Teaching Children - Classroom Management Archive

Our contributors for this topic are:
Brian Campbell
Chris Hunt
Joshua Myerson

Brian Cambell
The Scientific Approach

I try to approach discipline problems in class as I imagine a scientist might. As teachers, we have activities that we want our students to do, and we want them to do them in a certain way, interested, curious, motivated, focused, with confidence etc. In one way, our classes can be seen as an experiment. What do we do when we do not get the results we were hoping for? What do we do when our students are not interested in our activities?

The first thing I do after every class is to write down what happened in a lesson log. I write down the date of the lesson, the targets I had set, the activities I used, how each activity was received by the students, how effective it was, any other information gained I feel was important. This gets it out of my head and captured on paper and helps to facilitate recognition of patterns, generation of new hypotheses, some objectivity and emotional distance and a general increase in feelings of control.

When planning the next lesson, I look over the lesson log and make a point to avoid any activities that did not go over well in past lessons. I look at what worked and I build on that. I look through my teaching activities library (which should be as large as possible and getting larger every year) relying on my intuition to find good activities for the problem class. If you keep going with this process, your sense for what works and what does not will get stronger.

However, even though finding the right set of activities is essential it is not sufficient. I also make sure to write down where they are level-wise. If you try to push ahead too fast, even the brightest kid will start to get discouraged. Teachers have a huge responsibility for their students’ self-esteem. And self-esteem has a lot to do with how successful we feel we are. As teachers we need to keep careful track of the failure tolerance of each student. I think each student has an ideal ratio of success to failure that we need to pay extra-special attention to and we need to remember that ideal ratio will fluctuate. Some days a student may come in and be so down about something that happened earlier in the day that they may need to be up in the 95% success zone. In the middle of class, you need to trust your intuition on this, but the lesson log greatly enhances your intuitive powers.

One particular problem with being a teacher, and especially a new teacher, is that your own success/failure ratio for lesson plans might be lower than the ideal. This has very high potential for lowering the teacher’s self-esteem. Try to keep in mind that science is built on failure. And as long as you make sure to write your failures down and review them, you will not waste time going down the same dead-ends in the future. Besides, your failures are not really failures at all. Each time you fail, you enhance your sense for what does not work. Google Thomas Edison quotes. It could be said that the whole history of our species is founded on failures.

Keep in mind too that the students are also practicing science, although probably not as well as you are if you are writing everything down and reviewing it. Whatever they do is an experiment as well. They are also doing things to see what happens or doing things to try to make something happen. Our immediate goal might be to get our students to settle down and focus on the tasks we set for them, but do not lose sight of the bigger goal of helping them to become autonomous problem-solvers. We want them to develop the ability to aggressively and fearlessly engage with any problem they might be confronted with in the future. We want them to be interested in expanding their understanding in meaningful ways. We want them to become brilliant human beings.

With teaching, there is no line you cross one day where you have arrived and you do not have to think or experiment anymore. There is no limit to how good a teacher you can become. Recently I had the idea that I wanted to someday walk into the city office and demand that they give me a job at the worst junior high school in Osaka. I do not think I am ready for that experience right now, but maybe someday. Keep experimenting. Keep looking for new ideas. Keep growing. And do not let failure discourage you. This teaching stuff is too interesting to get sidetracked by self-doubt.

Brian did the JET program for three years and has been teaching privately in Osaka for the last six.  He has taught pre-school through adult.  He is most interested in enhancing motivation and personal meaning when it comes to learning. Brian can be reached at bricampsan2 (at mark) yahoo.co.jp

Chris Hunt

"Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power."

Clint Eastwood

"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean ó neither more nor less."

Lewis Carroll

I have a lot of trouble with discipline. Not that I mean the children I work with are like Siamese cats constantly running up the curtains and shredding the carpet. No, I mean with the concept itself. It makes me uneasy. It makes me nervous. Sometimes it makes me angry.

Usually when we teachers talk about about disciple, I feel that we mean control. We mean forcing children to obey our will and the typical approach is to use a system of punishment and rewards. The stick and the carrot. The amount of each may vary from one classroom to the next, or with the prevailing trends in education but they are always there, somewhere. A classroom without rules, learning without discipline - unthinkable, unacceptable, unworkable! But in the same way that unbirthday presents bring greater joy and surprise, so the concept of undiscipline can bring greater opportunities for genuine learning (well, what's good enough for Charles Dodgson is certainly good enough for me).

