There is one thing you can do right now that will . . .
- improve behavior
- lower your stress
- build better rapport
- save time
In other words, make teaching more fun and effective. Here at SCM we’ve been shouting this strategy from the rooftops for 16 years.
Yet, it’s still an uncommon practice. So what is it?
It’s to stop talking to individual students about their behavior. It’s to refrain from questioning, lecturing, counseling, admonishing, or pulling them aside to convince them to behave.
It does not work.
Because it puts them on the defensive. It’s intimidating. It’s awkward. It’s confrontational and antagonistic. No matter how gentle you are, it encourages them to lie, tell you what you want to hear, or point the finger elsewhere.
Change in behavior only happens through fair, consistent, and previously established accountability via your classroom management plan.
It only happens when students are left alone to reckon with their wobbling conscience.
Taking responsibility must come from them, of their own volition, based on knowing that they’ve interfered with the rights of their teacher to teach and their classmates to learn and enjoy school.
Every student is capable of self-reflection and deciding that they’d rather be part of the classroom than separated from it.
We have dozens of articles in the SCM archive (right sidebar) and in our books about how to create a classroom all students want to be part of, which is key to the strategy.
But to cause soul-searching and introspection from even your most challenging students, to force them into making hard decisions about themselves and where they’re headed, is to stop discussing their behavior one-on-one.
Allow your classroom management plan to do its job without mucking it up with your over-involvement. Let the weight of inarguable guilt press and press and work and work its healthy agency on the conscience.
Focus on great lessons and a classroom that your students look forward to and let the desire to be and do better awaken and grow within every student.
PS – My new book Unstressed: How to Teach Without Worry, Fear, and Anxiety will now be available this Tuesday, March 4th.
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