The New Distraction

Okay, fifty comments on a weekend post kinda settles the question, “Is there a market for classroom management tutorial?” I’m distracted now by a new question, raised several times throughout the comments, “Is classroom management too individualized, too tightly bound up in context, to teach?”

The Trouble Teaching Classroom Management

Yesterday I wrote an over-long since-edited post which positioned classroom management as an inverted pyramid, describing how, at the base level, you’re dealing with people who deserve specific, highly prescribed treatment, simple attitudes like, “treat others like you want to be treated,” which you could spend several lifetimes realizing.

But as you climb up into your role as a) teacher of a class, b) teacher of students, and c) teacher of very difficult students, the number of prescriptions splinter exponentially across vectors of personality and context.

For Instance

For instance, when I talk to a hurt or angry student outside, I’ll approach from the side. I’ll make some non sequitur about the weather or something to take the initial edge off. We’ll talk side-by-side, both of us facing the same direction because, subconsciously, I know this posture suggests we’re on the same team, both of us working towards a goal we’ll negotiate shortly. At their best, these resolutions ennoble teachers, students, and classes all at once.

But maybe you find the same results face-to-face, with direct eye contact and a commanding, caring presence. These tiny, crucial decisions are too tied up in context, background, and temperament to address comprehensively in a management course populated by sixty different preservice educators.

What Isn’t The Solution

Which is why I’m tempted less than ever towards authorship, towards a book of bromides and recommendations like those written above, so easily dismissed by the reader as “not me, not my class, not my kids.” Even if I could stock it with great stuff like TMAO’s, “We agreed to see in our kids their best, and demand it from them, daily,” a phrase which has been banging on my head like a kettle drum lately, your hit/miss ratio is gonna hover near one.

The Solution Then

I convinced myself recently that a) the solutions to classroom management conflicts vastly outnumber the conflicts themselves (ie. there are hundreds of solutions to a small set of archetypal conflicts) and b) you learn classroom management best by solving messy management problems of your own making.

Ideally you’d have a mentor ready to observe and post-mortem a terrible day with you, helping you find and own your solutions. But, lacking that kind of superior ed school experience, what if you had the ability to put yourself in the middle of someone else’s classroom management conflict at will?

To watch someone else flop and fail from arm’s length, in third person, after the fact. To then brainstorm solutions with a small professional group, maybe some mentors, maybe a small corps of new teachers observing the same train wreck and talking it out together, maybe on your own.

What if the simulated experience was portable, transferable, digital? What if your buddy called you from across the country, struggling with kids off-taskArchetypal Scenario #7 in his first year teaching and you could connect him instantly to a relevant management meltdown scenario and discuss it at a distance of several thousand miles?

Essay Prompts

I realize I’m being obnoxiously coy here, but feel free to give me forty words on:

1. How would this kind of inductive approach – starting from failure, working backward to success – work for you?
2. What deficiencies do you see in this approach?

Or anything else.

The Project I Killed

Last year I lined up 31 maxims for effective classroom management which I intended (at whatever point I found a few spare months) to publish in several forms and at several price points, after which I planned to retire at age 25 to a small island off the coast of Malta which I’d also own. Then it was this year and I scrapped somewhere near half of them.

Classroom Management: A Working Definition

See, no aspect of my practice changes more from year to year than my ability to keep a class of 35 students who define “heterogeneity” in every way working hard for two hours out of two hours, irrespective of how much they actually care about math or school or even life, irrespective of their home lives, wasting no one’s time or talent, respecting every student every day.

Maybe nothing I’ve ever done has been harder.

Classroom Management: Anecdotally

It’s come up a lot recently. Every day over the last week, once per period, something came up. Several students simply became too familiar. Several more decided they lived outside our mutually established classroom norms.

But every time I pulled a student outside – isolating the behavior outside, refusing to engage the student inside – the result was an oddly affirming experience for both student and teacher, one which looked nothing like how these things used to go. One conversation began with a mutual appreciation of the cherry tree blooming outside our classroom and ended with a student-initiated handshake.

Unless my experience as a classroom manager is several deviations below the mean, other people are struggling with this as I have struggled. New teachers are struggling with this. So why is classroom management the farthest topic from anyone’s blog?

Is It Because:

• you’d rather talk about something flashier like tech integration or master scheduling?
• you teach in a predominantly white, mid- to upper-ses district where a threatened phone call home is all the muscle you need?
• you’ve worked at your school so long your legacy is all the muscle you need?
• you figured it out so long ago, committed these movements to muscle memory so long ago, you’re useful to your students but useless to a student teacher trying to put it all together?

The Project Now

I’m running a new scheme right now, something similar to my original project, something to compensate for this deficiency in teacher training but pitched a little closer at my particular skill set.

Before throwing myself into this headfirst, I guess I’m wondering if the market for classroom management tutorial is everywhere or nowhere.

Minnesota’s TOY, Mike Smart, links a few psyche experiments through Gladwell’s Blink and on the other end concludes:

In the first six seconds of class on the first day of school your students can accurately judge your effectiveness as a teacher, even if they can’t hear a word you say.

He asks what effective teachers convey in those wordless six seconds. My response, profanity elided:

They’re looking for any indication that the person in front of the class (who will spend a lot of time in front of the class over the semester) has retained, in spite of her years immersed in the same preps, her curiosity, her empathy for those who don’t know what she knows, and her intolerance of boredom. You can tell from body language, posture, and facial expression alone that a teacher still loves her stuff and knows how to sell it to you.

Comments are closed here but weigh in on his tasty prompt over there.

Her graph does what several hundred words in my draft pile, thus far, have not.

Let’s say that every day for a semester, as the release bell rings, you say, sincerely, “Bye bye, boys and girls. It was good to see you today.”

Let’s say now that it’s second semester and your students have forgotten just how much math used to bore them not ten months ago. They’re feeling out the edges of classroom norms. They’re challenging behavior expectations a little more casually than they used to.

You may feel inclined to deliver a speech, something about how you brought them your best work today while they brought you much less than that.

But, if you really want to mess with their programming, to issue a sharp, subconscious reality check, simply let the release bell ring without your usual valediction.

The effect is sobering, contemplative, and downright funereal.