But just how can we bring undiscipline to the classroom? Here are a few ideas:

1. Give the children control over what activities are used.
2. Avoid using any kinds of punishments or rewards.
3. Avoid competition unless it is chosen by the children.
4. Don't give homework unless children ask for it.
5. Don't make assumptions
6. Be flexible
7. Focus on Focus

To deal with the last point first, by focus on focus I mean that the real yardship for learning is how much focus the children are bringing to what they are doing. When children are fully engaged in an activity their ability to learn is that much greater. The usual advice for managing the children's classroom is to use a lot of short activities and switch from one to another before they can get bored. But when children are engrossed with something the last thing they will want to do is switch activities. Forcing them to do so is an invasion of their autonomy, and counterproductive if we want them to become independent learners of English. Moreover, if children are really focused the notion of getting bored becomes moot.

Having said this, one problem that will arise is when children are interested in different things. They might not all want to focus on the same thing at once. But do they all need to be doing the same thing at the same time? Could it be possible to have a differentiated classroom? By this I don't mean children working at their own pace and level on the same thing (the typical definition), but on different things at the same time, things that hold their own individual interest. I envisage a situation where some children might be playing a board game while others are doing some worksheets and others reading books. As long as the children are focused in English they will be learning English.

This leads me to the importance of being flexible. I used to accept the NLP notion that the person with the most flexible behaviour is the one who controls the situation. But what I am suggesting here is that notions about control be cast aside. The reason to be flexible is not to control the children through pacing and leading (another NLP idea) but to find ways to keep the children's focus in and on English.

Don't make assumptions is one of the four agreements from the book of the same name by Don Miguel Ruez. The more assumptions we make the less flexible we are likely to be. Not making assumptions means looking for the positive in any situation. It means not typecasting children. It means not typecasting ourselves. It means a continual process of looking at what is actually happening and using our imagination to create new possibilities for what could happen.

I think it is a truism that adults encroach on the lives of children too much. I also know that children won't make as much progress in English if they do it once a week as they will if they do it every day. And I know that homework is a way of ensuring that children do English at least twice a week if we can get them to do it on a different day. But should we really push homework on them? I think a better model is to work at making English so interesting that they will be begging us for homework! Homework can be a benchmark for how interested children actually are in English.

Hopefully, it will be clear by now that the approach I am advocating is to abandon the idea of controlling children and concentrate on helping them to become self-directed English learners. My reasoning behind avoiding competition is that it detracts from focusing on English and in this sense, wastes time. The more children become obsessed with winning the less room there is for learning. Where there are winners there are losers. I think that such notions are best left outside the classroom if we want children to take their English learning into their own hands.

Avoiding punishments and rewards goes hand in hand with avoiding competition. What is a victory but a reward? What is a loss, if it is not some kind of punishment? This is certainly the case when children haven't chosen the competitive activity themselves but had it foisted on them.

G. K. Chesterton wrote, more than once, "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly". For me this means that one should do something because one is interested in it, not out of desire for reward. If we use stickers and gold stars and other assorted junk to buy children's interest we rob them of the chance to develop a real passion for English. This is not to say that we shouldn't celebrate passion and interest. I think in moderation, celebration can be very motiviating and uplifting, but only if it maintains an element of surprise. Celeberation without surprise is reward in disguise. And reward is form of poison.

Before I began writing this I asked my wife to give me a definition for discipline. She said that discipline is a positive attitude towards learning. I kind of like that. The challenge is to create the environment where such an attitude can flourish. The first step, I think, is to give control to the children and then allow them to realise that with control comes responsibility. I think it can be done. I'm in the process of creating a method to do it. And if there is a method that means anyone can use it, even you - and even me. I began with a Clint Eastwood quote. I'll close with another:

"It takes tremendous discipline to control the influence, the power you have over other people's lives."

Further reading:

Is Your Classroom Under Control? Discipline in the non-teacher's classroom
http://www.wisehat.com/resources/articles/isyourclassroomundercontrol.php

The Four Agreements
http://www.wisehat.com/resources/articles/fouragreements.php
http://www.miguelruiz.com/index.php?p=Books

Punished by Rewards. The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

Chris has been working with children in Japan since 1994. Apart from his
interests in democratic and co-operative learning he enjoys making
games, music (using a pc) and juggling. He can be reached via his website at
http://www.wisehat.com/wisewhat/contactus.php

Joshua Myerson

Classroom Management not Discipline
(When can I stop babysitting and start teaching?)

