Impractical jokers waiting room misbehavior full

Chapter One
Learning From the “Natural” Teachers
Preview
• All of our efforts to improve education come down to the classroom. Whether or not lessons come alive and students learn depends upon the teacher’s skill.

• In some fortunate classrooms, both the teacher and the students look forward to getting to school in the morning. This book describes how to produce such classrooms.

• Many of the lessons in this book were learned in the classrooms of gifted or “natural” teachers. As a result, the procedures described are practical and down to earth.

• Natural teachers do not work themselves to death. Instead, they put the students to work.

• Effective management saves you time and effort. As a result, you have more time for teaching in the classroom, and more energy for living after you get home.

Succeeding in the Classroom
Focus on Teachers
This book is for teachers. I want teachers to feel successful at the end of the day. I want them to go home with enough energy for the rest of their lives. I want them to enjoy teaching.

I know teachers like this – who thrive in the classroom and are energized by teaching. I have heard them say, “I can’t wait for school to begin.” These teachers, however, are a distinct minority.

Most teachers are exhausted by the end of the day. Almost a third of new teachers quit by the end of their second year on the job. Many who stay suffer from burnout.

Most of the stress of teaching comes from getting students to do things. Managing the behavior of young people is no easy job, as any parent can tell you. Managing a whole classroom full of young people is the subject of this book.

Focus on Principals
This book is for principals. I want them to be able to do their job without constantly being interrupted by office referrals. And I want their after school meetings to be with teachers rather than with parents who are upset about a child who is in trouble.

There has been a recent flood of research indicating that teacher quality is the single most important in-school factor influencing student learning and achievement. But teacher quality is also the single most important in-school factor that determines how much of the administrator’s time goes to damage control rather than instructional leadership.

Focus on Students
This book is for students. For students to learn, they must enjoy learning. They must look forward to entering the classroom in the morning.

Some teachers create just such classrooms. They make learning an adventure. There is excitement in the air.

Students like being active. But even more, they like being interactive. They enjoy learning when it engages all of their senses – when it comes alive.

Whether or not lessons come alive depends upon the teacher’s skill. This book describes the skills of exceptional teachers – the “how to” of effective instruction.

Raising Children
Parenting Is Hard
Parents not only juggle schedules and meals and errands all day long, but they are also teachers. How do you teach your kids to do what you want them to do the first time you ask? How do you teach your kids to stop doing what you don’t want them to do – now? How do you teach them to be nice to each other, to be respectful, to cooperate?

Every parent knows that raising children is one of the most challenging jobs on earth. It takes all of the intelligence and energy that you can muster. It takes never ending love and patience even when you are exhausted.

Can you think of anything more challenging than being a good parent? I can.

Teaching Is Harder
Being a parent is a piece of cake compared to managing a classroom. In the classroom you don’t have your own children – the ones who love you – the ones who have been carefully taught right from wrong.

In the classroom you have other people’s kids. These “other people” will send you a room full of youngsters whose personality traits range from exemplary to highly inappropriate.

Image

In the classroom you have other people’s kids.

Some parents teach their children that no means no, but not all of them do. Some parents teach their children that if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right, but not all of them do. Rather, some people raise kids who don’t make their beds, don’t clean their rooms, don’t set the table, and don’t pick up their clothes.

It’s not that these parents don’t want their kids to be responsible and well behaved. They just don’t know how to make it happen. They lack the necessary skills.

As a result, these parents make a lot of “rookie errors” as their kids are growing up. They are inconsistent when dealing with misbehavior. They nag instead of teach. They tell their kids to do something without following through to make sure it gets done. Over time these kids often learn to avoid work by being contrary while mastering the art of heel dragging and procrastination.

To these students add the usual assortment of characters who show up to any classroom on the first day of school – a handful of helpless handraisers, a couple of kids who can’t stop talking, a bully, a social isolate, several students with learning disabilities, and a few who are hyperactive. You will juggle the individual needs of this motley crew every hour of the day.

You don’t just teach the curriculum. You teach civilization. In addition to teaching responsibility and kindness and fair play, you must also teach the value of achievement based upon hard work.

In fact, you will ask your students to do more hard work in one day than their parents may ask them to do at home in a month. And you will expect it to be:

• done correctly

• written legibly

• finished on time

• with a good attitude

Lots of luck!

How will you succeed – by “winging it” – like their parents did? Are you kidding? You will need some serious, high-tech, industrial strength classroom management skills.

Image

You will juggle the individual needs of this motley crew all day.

But very few of us enter the classroom with a detailed understanding of classroom management. So we do “wing it.” We wing it because we have little choice. “On the job training” in education typically means being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool to sink or swim.

During our first few years on the job we accept the long evenings and the days fueled by adrenaline as the price of mastering a new profession. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Some teachers make teaching a room full of kids look easy. How do they do it?

Observing Two “Naturals”
We Have a Problem
The year was 1969, and I was asked to consult at a private school for emotionally, behaviorally, and learning handicapped junior-high-age students. All of them had been “removed” from the Los Angeles Unified School District. I had just been given a free ticket to the all-star game of classroom goof-offs.

On my first visit I observed four classrooms, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. The two I observed in the morning were a shock.

As I approached the first classroom, I could hear yelling. As I entered, I saw empty chairs. I looked to my left and saw a kid standing on a desk. Nine kids were crouched on top of the coat closet staring at me.

Suddenly, a half-dozen other kids poured out of the coat closet. They were armed with items of clothing with which they began pelting the students above. One student leapt from on top of the coat closet to wrestle a classmate to the floor.

In front of this scene was a male teacher who was donating his body to the betterment of young people – his stomach lining, his dental work, his blood pressure – as many of us do. With arms folded, teeth clenched, and a look of grim desperation he shouted,

“Group!”

This worried me. I am a clinical psychologist by training, and I had spent years working with groups – group dynamics, group communication, group problem-solving. I didn’t see any group.

Then, the teacher said,

“I am simply going to wait until you all settle down!”

I didn’t know how long he had been waiting. It was November.

Image

“I am simply going to wait until you all settle down!”

The second classroom I visited that morning was almost as bad. A young female teacher was leading a class discussion. I could tell because everyone was talking at the same time. Who do you think was talking louder than any of the students?

“Class. There is absolutely no excuse for all of this noise!... Class!...”

By the end of the morning, I desperately wanted to leave. But, since I had promised, I stuck it out past lunch.

Bringing Order Out of Chaos
After lunch I observed the students who had been on top of the coat closet as they entered another teacher’s classroom. This teacher greeted them warmly at the door. The students took their seats as they entered, looked at the chalkboard where a math assignment was posted, and went to work.

When the bell to begin class rang, only a few looked up. The students worked on the assignment for about ten minutes. Then there was a lesson transition. The teacher said,

“Class, before any of you get out of your seats, let me tell you what I want. First, place your papers here on the corner of my desk. Then, if you need to sharpen pencils, now is the time to do it. If you need to get a drink of water, now is the time to do it. When you return to your seats, would you please get out your social studies books.”

I thought, “Oh no! Don’t let them out of their seats!” But, the students did as the teacher asked and were back in their seats ready to go in 41 seconds.

The teacher then conducted a group discussion in which the students were respectful and actually took turns. Throughout the class period these students behaved like any well-mannered group of kids.

I might have written this experience off as a fluke had not the second teacher of the afternoon gotten similar results with the refugees from that morning’s group discussion. I had no idea how these two teachers got the results they did, but I observed three characteristics of their teaching that I will never forget.

• They were not working hard at discipline management. In fact, they were not working very hard at all.

• They were relaxed.

