For behavior to improve, your students need to feel remorse when they misbehave. They need to reflect on their transgressions and decide not to make the same mistake again.
Great, you say, but how might that be done? How do you get students to feel something many just don’t feel?
How do you break through when the culture, increasingly, is telling them that there is no right and wrong, that their truth is all that matters?
You remove YOU from the equation and shift responsibility to them.
Here’s how:
Define your rules precisely.
There must be no doubt among your students what does and doesn’t constitute breaking each rule. Thus, you must define your boundaries precisely.
Your students must know the instant they’ve crossed them without you having to point it out to them. There can be no gray areas or confusion over what is and isn’t okay.
In this way, breaking rules becomes a choice they know full well they’re making.
Be sure they know their purpose.
Students need to know, and be reminded of over and over again, why they’re in school and sitting in your class. They need to know what’s at stake and how their education provides freedom and opportunities.
They need to know that it’s about them.
It’s obvious to us, but few students see it this way. They don’t understand the massive implications their hard work, or lack thereof, has on their future.
Explain your job.
Your job isn’t to accept shoddy performance, do their work for them, or let them off the hook. It isn’t to threaten, beg, or implore them to behave or give effort.
It’s to provide world-class lessons. The rest is up to them.
When students feel this shift in responsibility—listening, learning, and behaving is their job—and grasp their role in the relationship, everything changes.
And they finally see the weight of misbehavior.
Show how your rules benefit them.
Your rules are there to protect their right to learn and enjoy being in your class. That’s it. They have no other purpose.
Be sure your students know this by modeling how talking, calling out, ignoring directions, and other disruptive behavior tramples on this right. In other words, show how their behavior affects others.
Be clear about why your rules are good and in their best interest. For many students, this is a radical change in perspective, something they’ve never realized.
Rules shouldn’t be cursed, but thanked.
Follow through.
If you aren’t consistent, then you’re communicating to your students that none of the above is true. You’re telling them very clearly that your rules don’t even matter enough for you to follow them.
That right and wrong doesn’t exist and you’re full of malarkey.
By the same token, your calm, decisive, confident follow-through says more about the sacred importance of listening, learning, and behaving than anything you can say.
Never create friction.
Refusing to engage in petty grievances, in anger, glaring, and raising your voice, in pulling students aside to lecture, question, or debate, safeguards your relationship with students.
It provides easy rapport, leverage, and influence.
It further transfers responsibility over to them. It tells them that you don’t have time to deal with silly disruptions beyond following your plan.
Too much is at stake. And you and they are too far above it.
Remorse, Naturally
Shifting responsibility for listening, learning, and behaving over to your students reframes misbehavior entirely. It makes it seem immature, absurd, even embarrassing.
It fills them with the notion that they’re better than that.
Consequently, even a simple warning becomes meaningful. It prompts reflection, empathy for those they’ve disrupted, and a desire not to cross the same line again.
It brings a wave of remorse that is strong and healthy and impossible to ignore.
It isn’t thrust upon them as a guilt trip, which then is summarily rejected. It isn’t an outside force they can ignore, deny, or refuse to acknowledge.
No, it comes from inside the student.
Where real change happens.
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I agree with all this, but what do you do when a student blatantly flaunts rules and disrupts class and as I run an afterschool music program, it is very hard to remove them to an area with safe supervision. Sadly, we have had to ask a few to leave, after several warnings, as they are causing the majority to lose valuable learning time.
I never want to “give up” on a student, but am trying to keep the best interests of the majority as a central concern and not allow it to be eroded.
Suggestions?
Have a heart to heart talk with the class and explain the rules.
Then explain that this was their warning.
Remove the next kid to step out of line and show the rest you mean business.
Protect the kids that want to learn as their right to learn is being trampled upon when you allow multiple warnings.
You might even preempt some problems by send an informative letter home to All the parents that due to the disruption of the other students you are being forced to adopt a program much more akin to zero tolerance. You can explain that since it’s an elective class outside of regular school and not a core subject that the students putting forth an effort to behave should not be punished by enduring disruptions. The parents will all assume their kid is one of the goods ones and quickly sign the form at the bottom.
Then call the parents and let them deal with it.
Great article and so true! I have a few that at 2nd grade just don’t care. I talk a lot about why we give our best but a few still don’t do any work or just sloppily put something on their paper.
My question is my standard is if it’s partner or group work you may whisper. If it’s individual work time it’s silence out of respect for everyone else and their learning. I call it “respectful silence” to remind them why. However, I have one girl who is 100% a verbal processor. I let her do it because that’s how she thinks and she does a quiet whisper to herself. However, the other kids say she’s talking. I have explained that some people need to think out loud but then they all think they need to do it and my respectful silence goes out the window. Any ideas?
