Managing 21st Century Classrooms

How do I avoid ineffective classroom management practices? (ASCD Arias)

Jane Bluestein

• Verlag: ASCD
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781416618881
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Education General

Classroom management may be the hardest part of being a teacher: fraught with power struggles, it often leaves teachers feeling stressed and drained and students feeling mutinous or powerless. Most familiar classroom management practices reflect a dissonance between the rapid pace of change in our culture and the decades-old instruction and management techniques that still form the foundation of our educational system.

According to award-winning author and classroom management expert Jane Bluestein, it's long past time for our strategies to catch up to the kids we're teaching. In Managing 21st Century Classrooms, she

* Identifies seven of the most prevalent classroom management misconceptions.
* Discusses the tried-but-not-so-true practices that result from them.
* Offers positive, research-based alternatives that take into account how students learn today.

This timely, practical publication, which is perfect for novice and veteran teachers alike, also includes a quick-reference chart contrasting ineffective, destructive approaches with effective, proactive strategies.

The Challenge of Classroom Management

You’ve probably already figured this out: despite the enormous amount of planning and preparation teachers do, instruction is actually the easy part.

See if this sounds familiar: you spend hours designing that perfect lesson. You bring in enrichment activities and related literature, and you’re able to make adjustments for kids who need to go back and fill in a few pieces they missed along the way. Your directions are clear, your materials are organized (maybe even color-coded), and you have backup plans in case the lesson runs short. You are enthusiastic and well prepared.

And yet . . .

You’re having trouble getting your students to settle down, stop talking, or even get in their seats. One student wants to go to the bathroom while another needs to sharpen a pencil. There’s a student making noises, another poking the child in the next seat, and a few others distracted with unrelated tasks or staring off into space. And then there’s that seemingly interested child who asks a question that somehow gets you off track, heading in an entirely different direction from the one you had planned.

Let’s not forget the students who can’t focus because they’re hungry, didn’t get enough sleep, or are fuming over a nasty encounter they had on the way to your class. There are a few kids who love the topic but need something to do with their hands or their bodies to stay attentive, and some who just can’t sit still for one more minute. Add in the students who gave up before they even walked into your class and the ones easily provoked to arguments, defiance, outbursts, or violence, and I suspect that you’re not only struggling to accomplish any of the instructional goals you’ve set, but also going home at the end of the day feeling frustrated, angry, and a bit defeated.

A Big-Picture Issue

Uncooperative student behavior is only one of several reasons why so many teachers are leaving the profession. Of all the reasons mentioned in research surveys and interviews, however, this one consistently appears at the top of the list and is mentioned as a significant source of frustration for many people in the field (Bluestein, 2010).

I believe this happens for a number of reasons. For one, we tend to think of uncooperative or disruptive behavior as something we need to react to, and most recommendations we receive, if we actually get any training in this area at all, tend to emphasize a “what-do-I-do-when . . .” approach to classroom management. Unfortunately, the fact that so many of these strategies either do not work or actually make things worse has not seemed to diminish our reliance on them.

We come from a culture that tends to look at situations through an all-or-nothing lens: either we are in control or they are. We also have traditions that require assigning blame and exacting some type of punishment when infractions occur. Our most familiar classroom management practices reflect a win-lose slant that leaves little room for an approach that would accommodate the teacher’s need for authority as well as students’ need for autonomy within limits (which they likewise need). In this traditional context, it’s easy to assume that anything short of an ironhanded, authoritarian attitude toward discipline is flat-out permissive, although this common belief is not remotely true.

Another factor in our difficulty with classroom management is the dissonance between the rapid pace of change in our culture—socially, technologically, and economically, for a start—and the decades-old curriculum, instruction, and management techniques that still form the foundation of our educational systems. For example, consider the rapid shift we have made from the uniformity inherent in an industrial society to the very different needs of one built to deliver information and services. Although assembly-line jobs have all but disappeared from the United States and many other developed countries, the factory-era notion of standardization, especially in curriculum and assessment, remains an intractable cornerstone of how we push kids through school (Bluestein, 1988, 2008, 2010).

Although young people once depended on a handful of adults to give them information on every subject, nowadays an entire world of data and resources is only a click away. Author and educator Sir Ken Robinson suggests that one of the problems with current attempts at school reform around the world is that “they’re trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And on the way, they’re alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose in going to school.” He also notes that “our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. They’re being besieged with information . . . and we’re penalizing them for getting distracted” from what he refers to as “boring stuff at school” (RSA, 2010). Long for the “good old days” all you want, but there is no going back. It’s long past time for our interactive and instructional strategies to catch up to the kids we’re teaching—and to the marketplace for which we are ostensibly preparing them.