• They were emotionally warm.

At the very least I learned that managing a classroom does not have to be stressful, and discipline does not have to be stern and humorless. These teachers enjoyed teaching.

How could two classes that were so out of control with one teacher look so normal with another teacher? I had to find out.

They Didn’t Have a Clue
I returned to these classrooms for several days hoping to discover “the secret.” Instead, all I saw was two “naturals” making it look easy.

On Thursday after having observed their classrooms for four days, I held a meeting with my two “naturals.” I told them that I simply wanted to understand how they could have such good classroom control with such difficult students.

The “naturals” could not have been more generous with their time. One of the reasons they participated so eagerly was that they were curious about the same question. As one of them said, “I don’t have any discipline problems, but I can hear the other classrooms with my door shut.”

Yet, while my natural teachers tried to be helpful, they didn’t help all that much. I said, “How do you get the kids to behave so well?”

They both said, “Well, you have to mean business.”

I said, “Right! But exactly how do you mean business?”

They said, “On the first day of school the classroom will either belong to you or it will belong to them. God help you if it belongs to them.”

I said, “Right! But how do you do it?”

They said, “Frankly, a lot of it has to do with expectations. Their behavior will not exceed your expectations. If you don’t expect them to behave themselves, they won’t.”

I said, “Right! But, how do you get them to do that?”

They said, “Well, a lot of it has to do with your values. If you value every child as a learner...”

I said, “Wait! Give me credit for good values and high expectations. I want to know what to do. Imagine that I am a substitute teacher taking over your class tomorrow morning. You obviously have the students in a groove. I don’t want to lose it. I’m standing in front of your class. Now, tell me. What do I do?”

“Oh.” they said. “I see... Hmm... Well... I can tell you this much. You had better mean business.”

On that day I learned something remarkable about these natural teachers. They had great instincts, but, for the most part, they could not describe what they were doing in specific terms. Why?

Choose Your Parents Very Carefully
My best guess is that my natural teachers lacked any language to describe their classroom management skills because they learned these skills in early childhood. Chances are, their parents were also naturals.

Consequently, to a natural teacher effective management seems like nothing more than common sense. “How else would you do it?” they often asked. As the saying goes, “Choose your parents very carefully.”

But how will the rest of us learn these management skills? Before we can even describe the skills of discipline management, we must first understand the nature of the problems we are trying to address. Don’t expect it to be obvious.

If you were to sit in the back of a dysfunctional classroom, you would see behavior problems galore. But, if you were to sit in the back of a typical classroom, you would just see kids doing interesting things while a dedicated teacher orchestrated the activity. What could possibly be wrong?

Inside Management
Wasting Time During Transitions
Let’s start at the beginning of class. “It takes a while to get started,” teachers will say. “We spend the first few minutes just settling in.”

In fact, this characterization is highly accurate. It is rare that any lesson begins before five minutes after the bell rings. Students chit chat as they sharpen pencils, collect their materials, and get into their work groups.

During this time the teacher takes roll, deals with tardies, and answers a few urgent questions from students. It all seems so normal.

That’s the problem. It is normal. Now suspend the pleasure you feel from watching those young faces, and engage your analytic faculties.

Image

Out of a fifty minute class period, five minutes represents one-tenth of the teacher’s total contact time with those students during the semester. If the school has a ten million dollar annual budget, one million dollars has just been spent on “settling in.” Did anything productive take place? Was anything learned?

Next, let’s take the lesson transition – the “black hole” of lost learning time. A typical lesson transition takes five minutes. If the kids were to hustle, it would take thirty seconds. But they have no vested interest in hustling. They know that as soon as the lesson transition is over, the teacher will put them to work.

So, students make dawdling into an art form. They amble to the pencil sharpener and lackadaisically turn the handle as they laugh and talk with the next person in line. They stand around the drinking fountain and chit chat while patiently waiting their turn. They amble to their seats and slowly get out their materials with absolutely no sense of urgency.

“Settling in” plus one lesson transition has now consumed nearly ten minutes of our fifty minute class period – 20% of our total contact time for the semester. And nothing has yet been learned.

Learning Time Lost During Instruction
During the teaching of a lesson, learning time simply evaporates. It doesn’t make a big scene like a discipline problem. Rather, it slips away quietly. However, the way in which it slips away looks different at the elementary and secondary levels.

In high school the vast majority of lesson formats are still dominated by lecturing in spite of reform efforts. During the lecture the teacher is active, and the students are passive.

Some students take notes, but many don’t. Instead, they zone out or, if they are in the back of the room where they can get away with it, they chit-chat or text their friends.

At the elementary level learning time slips away after the lesson has been taught. As soon as the teacher asks the students to work independently, hands start waving in the air. They are the same students every day.

Image

The teacher goes to the first handraiser to offer help. As the teacher tutors this student, the classroom quickly becomes noisy. In five seconds the chit-chat has spread across the room. In ten seconds it is getting loud. In a futile attempt to deal with the noise, the teacher announces to the class that they are to “quit talking and get back to work.” But as soon as the teacher resumes instruction, the chit-chat begins as before.

This pattern is repeated with a series of handraisers for the remainder of the lesson. “Working independently” is a euphemism for a little work, a lot of chit-chat, and a rate of time-on-task that hovers below fifty percent.

With the advent of cooperative learning, however, a new pattern has emerged. Now students are put into groups where they are expected to talk. The result is what you might expect – a lot of chit-chat without anybody working too hard – except for the high achiever of the group who does the assignment for everyone else.

Time Squandered by “Goofing Off”
Now, let’s move on to classroom discipline. This is where we deal with provocative behavior, right? Well... not really.

You can find plenty of provocative behavior in an out-of-control classroom, of course. But you could sit in the back of a typical classroom for weeks without seeing a kid being sent to the office. Who wants to get sent to the office?

So what form do discipline problems take in our typical classroom? Look around. They are right in front of you.

While large discipline problems are rare in our typical classroom, small discipline problems are very common. The discipline problems that I count over and over during any class period might be considered innocuous. But they add up. I will refer to them collectively as “goofing off.”

Eighty percent of goofing off is simply students talking to their neighbors or texting friends – scored talking to neighbors on our data sheet. It makes no difference whether we are observing elementary or high school classrooms, and it makes no difference whether the subject is math, social studies, or English. It doesn’t even make any difference whether the class is Regular Ed. or Special Ed.

Statistically speaking, when it comes to defining discipline management within the classrooms, talking to neighbors is “the ball game.” It accounts for 80% of lost learning time when kids are supposed to be on task – that crucial time between settling in and the first lesson transition.

Image

Eighty percent of the goofing off in any classroom is “talking to neighbors.”

Fifteen percent of goofing off is scored out of seat. And I don’t even count the kid at the pencil sharpener. Some teachers let their students go at will. I only count the second kid at the pencil sharpener. Or, more often, I count the kid (we call him or her “the wanderer”) who is always wandering around the classroom five minutes after the lesson has begun.

Between talking to neighbors and out of seat we have counted 95% of goofing off in a typical classroom. You might think that the remaining 5% are comprised of big problems that might cause a kid to be sent to the office. Wrong! They are just nickel and dime behaviors that aren’t worth scoring – like passing notes, drawing cartoons, and tying shoelaces around the leg of the chair.

A Pattern Emerges
A pattern emerges if you spend enough hours in the back of a classroom observing. The teacher works hard all day long. But the students don’t work any harder than they have to. They would rather chit-chat.

The students aren’t being defiant or provocative. They are just being kids. Kids love to socialize. Working diligently on a classroom assignment, in contrast, might be considered an unnatural act.