Wean her of that habit. It won’t be tolerated anywhere else in the future. If it’s respectful silence you want then it’s what you should expect from all unless there’s an I.E.P. If that’s the case then she could be supervised outside of class. I have found that making exceptions without IEP only degrades the classroom atmosphere.
Heather, I also ran an afterschool music class at a public community center and I understand exactly your position as I also experienced the same thing. The students who don’t care make it difficult for the ones who do and want to learn. I found this site to be extremely helpful for dealing with these situations. I learned that giving the students a choice of either participating while following rules and instructions or having an opportunity of joining another class that better suits their interests is always an option. When the class is mandatory then I found by making it super fun and interesting usually enticed the troublemakers to want to behave. Be patient. Just be firm with the rules and remind the students they have to stick with the program to get results.
Check out Whisper Phones online. They amplify the whisper to keep the volume lower and make it easier for kids to hear themselves.
Thanks Deb, I have whisper phones and she does use them successfully. It’s the rest of the class who doesn’t understand…whisper.
This sounds fantastic. Please tell me, and I’m assuming this needs to be done at the beginning of the year, exactly what the steps are to implement this classroom structure. What do the lessons look like to send this message without being preachy? I have read several of your articles and have implemented them, and they have worked very well. Namely the cell phone policy and the listening and participation point system. I need help in this latest (wonderful) idea though.
Great article. I read your pieces for their calm, revolutionary common sense. 🙂
Thank you, Julia. I love how you put that.
Hello,
Our teachers bend over backwards with interventions to help kids in their classroom. However at the elementary level we have many students without IEP’s that look like they could be. They throw chairs, talk back, make noises, blurt etc. Because all of these kids are coming from trauma backgrounds (not exaggerating here, we have kids from the shelter and up to 10% at one time can be in foster care we are not allowed to look at a Special Ed. referral because we have to rule out culture and trauma barriers. Of course they are made to leave the room for a certain length of time as a consequence to not being safe in the room and other kids worried about their own safety. We are also implementing positive incentive interventions to help the child make good choices and teaching safety and social skills. However the rest of the children classroom, especially those with a anxieties Continue to worry while they try to learn. Our teachers are very good at keeping consistent boundaries and not raising their voice. Due to the confidentiality of our students please do not mention by name.
I totally agree with you. Sadly the same situation at middle school. For one students all the others don’t get to learn.
You can set rules and do all this but students are kids and if they want to play or just do nothing doing nothing expecting them to see their doing wrong isent going to get them to modify back. You have to establish consequences and punishment. Students know thier doing wrong! But to sit back expecting them to stop on thier own and feel sorry is just plan ridiculous. Teachers have to act to maintain order and a safe teaching environment
I think you should look at some of the other articles. This article assumes that you are trying to implement a classroom management plan and reiterates how you should let your rules speak for themselves. You should carry out your plan, but not be emotionally reactive in carrying out consequences. In carrying out your plan and demonstrating to students how their choices affect others, you maintain order and safety.
Thank you very much Micheal. Its very educative.
Great post thanks for sharing this valuable information with us all. It’s nice to see that you’re enlightening your audience with such decent post. It’s nicely written and well represented article. Good work keep it up.
Almost every class will have students who will be disruptive and want to create chaos. Besides having clear and defined expectations and rewards as well as consequences, it also helps to have a behavior plan for these students, who are responsible for filling them out. It puts it back on them. It will be very tedious in the beginning, but it should help out in the long run. It is also really important to find out if there is something going on with these students, young people have different manners of showing their needs. Often, it could be their home situation.
First, rules are make to govern the student body. They are made to keep the class flowing without interruption. They for the most part, govern the whole school. They are not all just Mr. or Ms.’s rules. Before rules are posted a bases/purpose for them is established and students must be made aware of them, their purpose and the expectations of for the student population made clear.
I agree with MICHAEL.
Thanks for this article. My question is on modeling. I do model quite a bit and explain why talking and calling out can hurt the learning of others. But I’m wondering if it would have a better effect if I ask one of the students to come up and read something while some students talk to each other and not listen and a student calls out? I’m not sure how you suggest we model talking and calling out? I feel like what I have done, the kids don’t take me serious! When a student calls out, I stop and explain how that is an interruption and stops our learning. That this is not good listening and following. But it happens all over week after week! I teach general music.
talking, calling out