When we actually do get down to talking about classroom management, our focus tends to be far too narrow. We need to look at this topic from a big-picture perspective. A truly effective approach requires us to pay attention not just to student behavior and power dynamics but also to the pace and content of the curriculum, the social and emotional climate of the classroom, students’ belief in their ability to achieve academic success, and the methods of instruction that make sense to the ways individual students learn. All of these ingredients affect student behavior, and each one is an important part of an effective approach to classroom management.

7 Common Classroom Management Approaches That Work Against Us

Looking at classroom management practices solely as ways to respond to undesirable behavior ignores the potential of alternative strategies that can prevent such behavior. Besides, a reactive, punitive approach doesn’t work with those kids we simply cannot scare—kids who are impervious to the worst we can throw at them. Such an approach also compromises the emotional safety of the learning environment and creates a great deal of stress (which, neurologically, gets in the way of learning) for everyone in the room. Keeping problems from occurring in the first place is definitely the preferable option.

Yet we humans are creatures of habit. In the absence of specific positive and proactive strategies for dealing with misbehavior, we tend to fall back on what we have learned or experienced throughout our training, if not our lives. Trying an approach that looks different from what everyone else is doing can put teachers—especially new teachers—at risk for everything from ridicule and social alienation within the school culture to poor evaluations, increased scrutiny, or even transfers or dismissals. So it’s understandable that we tend to keep doing the same things over and over again, whether or not they work or even make sense. Fortunately, it’s possible to use effective alternatives without getting buy-in or involvement from others. As a bonus, the positive outcomes of these alternatives will make you less vulnerable to others’ negative reactions: you make yourself a much smaller target of ridicule or recrimination when your kids are on task, cooperative, and making academic progress.

In the following sections, we’ll look at some common misconceptions, examine how they lead to problematic classroom management practices, and explore some more positive and effective options to try instead. Please keep in mind that the positive alternatives work best in a win-win environment—that is, one that recognizes the importance of the relationships we build with our students and eliminates the need for kids to compete for power or fight to maintain their dignity. This dynamic will probably be as unfamiliar to students as it is to most adults, so give it time. When kids know we’ve got their back and see our efforts to accommodate their needs for structure, belonging, success, and autonomy, acting out starts to look pretty silly and pointless.

Misconception 1: Teachers Must Retain All the Power in the Room

Whether we’re talking about children or adults, the need for some degree of power or autonomy is standard issue on all models and comes preinstalled at birth. Even people who always defer to others’ choices are making a power play: by putting themselves at the mercy of another’s preferences or agendas, they always have someone to blame when things don’t go well.

Yet even after acknowledging that all of us—teachers and students alike—have a legitimate need for some degree of control, we have a hard time letting go of the all-or-nothing thinking that says in order for someone to win, someone else has to lose. We fear that if we offer any power to students, they’ll take it all, and chaos will ensue.

This thinking, and the control-based classroom management behaviors that often follow, tend to backfire on us. Very few of us enjoy losing, and even the best sports are likely to fight back when their safety or dignity is at stake. Thus, the harder we try to control or disempower kids, the harder they will push back, whether by exhibiting overt defiance, becoming passive-aggressive, shutting down, acting out, or even hurting themselves. Although seemingly counterproductive, all of these behaviors give students a sense of control in their lives when they cannot achieve this goal in safer, more productive ways.

Our most familiar rules-and-punishment models are no longer the most effective way to go. (If you’re thinking, “Wait! We don’t have punishments, we have consequences,” read on. If the focus is negative, there really isn’t much difference between the two.) Even when this approach seems to work, compliance comes at a cost. Veteran teacher Mark Barnes (2013) wrote, “What I failed to comprehend in my ‘I’m-the-meanest-teacher-in-the-school’ approach was that I had created a classroom based on control, and I was alienating my students.” He admits that while his students “may have, on occasion, acquiesced to my list of demands . . . most of the time their compliance came at the price of learning. After all, what child would embrace education in this kind of militant classroom?” (para. 2).