One of the teacher’s most pressing jobs during any lesson is to replace socializing with hard work. This is quite a trick. It requires some serious classroom management skills. Without these skills, learning time will simply evaporate due to the teacher’s inefficiency.

The Stages We All Go Through
If talking to neighbors is the most common classroom discipline problem, the logical question for any teacher is, “What am I going to do about it?” Answering this question over and over all day long is something we were not prepared for when we entered the teaching profession. Instead, we must figure it out for ourselves.

As we progress along the learning curve, we all pass through the same four stages. These stages account for much of our exhaustion during our first year of teaching.

Stage 1: As Green as Grass
Imagine that it is the first day of your teaching career. As the saying goes, you are as green as grass.

It is the undying hope of the green teacher that if you just love your students and are nice to them, they will be nice to you in return and everything will turn out fine. This is the sweet dream of the uninitiated. It will get a weary smile from your more experienced colleagues.

You are, however, crystal clear about what you are not going to do.

“I am not going to nag my students. I hate it when teachers do that!”

Thus, with a smile on your face and love in your heart, the ball game begins.

As you begin to help a student, you look up to see two kids on the far side of the room talking instead of working. Can you believe it? Green teachers, not wanting to nag, say to themselves:

“I’ll just wait. Maybe the students will get back to work.”

Stop! You just declared “open season” on yourself! If you don’t do anything about the disruption, the rest of the students will conclude, “If they can talk, so can I.”

Not surprisingly, as you continue helping the student, the noise level rises. Soon a student begins to wander around the room. You are beginning to lose control of the class!

Finally, you say to yourself, “I have to really do something!” We will refer to this realization as losing your innocence.

But what will you do? In all of your teacher training were you ever prepared for this moment?

Stage 2: Do Something!
You swing into action. You stand, turn toward the offending students and say their names.

“Larry. Roberta.”

They respond with that look of mild surprise and total innocence that I call “smiley face.” Green teachers often mistake smiley face for repentance. If you wait long enough, you may observe all four stages of pseudo-compliance.

• Smiley face: They give you the look of the repentant angel, as if asking, “Who, me?”

• Book posing: They open their books and look back at you as though to ask, “Does this fulfill the requirements of formal education?”

• Pencil posing: They get out a pencil and touch it to paper while looking at you as though to say, “Look, I’m writing.”

• Pseudo-scholarship: They start to write but look up periodically to see if you are still tracking them.

It certainly looks like compliance from where you stand. But as soon as you turn your back, Larry and Roberta resume their conversation. What will you do now?

Stage 3: Nag, Nag, Nag
Students can tell when you are beginning to lose your patience. You turn with a look of grim determination, put your hands on your hips, cock your head forward, raise an eyebrow, draw in a deep breath, and address the students in question:

“Larry! Roberta! I am sick and tired of looking up only to see the two of you talking. You have just as much work to do as anyone else blah, blah, blah...”

Sometimes you address the group:

“All right class, there is absolutely no excuse for all of this noise! When I look up, I expect to see people working! There is an assignment on the board, and blah, blah, blah...”

Sometimes you address the lone wanderer:

“Phillip! Where are you going? I have not given you permission to wander aimlessly around the room. Would you please take your seat and blah, blah, blah...”

I have just given three examples of the most widespread “management technique” on earth – Nag, Nag, Nag! No job is more suited to making a nag out of an idealistic young person than trying to get a room full of kids to do one thing after another all day long.

Image

But students know exactly how to get you to quit nagging. They look contrite and get back to work. You start helping the next student. In five seconds Larry and Roberta resume their conversation.

When you see them disrupting one time too many, something in your soul finally snaps. Enough is enough! This brings us to phase four: Laying Down the Law!

Stage 4: Laying Down the Law
You stand slowly, square up, give your best sick and tired look, say the students names, and march over to Larry and Roberta. It is time to deal with this nonsense once and for all. Of course, as you walk across the room, you pull the entire class off task as all eyes follow you. Then, after you arrive, you get to have one of the most silly conversations in all of education.

“Larry! Roberta! I am sick and tired of looking up to see nothing but talking over here.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to turn around in your seats right now and get some work done. Do you understand?”

“Okay.”

“And, when I come back, I want to see that something has been accomplished.”

“Okay.”

Having taken a firm stand for all that is right and good, you trudge back across the classroom with all eyes following. With one last sick and tired look at Larry and Roberta, you resume helping the poor student who has been patiently waiting. What do you think Larry and Roberta will be doing in fifteen seconds?

Getting Nowhere
Right Back Where You Started
When you look up the next time to see Larry and Roberta talking again, it may dawn on you that, after having gone to all of the trouble of laying down the law, you are right back where you started. Of course, the kids know this.

Occasionally a frustrated teacher will bounce a student to the office at this juncture for “insubordination” or some such thing. But this looks weak, especially when done repeatedly.

Instead, most teachers will be looking for a “labor saving device.” The two most common are:

• Save the trip and just nag: There is a certain logic to support this move. If you are going to fail, fail cheap. The trip across the room is a lot of work for nothing.

• Give up: When a teacher finally decides to throw in the towel, they often make a self-justifying pronouncement in the teachers’ lounge. I will call it the “Policeman Speech.” Have you ever heard words like these?

“I did not go into teaching to be a policeman. I am not going to spend all of my time and energy dealing with one little disruption after another all day long. I will deal with any situation that is serious, of course, but I am not going to stop my lesson every thirty seconds in order to blah, blah, blah...”

Both of these responses belong to well-intentioned teachers who have finally accepted the fact that they cannot win. It costs them an arm and a leg to deal with the disruption. In contrast, the students only have to smile, face forward, and return to work in order to be in compliance. Unfortunately, if you are working harder at discipline management than the students, you will eventually lose.

Dying by Inches
Students know that you will wear out before they do. Some students even enjoy watching it happen.

If you think that you can bring “law and order” to the frontier by chasing after every bandito in the territory, let me bring to mind some basic realities that might add a note of sobriety to your calculations: 1) There are many of them, and only one of you, 2) You are older, and you tire more easily, and finally 3) They send in “fresh troops” every year.

Going through the four stages of the learning curve like previous generations of teachers will start you down the road to burnout. The following stages represent a well-worn path from initial frustration to “throwing in the towel.”

Exhaustion – You are constantly dealing with discipline.

Futility – It doesn’t get any better no matter how hard you try.

Cynicism – You can’t do anything with these kids.

Resentment – It finally becomes them against you.

Rationalization – Here come the self-justifications.

• It’s just the way kids are at this age (i.e., the hormone hypothesis favored by junior high teachers).

• It’s the homes these kids come from.

• It’s the television and the video games. They have the attention span of gnats.

• I don’t have major problems.

• The noise doesn’t really bother me that much.

• It’s my job to teach. It’s their job to learn.

The Price We Pay
Teacher Stress
You are on your toes all day long teaching lessons while constantly juggling the needs of individual students. After school you have parent conferences and committee meetings.

When you get home you have paper grading and lesson planning. You are on your toes all day long, and then you keep working into the evening. You can run yourself ragged!

Everybody knows that teaching is a stressful job. So, part of the job is managing stress.

Image

You can run yourself ragged!

But stress management, to be successful, must be proactive. You cannot allow yourself to be stressed all day long and then somehow undo it once you get home. You can try, of course. Some of the more common prescriptions are: 1) Rest – lots of luck if you have kids, 2) Exercise – lots if luck if you have kids, and 3) A glass of chardonnay – or two.

But stress management after you get home is not really stress management at all. It is damage control. And the damage has already been done.

