By Kristin
I've been teaching a long time, but I think I'm only now figuring out what matters most – creating a classroom my students own, are proud of, and where they flourish.
Last year, my first year teaching a reading intervention class, I threw away almost everything I knew about classroom management and tried to create a room that worked for the most challenging students. Things got a little crazy, and they got a lot uncomfortable for someone who doesn't like loud noises or a lot of jumping around, but I worked hard to adapt.
What I got in return were moments like this one, and that made it all worth it.
That is a picture of my 7th grade homeroom after they found a box of costumes left over from when I taught Shakespeare to high schoolers. Swords, rapiers, crowns and gowns were pulled out, passed around, and put on.
Suddenly, I was looking at a cast, and there was nothing left to do but ask if they wanted a tragedy or comedy (a desire to use swords and die dramatically resulted in a tragedy), pull my dog-eared Hamlet off the shelf and assign parts.
What you are looking at, even though I'm sure it's totally obvious, is the final scene. The King (orange caftan and crown) is stabbing the queen (black velvet bed jacket and diamond cat eye glasses), Horatio and Hamlet are going at it, and in the true interpretation of an urban tragedy some visiting cousins have taken up arms and joined the fray. Everyone died except Horatio, and we decided Hamlet talked too much. Hamlet herself decided she talked too much, blurting out, "What's his problem? Why doesn't he just shut up and do something if he's so mad?" If we'd been purists the queen would have been poisoned, but I have a hunch the Bard himself would have adored our campy version.
The Queen is dead.
I'm going to write a few posts about how I reformed my management. I'm going to write about how I became less of a manager and more of an instructor, using the work to help my struggling students succeed and grow. It's not about letting children run the show - I'm the grownup and the teacher, and I'm there to ensure every child is attended to and safe. But it is about ignoring what doesn't matter. Kory's drumming bothers me, but no one else, and it helps him read. Stephan's disruptive behavior is ignored, and my coaching is directed at helping Karen and Mohammad focus on their work and learn to succeed despite Stephan's distractions. Once Karen and Mohammad are refocused, I go to Stephan and check in with him about his work, addressing the behavior only after he's reconnected with his academics. And I do address behavior, but directly, as if it was its own learning target instead of something I'm assuming every child knows.
It sounds easy, and maybe everyone but me mastered this during student teaching, but shifting to this kind of management and away from, "Stephan, sit down and do your work!" took a lot of intense effort. I shifted my energy away from what looked and sounded good according to me and toward what my students need to thrive.
I'm not the only teacher who has discovered some powerful, concrete strategies to allow my students to be self-directed scholars – and I stole and imitated them, I didn't invent them - but I am one who can write about it here. Putting students in charge of management results in higher test scores, but that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is that it creates children who are excited to work, and who self-select to experience a great work of literature. To me as a citizen, mother and educator, that is by far a more important objective than a test score.
I’m in awe of you, Kristin, and challenged to be less authoritative!
Your students are learning valuable life skills, in addition to language arts.
No, this doesn’t sound easy, but it does sound effective, and it does sound like the kind of behavior management your students will benefit from not only this year, but also be able to take with them into classroom experiences in their future.
It doesn’t sound easy, and this is far from what I learned in student teaching (though in hindsight, there was a lot of your approach in my supervising teachers’ approaches). What you’re arriving at is something that comes at a point in a teacher’s career when you possess the kind of confidence in yourself and trust in your students that can only come from having been though enough to understand what really matters.
I learned from you when I read this line: “I go to Stephan and check in with him about his work, addressing the behavior only after he’s reconnected with his academics. And I do address behavior, but directly, as if it was its own learning target instead of something I’m assuming every child knows.”
This is going to change the way I work with more than a few of my young-uns in particular this week.