ability to cover eventualities. More specifically, it allows you to model the most common behavioral scenarios and what happens as a result.

Take something as simple as calling out in class. I choose calling out because it can be a real showstopper. Nothing breaks up the momentum of a lesson quite like a student calling out. I’ve been in many classrooms where this isn’t a priority, which is beyond my comprehension. How do they get anything done?

To model calling out, the teacher might sit at a student’s desk while a student plays the part of the teacher. This gives the teacher the opportunity to demonstrate the rudeness, and even absurdity, of interrupting someone who is speaking in front of a group of people. By allowing the students to fully understand why raising their hand is important, it becomes less likely that they’re going to call out in class.

Your students must also be clear about what exactly will happen if a rule like calling out is broken. This should also be modeled and, taking it one step farther, practiced by your students. You can have volunteers act out the roles of students misbehaving.

For example, choose students to purposely interrupt you as you’re speaking, and then administer your consequences to them. Go through the whole process, including what happens when they call out a second and even a third time.

Merely explaining classroom rules, or anything else for that matter, is minimally effective. Students must actively participate in and experience what it means to break rules and how doing so negatively affects the learning and enjoyment of everyone in order to understand why rules are important.

When your students unequivocally understand your classroom management plan, they’re much less likely to break classroom rules. Nothing is as effective as detailed modeling in communicating anything important to your students… nothing. Try it and let me know what you think. I know you’ll be pleased.

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- Smart Classroom Management - Copyright 2009-2011, All Rights Reserved.