The bottom line in stress management is simple. You have to prevent stress while you are teaching – moment by moment, class period by class period. You have to work smart, not hard.

Lost Learning Time
As we watch our typical classroom day after day, the price we pay for our lack of preparation in classroom management becomes more and more apparent. Teachers work themselves to death. But, in spite of these efforts, the learning time continues to slip away – before class, during class and at every transition. When learning time goes, achievement goes with it.

How do you prevent learning time from simply evaporating? Don’t look for a simple answer.

The methods you would use to get kids on task as soon as the bell rings are completely different from the methods you would use to train kids to hustle during a lesson transition. And neither of these procedures bear any relationship to the skills needed to prevent goofing off. Prevention will require that we redesign the entire process of instruction to that end.

In addition, the prevention of goofing off is completely different from the remediation of goofing off. Remediation will require meaning business. Handle the situation effectively and the class period progresses smoothly as though nothing had happened. Mishandle a situation and you have a stressful, time-consuming problem to deal with.

And then there is motivation, hardly a simple topic. There are two different types of motivation. One is academic – getting kids to work hard while being conscientious. The other is behavioral – getting kids to hustle during lesson transitions in order to replace wasted time with learning time. Both motivational programs will operate simultaneously.

Winging It
In a Tools for Teaching workshop new teachers come up to me during the break and ask, “Why didn’t we get this in college?” Older teachers will say, “Where were you twenty years ago?”

I will ask the new teachers, “In your teacher training program did you ever have a course in discipline management or classroom management?” For decades, the answer was, “No.” More recently they will say, “We had a course, but it was mainly theory. We learned what we were supposed to do, but we never learned how to do it.”

“Did you ever get up on your feet and practice any skills,” I will ask. The answer, of course, is “No.”

Without classroom management training, teachers are left to figure it out for themselves as best they can once they enter the classroom. The result will be what you might expect.

You Can Do This
To manage the classroom efficiently, you will need a repertoire of sophisticated management skills that cover all of the tasks that you must deal with each day in the classroom. It is not enough to simply know about these skills. You must be able to execute them – quickly – under pressure.

But have hope. Being a natural teacher isn’t magic. It’s a matter of skill. And skills can be taught. You can do this.

Image

Chapter Two
The Primary Prevention of Discipline Problems
Preview
• This chapter is an overview of the topics described in the book.

• This book focuses on the fundamental skills of classroom management. These skills replace working hard with working smart.

• Instructional practices focus on making learning interactive while replacing helpless handraising with independent learning.

• The management of motivation focuses on helping students to internalize values of hard work and conscientiousness. Incentives for productivity combine enjoyment with accountability.

• Discipline management focuses on 1) making cooperation and responsible behavior a matter of routine, and 2) setting limits in a nonadversarial fashion through mobility, proximity, and the body language of meaning business.

Anatomy of Classroom Management
Inseparable Parts
My “natural” teachers were naturals at classroom management. But, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, they had a hard time describing what they did. If we want to train teachers to have a similar ability, we must first gain a detailed understanding of classroom management.

Classroom management is an umbrella term for the skills and procedures that define a teacher’s job in the classroom. Classroom management integrates discipline, instruction, and motivation. These three are so intertwined that success in one requires success in the other two.

Since time and energy are finite, all of the time and energy that go into discipline management come right out of instruction. If we want to help teachers teach, one of our first objectives must be to drive the cost of discipline management as close to zero as possible.

Focus on Prevention
If discipline management is remedial – always dealing with problems after they occur – discipline management will always be expensive. For discipline management to be affordable, discipline problems must be prevented.

Yet prevention is far more complex and subtle than remediation. Prevention requires dealing with root causes, not just delivering consequences. It requires intervention early in the chain of causation, not after the fact. It will ultimately define the critical elements of both instruction and motivation.

Therefore, discipline management, when viewed in the light of prevention, becomes synonymous with classroom management. In this book the two terms will be used interchangeably, with “discipline management” coming to the fore in discussions of student misbehavior.

Skills of the Natural Teachers
Brainstorming with the Naturals
While my natural teachers could not describe what they did in any real detail, the management skills obviously existed in their minds and bodies. I just had to draw these skills out so I could see them.

As before, my natural teachers were more than generous with their time. We began our exploration with what the teachers called “meaning business.” The teachers were adamant that you had to mean business before you could ever be successful in the classroom. But what is it? Meaning business seemed to be as intangible as it was critical.

I met with my natural teachers each day after school. We brainstormed. We role played. I would set up examples of misbehavior and say, “What would you do now? Show me!” Then I would experiment by having the teacher respond to the situation in several different ways. Finally, we would put our heads together to decide which worked best.

The teachers would say things like, “Oh, the second time was better. When you turned all the way around toward me, I could tell that you were more serious.”

Decoding Body Language
Over time it became clear that the core of meaning business was body language. We were decoding a new language – yet one that is understood by everybody.

As we came to understand body language more fully, we realized that the kids were “reading” the teacher like a book. They knew what they could or couldn’t get away with at any moment of the day. They knew because the teacher was telling them.

Body language is a continuous dialogue without words between people. It is ongoing and unavoidable. It signals your mood, your intentions, your resolve. With goofing off in the classroom, it is a conversation not unlike a poker game in which students read you in order to know whether to raise or fold.

Sometimes after decoding a critical piece of body language in our after school sessions, teachers would take it home to use with their own kids. They would often report the next day, “You know that thing we did yesterday? It really works!”

Untangling Classroom Management
Every time we solved a problem, the next problem came into view. Once we got a handle on meaning business, I said to them, “Why do kids goof off so much during a lesson? If we could cut down on that, we wouldn’t have to mean business so often.”

This forced us to analyze those parts of the instructional process that produced the most disruptions. For starters, I observed very little goofing off when the teachers were mobile. But I saw an immediate increase in goofing off as soon as the teachers stopped to help an individual student. Obviously, the teacher’s mobility and proximity reduced goofing off.

What keeps the teacher from being mobile? I started with the most obvious thing – the furniture. The arrangement of furniture in most classrooms inhibits movement. We experimented with one room arrangement after another until we developed an efficient solution – a compact pattern of walkways that allowed the teacher to get from any student to any other student in the fewest steps.

Once we created efficient walkways for the teacher, the next barrier to mobility emerged – the duration of the teacher-student helping interaction. Teachers would typically work with an individual student for 3 – 5 minutes before going to the next student. During these tutoring sessions, talking quickly spread across the room, and time-on-task plummeted.

Entering the Realm of Instruction
For starters, we had to reduce the duration of a teacher/student helping interaction. This raised an interesting question. How, exactly, do you help a student who is stuck?

The teachers told me, to my amazement, that they had never been given a method. They were just winging it by doing what seemed logical – reteaching the portion of the lesson that the student didn’t understand.

Next we examined how to give corrective feedback as efficiently as possible. This process is described in detail in Chapters 5 and 6. In a nutshell, feedback must contain a brief, focused prompt that clarifies for the student what to do next. An efficient verbal prompt typically takes 20 – 40 seconds.

However, we found that this wasn’t good enough. While working with an individual student, teachers lost the class to noisy chit-chat in 5 – 10 seconds. How can you give corrective feedback as quickly as that?

To do this we had to prepackage feedback. I simply represented the steps of the task analysis visually. We called it a Visual Instruction Plan or VIP. The teacher presented it for all to see as they taught the lesson.

This reduced the duration of corrective feedback to about 5 seconds. Now the teacher only had to point out a critical feature in a step that had already been taught in order to clarify what to do next. In fact, the entire lesson was now so clear that handraising was reduced by half.