I have also noticed that many of the traditional power plays teachers use to control or correct behavior have little effect on kids who rely on negative reactions to fulfill their need for attention, provoke adults to outbursts to satisfy their need for power, or simply don’t care about their teacher’s opinion of them or what punishment they might get. These same powering behaviors, however, can significantly increase the stress level for the rest of the class, especially the cooperative, quiet, or sensitive students. Classroom management behaviors that rely on teacher control and students’ fear of punishment trigger the brain’s survival instincts and suppress the brain functions students need for learning, cognitive processing, and retention (Bluestein, 2001).

Try This Instead: Establishing Win-Win Authority

Although it’s easy to agree that students need a sense of structure or limits, we often struggle with the idea that they also need a certain level of power or autonomy. The better you can accommodate both sets of needs for the students in your classroom, the better you’ll be able to maintain your authority without needing to control or disempower anyone else. The following tips are a good place to start.

• Clarify your goals and intentions. Teachers who aim to inspire student growth and cooperation will naturally exhibit very different behaviors and language from those of teachers who are simply looking for control. Be sure your behavior matches your intentions.
• Recognize the difference between controlling and being in charge. Letting students have some autonomy in your classroom (within limits you determine) does not diminish your authority. The best alternative to trying to control students is teaching them to control themselves. Controlling kids deprives them of opportunities to learn and practice the important skill of self-management.
• Pay attention to your words, tone, and body language. Notice any tendency toward negativity, criticism, contempt, impatience, or threats. This is the classroom management model many of us know best, but behaviors that hint at possible retribution for lack of compliance inhibit learning. Take the pulse of your classroom climate, looking for any patterns in your behavior that might increase the stress level.
• Aim for prevention, heading off conflicts and power struggles before they occur. Find ways to let kids “win” within limits that won’t make you (or anyone else) lose. The easiest strategies are those that allow students some input in situations that affect them. Not everything is negotiable, of course, but you can certainly give students choices about which activity to do first or which 10 problems to complete from a list of 15. Once they have built up some decision-making muscle, give them even more autonomy—for example, have them design their own projects within certain criteria you determine.
• Be the one to keep a cool head if a confrontation occurs. You may be able to defuse a potential outburst simply by agreeing with a frustrated student or redirecting the energy in the confrontation: “I know you wish you didn’t have to do this assignment” or “You know, I think we could all use a two-minute break right now.”

Misconception 2: Classroom Rules Ensure Good Behavior

Rules are such a sacred cow in education that we rarely bother to question their existence, much less their effectiveness. I suspect that at some point early in all our careers, teachers are encouraged to make classroom rules and post the list on the wall. Although this is a common and familiar practice—I don’t think I’ve ever seen instructions for the first day of school that did not include “go over the rules”—they aren’t especially useful in terms of classroom management. They rarely vary from one classroom to the next, tend to be expressed negatively (except when phrased as generic platitudes like “Respect one another”), and do not teach students self-management. Usually rooted in teacher or organizational power, they create an illusion of authority for the adults (something to point to when kids misbehave) and often carry a subtle or explicit threat of reprisal if they are not followed. In general, a focus on rules distracts us from building community and positive outcomes for cooperation, both of which trump a list of rules as far as effective classroom management goes.

Many schools develop a code of conduct and require that rules be posted in each classroom. This is understandable and, from a liability aspect, perfectly reasonable. Aside from the legal implications, however, I think we just do this because we have always done it. The unsettling upshot is reflected in the number of teachers who come to the profession believing that all they need to inspire good behavior is a comprehensive set of rules and are subsequently surprised and dismayed when rules alone don’t work.

There is a great deal of mythology around the power of rules, including the implication that simply having rules will inspire students’ commitment to them, especially if they’re right up on the wall where everyone can see them. If awareness of rules were an effective strategy, however, we could reasonably expect that there would never be any murders, thefts, illegal drug use, or even speeding violations. Yet despite the abundance of well-known rules and punishments for these offenses, such transgressions occur on a daily basis.

When you walk into a classroom where kids are busy and engaged, it is unlikely that their cooperation was motivated by rules. A...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• The Challenge of Classroom Management
• A Big-Picture Issue
• 7 Common Classroom Management Approaches That Work Against Us
• 1: Teachers Must Retain All the Power in the Room
• 2: Classroom Rules Ensure Good Behavior
• 3: I Shouldn’t Have to Motivate My Students
• 4: Conditional Praise Is Necessary and Effective
• 5: Giving Warnings and Asking for Excuses Are Acceptable Strategies
• 6: Administrators and Parents Can Take Care of Discipline
• 7: Kids Will Not Learn Without Negative Consequences
• Shifting to the Positive
• Encore Divider
• Encore
• References
• Related Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright