I was observing a teacher recently who left me dumbfounded.
I was sitting in the back of the room with the principal, who was there for the teacher’s formal observation. The lesson was about three-dimensional shapes.
But instead of taking the lead, the teacher fired up a video on the smart board that did the teaching for her.
It was a somewhat goofy, animated cartoon you might find on YouTube.
Every couple of minutes she would pause the video and add her two cents. She would hold up a shape, ask a question or two, and then call on the half dozen students paying attention.
The students were sitting on a carpet in front of the screen and she was sitting in a chair off to the side. The moment the video started, four or five boys began battling a severe case of boredom.
Having seemingly lost all muscular function, they were melting into the fibers. It was as if they were hit by a volley of tranquilizing blow darts. Although not quite as affected, most of the other students appeared dazed and lost in daydreams to pass the time.
My goodness.
It was brutal. I felt terrible for the kids, but especially for the group of boys that were so painfully enduring the ordeal. Bless them for having the discipline not to get up and walk out of the room.
I didn’t speak to the principal about her thoughts on the lesson. However, she seemed perfectly content, hardly jotting down a note.
Later I learned that the struggling boys were being considered for interventions, behavior contracts, and psychological testing because of what a few adults felt were attention disorders.
Infuriating. Because, to me, there was nothing wrong or abnormal about any of them. They just needed good teaching.
They needed to move and explore. They needed to use their hands to build, create, fix, figure out, or dissect. They needed inspiration and challenge. They needed mystery and purpose, fun and novelty.
They needed to be shown how cool geometry can be.
The last thing they needed was more screen time. Providing compelling lessons that all students want to pay attention to is your job. Besides supervision, it’s the biggest responsibility of teaching.
The more you pawn off this responsibility to video—or anything else for that matter—the worse it is for students.
Seeing a comedian in person is a completely different experience than watching them on Netflix. It’s the same with teaching—provided you have the skills and content knowledge to capture and keep attention.
Here at SCM, our classroom management approach is designed to give you the maximum time, energy, and freedom to stand uninterrupted in front of your students and teach them something cool.
But you must take advantage of it.
Expert classroom management is half the battle. Important but incomplete. The other half is lesson performance, which in this day and age must be strong. The good news is that anyone can do it.
Anyone can learn, apply, and see staggering results. This is a topic we’ve covered extensively in The Happy Teacher Habits, as well as in other books, but there are also articles available in our archive.
The broader point is this: If your classroom management is solid but your students are still bored and wilting, it’s not them.
It’s you.
Despite it all, despite the smart phones and social media and a zillion other present-day challenges, good teaching still works.
“They just don’t care” is a false assumption and akin to giving up on students.
But you must put away the videos. You must limit laptop use, student research, recordings, centers, computer programs, and other modes of self-learning. You have to offer something different, interesting, weird, scary, surprising, amazing, baffling, etc.
In other words, something they can’t get anywhere else.
You must also sell your lessons and prove to your students why whatever you’re learning is worth the effort.
You must draw your students so deeply into the topic through storytelling, modeling, playacting, and explicit detail that they forget where they are. They lose track of time and even their own consciousness.
It’s the only way.
PS – The audio version of Unstressed is now available. Click here for more info.
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