So far so good, but how do you teach a lesson so that students rarely need corrective feedback? We had now arrived at the heart of instruction – with motivation yet to come.

Putting Together a Puzzle
As you can see, as soon as we solved one problem, the next problem popped into view. As more and more problems were solved, I realized that we were assembling the pieces of a puzzle. Once assembled, this puzzle gave us a comprehensive picture of classroom management.

As we assembled this puzzle, however, we tried a lot of different things. Some came from the teachers’ insights, some came from my insights, and some came from the classroom management literature. However, most of the management programs in the literature proved to be non-starters – cumbersome, expensive, of limited utility.

And the teachers were not subtle in letting me know it. They would say, “I can’t use that. I don’t have time for all that record keeping. And I’m not about to run a supermarket for reinforcers.”

To be helpful in the real world a classroom management procedure has to be

• simple

• powerful

• and cheap.

It must make the teacher’s job easier, not harder.

It is hard to find procedures like that. And as we worked together after school, I was surprised to find that my natural teachers didn’t have as many answers as I had thought.

I spent a half-decade winnowing the management procedures that were available. After that I had to invent what was missing. There were a lot of pieces missing! For example, how do you train a class to hustle rather than dawdle during a lesson transition in order to convert wasted time into learning time? Or, for example, how do you deal with severe provocations in a win-win fashion so you can avoid most office referrals?

Eventually we began to run out of major problems to solve. The major pieces of the puzzle seemed to have finally come together. Slowly I began to realize that we had developed a classroom management system.

A Management System
Only Skills that Are Critical
The classroom management system that evolved through our problem solving and winnowing embodies two unique attributes:

First, every element must be the most cost-effective way of solving a given problem.

Second, nothing is included which is extraneous.

This produces a very tight, parsimonious system – a management system reduced to fundamentals – to skills and procedures that are critical.

Tools for Teaching is that system. It is a fabric of interlocking parts, each of which has a specific job to do and each of which depends on the other parts for maximum effectiveness.

System, however, is one of the most overused words in education. For the sake of clarity, we need a definition. A system has two defining characteristics:

• The whole is formed by pieces that fit together like the pieces of a puzzle.

• The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The pieces have synergy.

Synergy
Synergy refers to the geometric increase in power that comes from each part of a system enabling the other parts to do their job fully. But synergy is rare. It requires the right skills combined in the right way. Yet with synergy a modest effort can produce a big result. Listed below are some of the management goals achieved as a by-product of implementing Tools for Teaching in the classroom – a catalogue of staff development buzz words that have been prominent during recent decades.

• Student engagement

• Stress management

• Interactive learning

• Teaching to mastery

• Student motivation

• Time-on-task

• Minority achievement

• Formative assessment

• Teaching to all modalities

• Writing across curriculum areas

• Reducing office referrals

• Increasing teacher retention

Achieving all of these objectives simultaneously may seem like an outlandish idea – until you realize that natural teachers have always done it in their beautifully run classrooms. And they have done it without working themselves to death. They are the embodiment of working smart instead of working hard.

Their colleagues know that these teachers are exceptional, but they don’t quite understand how or why. So they make up a mythology of effective teaching. “It’s just something you are born with, I suppose” – as though there are genes in the human body for effective classroom management.

Skills versus Information
To understand Tools for Teaching you must understand the difference between skills and information. Both are necessary, but they play different roles.

Through information you learn about something – its general nature along with theory and history and context. Through skill building you learn how to do something – the emotion, the mind-set, the physical response.

Skills and information are as different as day and night. Reading books about playing the violin will not make you a violinist. There is a profound difference between “knowing about” and “knowing how to” that even a child can understand.

Of course, you will need them both. But they are acquired in different ways. While you may learn about something through reading and discussing and writing, you will learn how to do something by being skillfully coached along with plenty of practice, practice, practice.

As you face the challenges of the classroom, you will rely constantly on knowledge of what to do and how to do it – the kind of knowledge that only comes from systematic skill building. Tools for Teaching is about skill building.

Fundamentals Are Timeless
Basic skills have a timeless quality. The fundamentals of baseball and football and basketball have not changed within living memory.

In addition, the coaching of skills has a timeless quality. Coaches at the top of their profession still use skill drills that were developed decades ago simply because they are efficient.

Information changes constantly. A college text is only good for three years. But the fundamental skills of classroom management acquired from Tools for Teaching will be your partner in the classroom for as long as you teach. Many teachers who have become friends during workshops over the years have confided that they reread “Tools” each fall before the kids show up.

Discipline Can Be Positive
The notion that discipline management could be positive was not on my radar when I began working with teachers in the classroom. It was too radical of a notion to even occur to me.

The traditional view of discipline management is simple – discipline equals punishment and the punishment fits the crime. This logic is incorporated in the “hierarchy of consequences” that is central to the discipline code at any school site. Consequences are meant to be unpleasant in order to serve as a deterrent.

As I worked with classroom management during the 1970’s, however, I began to see that discipline could actually be non-adversarial. This was due to a series of innovations:

• Learning to prevent most classroom discipline problems by redesigning the instructional process

• Learning to set limits on those disruptions that do occur in a non-adversarial fashion (meaning business)

• Learning to train the entire class to be responsible

• Learning to deal with severe provocations in a win-win fashion rather than sending the student to the office

My first book, published with McGraw-Hill in 1987, was entitled Positive Classroom Discipline. In 1999 I began to write a sequel. A preliminary title search found forty two recent books with “positive” and “discipline” in the title. I switched to Tools for Teaching to avoid confusion.

Obviously, the idea of making discipline management positive is very appealing to educators. But wanting it and getting it are two different things. To reach the goal you will need the innovations that made Positive Classroom Discipline revolutionary.

A Cognitive Map of Classroom Discipline
Here is a brief description of the system of classroom management contained in Tools for Teaching. It is presented in the order in which the procedures were developed – more or less. This will help you to get a feel for how elements of instruction and motivation combine to prevent discipline problems. It is the advance organizer for the book.

Instruction
• Working the Crowd: Highly effective teachers tend to move among the students whether they are checking work in a junior high math class or reading to second graders. They make an art form out of “working the crowd” – otherwise known as “management by walking around.” Teachers who spend too much time in the front of the classroom have a lot of “goofing off” in the back of the classroom.

Yet, when you ask these teachers why they spend so much time working the crowd, they usually say things like, “I just want to see how the students are doing.” Working the crowd, therefore, allows the teacher to check for understanding while getting discipline management for free.

• Room Arrangement: To make working the crowd as easy as possible, you may have to rearrange the furniture in your classroom. The optimal room arrangement allows you to get from any student to any other student in the fewest steps. This maximizes proximity while facilitating the supervision of student work.

• Helpless Handraisers: Once you focus on working the crowd, you immediately confront the natural enemy of working the crowd –“helpless handraisers.” When teachers announce the beginning of Guided Practice, they are typically met with hands waving in the air.

To briefly recap from Chapter 1, the teacher goes to the first student to find out where they are stuck. The student says, “I don’t understand what to do here.” The teacher then tutors the student through a portion of the lesson – a process that takes several minutes. Within seconds the noise level rises as students begin to chit-chat. Soon a couple of students are out of their seats.

However, the more ominous consequence is that, by giving several minutes of undivided attention to the students seeking help, the teacher inadvertently reinforces help seeking rather than achievement. A typical classroom has 5 – 6 “helpless handraisers.” These are the students for whom help seeking has been shaped into a chronic pattern of learned helplessness.

Image

The natural enemy of working the crowd is the helpless handraiser.