There they go again, chatting while I’m trying to explain this point...” “Don’t tell me he is looking at his comic book again while I’m teaching...” “Is he drawing on his desk again?” “Aren’t they interested in getting a good grade in this class?” “How many times do I have to tell them?” “I didn’t take this job to babysit. I took this job because I wanted to teach!!”

When can I stop babysitting and start teaching?” If you have had students or even classes that make you ask this question, then go with your desire and start teaching, but do so understanding what your job is and who your students are. A change in perspective can change your world, and theirs.

We are not just hired to teach a subject. We are hired to teach our students a subject. Our students are learning how to do so many things for the first time. Among other things, they are learning how to make friends, keep friends, be accepted, and deal with all the people in their lives. They are learning how to control their feelings, become organized, and study. If that isn’t enough, they have to deal with school life where they get quizzed and tested on all the subjects they are studying, and this can have a huge effect on how they feel about themselves and the subject matter. On top of that, they all have different parents and personalities. It’s a wonder we don’t have to spend more time keeping them on task.

Let’s put ourselves in their shoes for a moment in hopes that understanding their situation may give us some insight that we will be able to use to our advantage. Teenagers like music. Teenagers have short attention spans. Teenagers like to move around. Teenagers like stories. Teenagers like to talk. We know all of this, yet students in typical junior high school and high school classrooms have to stay seated for 50 minutes at a time, 6 periods a day, while being lectured at. And, we shouldn’t forget that they are surrounded by their friends, who they are not supposed to talk to for the duration of each class. Tell me being in their shoes wouldn’t drive you stir crazy.

So, what’s the solution? I have found that a major part of the solution is to focus not on getting the students to change but on getting ourselves, the teachers, to change. I have found that changing my perspective and developing lesson plans that apply what I know about young students to be a very effective way to begin keeping my students not only on task but also looking forward to my classes.

My perspective on teaching is that these young students have various levels of English skills, as well as various levels of classroom/social skills. It is my job to help them develop both of these skill sets so that there are fewer rough spots and more bright spots for them during their tenure at school. In some cases, my students only need to be made aware of their behavior and how it is affecting themselves or others. Often times that is enough to get my relationship in the classroom with them moving in a more positive direction. In some cases, however, repeated reminders not only from me but from their homeroom teachers or coaches are necessary. My goal is to help change habits and build better ones. Replacing habits and building habits takes years in some cases. With some students this kind of concerted effort is necessary. A word from another teacher may be the miracle that ends an unproductive behavior. Although I always hope for great and sudden change, I understand that sometimes change can be a slow process. To get there, the essential ingredients are understanding, communication, firmness, fairness, and consistency.

When planning my lessons, I try to organize the activities around what I know about teenagers. Because teenagers like music and rhythm, we don’t just read vocabulary word lists. We sing or chant them. Because teenagers have short attention spans, I have a series of activities surrounding our lesson’s target and try to make sure each one is no longer than 10 minutes. Because teenagers like to move around and talk, my activities include class work and pair work, and sometimes group work. In some cases, the students are up and moving around the class either writing on the board or getting information from a partner of their choice. Because teenagers like to talk and hear stories, I often try to get out of the book and ask two or three students a question or two about their lives that are somehow related to the lesson’s target.

Students are always more fun to teach when the students are focused on and involved in the lessons. Structuring your lesson so that it takes into account your students’ needs will go a long way towards the smooth running of your classes. your job title may be ‘English Teacher’, the truth is we are teaching humans and that means we must teach English through a wonderful vehicle called a relationship – the one we have with the students.

When can I start teaching and stop babysitting?” The answer: You can never stop babysitting. However, how often you have to ‘babysit’ and the types of things you ‘babysit’ about will change as you help your students raise their awareness and maturity levels. We have to help the students mature. If we don’t, who will?

Joshua Myerson moved from America to Japan in 1994 and now resides in Nagoya, Aichi.  He currently holds positions as an English instructor at a university, a senior high school, a junior high school, and an English conversation school, which he also manages.  Additionally, he is the coordinator for ETJ-Aichi, a role he has had for the past 10 years. He can be reached at newleaf (at mark) japan.email.ne.jp

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• How do you maintain discipline in your classroom , and what advice would you give to teachers who are experiencing discipline problems?

• How do you maintain discipline in your classroom , and what advice would you give to teachers who are experiencing discipline problems?
    - hussey