As mentioned earlier, this management fiasco raises the question, “How do you give corrective feedback to a student who is stuck?” Corrective feedback is a three step process:

1) Praise: Describe exactly what the student has done right just prior to the error in order to review while focusing their attention. (This step is optional.)

2) Prompt: Show the student exactly what to do next in place of the error.

3) Leave: Put the student to work.

These three steps 1) reduce discouragement by focusing on what is right rather than what is wrong, 2) eliminate cognitive overload by limiting input, and 3) eliminate forgetting by putting the student to work before they have time to forget.

While this basic process can be elaborated by the teacher, Praise, Prompt, and Leave typically reduces a four-and-a-half minute tutoring session to a brief “in-and-out” of 30 seconds duration. Even with a question and some discussion, the total duration is typically under a minute.

Image

If working the crowd is to have a chance, we must free the helpless handraisers from their dependency on the teacher.

• Visual Instruction Plans (VIPs): As mentioned earlier, while Praise, Prompt, and Leave is relatively brief, it is not brief enough. Since you will lose the class to chit-chat in 5-10 seconds unless you work the crowd, even a 30 second helping interaction is too long by a factor of three. How do you reduce the duration of a prompt even further while increasing its clarity?

There is really only one answer – prepackage the steps of the task analysis in visual form. This type of lesson plan, referred to as a visual instruction plan (VIP), is simple, clear, and continually available to the students as they work. Corrective feedback is thereby reduced to about 5 seconds as you point out a critical feature in the appropriate step. Just as important, the clarity of the VIP accelerates learning while reducing the cognitive overload and performance anxiety that drives help-seeking. This is all described in detail in Chapter 7.

• Say, See, Do Teaching: The most direct way of minimizing the need for corrective feedback during Guided Practice is to teach the lesson properly in the first place. There are two basic ways to package the activity of a lesson.

The first is:

• Input, Input, Input, Input – Output
This pattern characterizes most teaching at the secondary level. Imagine a 25 minute lecture followed by a discussion.

The second pattern is:

• Input, Output, Input, Output, Input, Output
This pattern is characteristic of coaching and skill building in general. Students learn by doing one step at a time with constant monitoring and immediate corrective feedback.

Say, See, Do Teaching is not about one teaching methodology verses another. Rather, it is simply about activity versus passivity. When planning a lesson the teacher must constantly ask, “What do I want the student(s) to do with this chunk of material?”

Educators have traditionally emphasized the link between effective instruction and effective discipline management. But, what is the link? What makes some teachers so effective while their colleagues down the hall struggle?

The difference is in process – the organization of learning activity. Successful teachers constantly engage their students in learning by doing. Their students are busy. When students are both busy and successful, discipline problems plummet.

• Adequate Structured Practice: Structured Practice is simply practice that is highly structured in order to minimize error during initial acquisition. The traditional method has always been to walk students through performance slowly with continuous monitoring and feedback. In this way the timing and sequence of performance can be built correctly with a minimum of performance anxiety since error is immediately seen and corrected.

Structured Practice “grooves” correct performance so that it becomes second nature – what Benjamin Bloom refers to as “automaticity.” If teachers go straight from lesson presentation to Guided Practice without adequate Structured Practice as is so common, they will immediately be confronted with hands waving in the air. Guided Practice will then be consumed with helping students who are stuck.

Discipline
• Classroom Structure: Once the teacher has an effective model for instruction, they are in a position to teach classroom rules, routines and procedures to mastery. However, rather than actually teaching these elements of classroom structure, many teachers simply announce them. The predictable result is sloppy performance, massive time wasting, and a lot of nagging – especially during lesson transitions.

• Limit Setting (Meaning Business): Highly successful teachers can get a student who is goofing off to “shape up” by simply looking at them. How do they do that?

When we finally cracked the code, we realized that meaning business was the body language that signals calmness, commitment, and a willingness to follow through. It teaches the students that “no” means “no” – but in a low-key and non-adversarial fashion. It is the emotional opposite of what we typically think of as “discipline.”

Moreover, once an understanding has been established between you and a student, you can signal that student to “cool it” using progressively smaller cues until a word, a look, or ultimately, your mere presence is enough. Rather than providing formal consequences, you become the consequence. When you walk into the classroom, the management program has arrived.

Meaning business marks the transition from primary prevention to secondary prevention in the management of classroom discipline problems. Of course, formal consequences can always be used to enforce rules when necessary. But with meaning business, the use of these more adversarial and expensive remedies becomes rare.

• Responsibility Training: Getting students to stop doing what you don’t want them to do is only half of discipline management. The other half is getting students to do what you want them to do the first time you ask.

Responsibility Training is one of the major technological advances of Tools for Teaching. It employs group incentives to train the entire class to cooperate with rules and to hustle when carrying out classroom routines. Reducing two lesson transitions during a fifty minute class period from five minutes to 30 seconds will save nine minutes of learning time.

Image

Responsibility Training can save huge amounts of learning time by eliminating dawdling.

• Omission Training: In any classroom there always seems to be a few students – the “squeaky wheels” – who choose to be uncooperative just to show that they can. For Responsibility Training to be consistently successful, it will need failsafe mechanisms to protect group incentives from the few who might abuse them.

Omission Training is the failsafe mechanism for the squeakiest wheel. It gives the alienated and oppositional student a powerful reason to work with the group rather than against the group. It is the win-win alternative to office referrals.

• The Backup System: The Backup System is the school discipline code – the hierarchy of consequences. While aggressive and dangerous behavior will typically call for the Backup System, in practice most office referrals are for small but frequent offenses – the goofing off and “mouthiness” that finally has teachers “at their wits’ end.”

The use of the Backup System is extremely expensive. At the very least it requires the involvement of both teachers and administrators plus thorough documentation. A conference with parents drives the price through the roof. For everyday hassles it would be to everyone’s advantage to avoid the office referral.

This directs our attention to the bottom of the hierarchy of consequences where a more subtle response on the part of the teacher might nip a problem in the bud. Something as simple as a warning delivered in private, however, derives its potency not from the words but from the student’s prior perception of the teacher as meaning business.

• Gauging Success in Discipline Management: Whether the teacher is dealing with misbehavior preventatively or remedially, success in discipline management is measured by a simple criterion:

If a procedure is working,
the problem should go away.

While this criterion may seem stringent, it is the only price that the teacher can afford. The alternative is to manage the same problems with the same students all year long.

That is to say, effective discipline management trains the class to behave appropriately. Consequently, as the school year progresses, student behavior gradually improves so that discipline management takes up less and less of the teacher’s time and energy – time that can now be devoted to instruction.

Motivation
• Why Should I?: Before an unmotivated student will work hard, the teacher must answer one simple question, “Why should I?” The student will need something to work for in the not too distant future – something they want – something that makes the effort seem worthwhile.

This “something” is called an incentive. In the classroom, most incentives take the form of a highly desirable activity – referred to generically as a “preferred activity.” The trick with classroom incentives is to make preferred activities into learning activities.

The risk of incentives, however, is that students may do fast and sloppy work in order to receive the incentive as soon as possible. How do you train students to be both hard working and conscientious?

• Continuous Accountability: For students to learn to be both hard working and conscientious, several structural elements need to be in place. First of all, you must be able to check their work as it is being done. Checking work as it is being done is called continuous accountability.

Continuous accountability allows the teacher to utilize a Criterion of Mastery. A Criterion of Mastery specifies the amount of work that the student must do correctly before being excused to do his or her preferred activity. If the student makes an error, they start over. However, the teacher can eliminate the discouragement of starting over by substituting Praise, Prompt, and Leave for the error message.

As you can see, motivation does not stand in isolation from the rest of the teacher’s instructional program. Rather it is one of the final pieces of the management puzzle to fall into place. For starters, it requires that the teacher be free from servicing helpless handraisers during Guided Practice so they can check the work that is being done.

In addition, the management of motivation requires that teachers build preferred activities into lesson plans as a normal part of the students’ day. During training, teachers learn the golden rule of motivation:

No joy, no work.

Understanding Tools for Teaching
No Silver Bullet
As you read Tools for Teaching, your cognitive map of classroom management will develop. As it does, you will realize that there is no “big answer,” no “silver bullet” for producing an orderly and productive classroom. Rather, there are many key skills and procedures. Each skill and each procedure is critical to achieving a specific management objective. The more of them you master, the better your life in the classroom will be.

Nor is there a “bag of tricks” for you to rummage through when in need of a quick answer. Rather, each procedure is built upon a foundation of classroom management provided by the entire system.

To see how the system unfolds, let’s take discipline management as an example. As we have just learned, there are four areas of discipline management:

1) Classroom Structure

2) Limit Setting

3) Responsibility Training

4) The Backup System

Since each element of the system is built upon those that preceed it, you can assume that:

• The Backup System is built upon Responsibility Training.

• Responsibility Training is built upon Limit Setting.

• Limit Setting is built upon Classroom Structure.

Eliminating a discipline problem always involves problem solving. It makes sense, when attempting to solve a discipline problem, to use the cheapest remedy. In this context, remember that:

• Classroom Structure is cheaper than Limit Setting.

• Limit Setting is cheaper than Responsibility Training.

• Responsibility Training is cheaper than the Backup System.

The reason is simply that success with a procedure early in the chain of causality saves you the trouble of using the procedures that follow.

To give an example, if you don’t train your third grade class to walk quietly through the halls during the first week of school, you will have to set limits on the noise they make as they walk through the halls for the rest of the semester. As you can see, if a problem is not dealt with at one level, it is kicked down to the next level where dealing with it is more work.

“What’s the Trick?”
When teachers and administrators begin their training in discipline management, they are usually looking for “the answer.” They say things like:

“What is the key to your program?”

“What is the trick to keeping kids on task?”

“What is the one thing that is most important for a teacher to keep in mind?”

Even after decades of teacher training, I am still taken aback by such questions. We are dealing with a topic that is far more complex than most realize. Yet, people keep looking for the answer in a “one-liner.”

It takes time to develop a cognitive map for something as complex as classroom management. Until the cognitive map is developed, we are prone to categorical thinking.

Paradigm Shifts
A paradigm shift is a change in your entire frame of reference for analyzing a problem and its solution. A paradigm shift can be hard to wrap your mind around.

Tools for Teaching is a long series of paradigm shifts. But, they are gentle and sensible.

And sandwiched between these paradigm shifts are a host of down to earth solutions to everyday management problems that make your life easier. You may even recognize some of them as solutions that you have developed on your own over the years.

I will never forget one new teacher exclaiming at the end of a three day workshop, “Dr. Jones, this is just a big collection of common sense!” This made me very happy. I felt that I had made classroom management, paradigm shifts and all, accessible even to a novice.

An Overview of Classroom Management
Classroom Management Touches Everything
A teacher’s skill at classroom management will create the climate inside of the classroom. It will determine whether learning is fun or a drudge, whether students are cooperative or oppositional, whether they are respectful or insolent, whether they work independently or sit helplessly with their hands raised.

The skill of teachers at classroom management will also determine their personal well-being. It will govern their level of stress. It will determine whether they enjoy teaching or dread going to work. It will determine how tired they are at the end of the day. And, ultimately, it will determine how long they stay in the profession.

Being a Disciplinarian
In the classroom life of young people, goofing off is a given. Kids naturally talk. They don’t naturally study. Managing a classroom will require that you replace the normal social life of young people with rigorous schoolwork for hours on end.

Since goofing off is natural, any classroom has a potential to be a problem classroom. Whether the class develops its full potential will depend on how it is managed. Every teacher, therefore, is a “disciplinarian” by necessity.

And any classroom has the potential to leave you stressed and exhausted at the end of the day. When that happens, your patience will be the first casualty. And when your patience goes, your capacity to be nurturant goes with it.

Love and the capacity for nurturance are absolute necessities for any teacher. But love and nurturance must be protected. They cannot stand up to a constant, withering assault.

None of us want to be harsh. None of us want to nag. It creeps up on us. At some point we may hear words coming out of our mouths that we never thought we would say.

Love Is Not Enough
Every good teacher wants to have a positive classroom atmosphere. However, wanting to be positive and pulling it off under pressure are as different as day and night. They are separated by a deep chasm that can only be bridged by mastery of the necessary classroom management skills. Life in the classroom teaches us that love without expertise is powerless.

As mentioned earlier, it is the undying hope of green teachers that, if they just love their students and are nice to them, everything will turn out fine. This is the sweet dream of the uninitiated. For everything to turn out fine, you must be a skilled professional – a master of your chosen craft.

Image

It is the undying hope of green teachers that, if they love their students and are nice to them, everything will turn out fine.

Tools for Teaching Is a Revelation
Tools for Teaching is a revelation to most teachers. They had no idea that such a detailed and tightly knit methodology even existed. They enjoy having a cognitive map for something that often seems chaotic.

The greater revelation, however, comes when teachers put the skills into practice. I suppose any new way of doing things is on trial in the teacher’s mind until it succeeds in their own classroom. I am sometimes amused, for example, when a trainee tells me in excited tones that my program actually works.

“Dr. Jones! The other day my most disruptive student started to give me backtalk when I asked him to return to work. I took my relaxing breath, kept my mouth shut, and used the body language we had practiced. He began to run out of hot air when he realized that his melodrama wasn’t getting him anywhere. Soon he stopped and just looked at me. Finally he said, ‘Okay, Okay, I’ll do it.’ It was like magic. We completely avoided our usual hassle.”

Discovering that the skills actually work is a revelation, to be sure. But experiencing synergy is the biggest revelation.

Chapter Three
Working the Crowd
Preview
• The most basic factor that governs the likelihood of students goofing off in the classroom is their physical distance from the teacher’s body.

• Effective teachers work the crowd. They know that “either you work the crowd, or the crowd works you.”

• By using mobility and proximity as tools of management, teachers constantly disrupt the students’ impulse to be disruptive.

• Since these teachers are typically supervising the students’ work as they move about the room, they get discipline management for free.

• Working the crowd provides the perfect camouflage for setting limits on disruptions. Since teachers move continually among the students, they can move close to the disruptive students without embarrassing them in front of their peer group.

Physical Proximity
Where Does Goofing Off Start?
I’ll bet you already know the most important single fact about the management of goofing off in the classroom. After all, you spent the whole first part of your life calculating the odds.

Look at the diagram below – a typical classroom with the teacher’s desk in the front. The “X” marks the spot where the teacher is standing helping a student who is stuck. Imagine you are that teacher.

Now, place your finger on the spot in the classroom where goofing off is most likely to begin.

Image

You Know How It Works
Chances are, you put your finger on the corner of the room that is farthest from the teacher. You’ve played the game. You know how it works.

When the teacher is standing near you, you cool it. If you are not working, you at least make it look as though you are working. But, when the teacher is on the far side of the room, well, that is a different story.

The most basic factor that governs the likelihood of your goofing off in the classroom is your physical distance from the teacher. The closer the teacher is, the less likely you are to goof off. The farther away the teacher is, the more likely you are to goof off.

Proximity and Mobility
Watching Natural Teachers
When you watch natural teachers, you do not see very many things that you would label as “management techniques.” Rather, you see a room full of students who are busy working.

While the students work, the teacher walks. The teacher meanders around the classroom supervising the students’ work in a most unremarkable fashion.

If you were to ask a naive observer what the teacher was doing, the answer would probably be, “Nothing.” The observers might occasionally see the teacher lean over to help a student. But typically it looks as though the teacher is just “cruising” around. Only after you watch a lot of classrooms and note the differences between the effective and ineffective teachers does the importance of this cruising become apparent.

Crowd Control
Once a discipline problem occurs, management cannot be truly cheap. When a problem occurs, you must stop and deal with the problem or declare “open season” on yourself. If you stop and deal with the problem, it will take time and energy, and it will pull you away from instruction.

Consequently, before we get into complicated discipline management techniques, think in simple terms. In a classroom there are roughly 30 students. That is a crowd. The most basic level of discipline management is crowd control.

Crowd control does not create a perfect classroom. Rather, crowd control gets most of the students to do most of what they are supposed to be doing most of the time. If teachers can get most of the management they need cheaply through crowd control, they can then afford to give their undivided attention to the few problems that are left over.

Working the Crowd
The most basic technique of crowd control is called “working the crowd.” Anyone who earns a living in front of a crowd will come to understand working the crowd. Singers, comedians, teachers and preachers – they all work the crowd. They know that either you work the crowd, or the crowd works you.

Entertainers will work the crowd with movement, eye contact and energy. If they feel that they are losing part of the room, they will work that area all the harder.

If, for example, people at a table are talking instead of paying attention, performers will direct everything to that table until they have eye contact. Thereafter, they will focus on that table as often as necessary to keep from losing it. If they were to allow that table to “slip away,” they might lose the table next to it and perhaps the table next to it as well. Soon they would be playing to the backs of people’s heads over the din of conversation.

Natural teachers instinctively work the crowd. They have an innate sense of being “in contact” with the students. They use the proximity of their bodies as an instrument of management. They move.

Image

Psychological Distance
Zones of Proximity
Think of every student in the classroom as having a computer whirring in the back of his or her brain dedicated to answering one simple question, “Is the coast clear?” This computer is operating at all times, even though it may not be at a conscious level. It calculates such things as how far away the teacher is, which direction the teacher is facing, and whether the teacher is preoccupied.

Next, imagine a teacher walking among the students. Picture three zones of proximity surrounding the teacher’s body in concentric circles. We will use the colors of a stoplight to represent these three zones: red, yellow and green.

• Red: The red zone is a circular area around the teacher roughly eight feet in radius. Using the stoplight as our analogy, red means stop.

Students in the red zone cool it. Their computer says, “Goofing off now would be really stupid. You would get nailed.” Very few problems occur in the red zone.

• Yellow: Outside of the red zone is the yellow zone. The yellow zone extends another six feet in every direction. Yellow signals caution.

In the yellow zone students act much the way students in the red zone act – as long as the teacher is facing in their direction. But if the teacher should become distracted by helping a student for a little too long, especially if the teacher’s back is turned, the computer says, “The coast is clear.” Suddenly a part of the student’s brain wakes up – the part that likes to goof off.

• Green: Outside of the yellow zone lies the green zone – green as in go! When students in the green zone look up to see that the teacher is on the far side of the room, particularly if the teacher is preoccupied, the little computer in the back of the brain gets excited and says, “Why not?”

Students in the green zone, however, do not start goofing off immediately. They need a little time to size up the situation. After they notice that the coast is clear, they need to cook up a plan and cast an eye about for an accomplice.

The longer students are in the green zone, the more likely goofing off becomes. Imagine students in the back of the room with a teacher who lectures from the front of the room. These students will spend the whole semester in the green zone. Oh my!

Image

Kids feel safer goofing off in the green zone.

Disrupting Disruptions
As effective teachers work the crowd, they constantly cause the zones to change. Imagine students who look up to see that they are in the green zone. But just when their computers signal, “Coast clear,” the teacher looks their way and begins to casually stroll in their direction.

“Dang!” says the computer. “I hate it when that happens! Oh, well, back to work.”

When a teacher is working the crowd, two or three steps will switch a student from the green zone to the yellow zone or from the yellow zone to the red zone. Thus, through mobility, the teacher is constantly disrupting the students’ impulse to disrupt.

Of course, neither the teacher nor the students monitor these calculations at a conscious level. It is subconscious – at the edge of awareness.

When I asked my “natural” teachers why they continually moved among the students, one said, “To see how they are doing.” Another said, “If you had just asked your students to do something, wouldn’t you want to know how it turned out?” They acted as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

But I asked the question because I wanted to know whether their use of proximity to manage goofing off was conscious or instinctive. I found that it was instinctive.

So I asked the students, “What is the purpose of the teacher’s moving around the classroom while you are working?” They responded, “So I can get help if I need it.”

Only when you watch these same students in the classroom of a teacher who does not work the crowd, do you come to appreciate the subconscious calculations of the classroom. By the time these previously well-behaved students have been in the green zone for five minutes, they become living proof of the statement, either you work the crowd, or the crowd works you.

Image

Even when you are in the front of the class, you move.

Working the Crowd from the Front
Working the Near and Far Zones
Let’s imagine that you are talking to the class from the front of the room. When you are in the front of the class, you work the crowd just like an entertainer would work a room in Las Vegas. You continuously move, and you direct your energy and eye contact with a purpose.

Eye contact is effective at a distance, whereas proximity is effective at close range. Since you worry about the students on the far side of the room, you will direct most of your eye contact toward the green zone. You will let physical proximity take care of the red zone.

It is best to make eye contact with individuals on the far side of the room. Don’t just scan an area. Make eye contact for about a second. Then, move on to another target and then another as you teach.

Interspersed between these moments of eye contact with students on the far side of the room are more fleeting “scans” of students in the red and yellow zones. Thus, while you do make eye contact with everyone in the room, most of your time and attention is directed to the far side.

As you talk, you walk. Your general pattern of movement is roughly an arc as pictured below.

This general pattern of movement accomplishes several goals simultaneously. First, you constantly change the zone in which a student is sitting so that no one is in the green zone very long. Secondly, you constantly change everyone’s visual field by forcing them to watch a moving target. If you stand still, you create a stationary target, a “talking head,” and the brain “zones out” in a matter of seconds. Finally, you provide yourself with camouflage should you need to set limits on a student who is goofing off.

Camouflage for Setting Limits
Camouflage is an important concept when dealing with students who are goofing off. You want to get them back on task, but you do not want to embarrass them in front of the group. Your normal pattern of movement creates the perfect camouflage needed to “work” individual students without it being blatant.

Three Rules of Movement
• Constantly change the zones of proximity so that no one is in the green zone for very long.

• Stimulate the brain to attend by constantly changing everyone’s visual field.

• Use movement as camouflage for dealing with disruptive students.

Imagine, for example, that you catch two students goofing off on the far side of the room. These students suddenly become the two most important people in the room.

Of course, you could stop and ask the students to get back to work. This would be about as subtle as an entertainer stopping in the middle of a song and saying to the patrons of the lounge, “Group, I am simply going to wait until I have your undivided attention.”

Rather than embarrassing the student, you can use finesse. Without breaking your train of thought as you talk to the group, turn toward the whisperers and move slowly toward them. Typically they will notice you because students keep an eye on the teacher when goofing off.

You now have eye contact with the disruptors. Talk directly to them as you stroll a step or two in their direction. Then, pause and half turn as you continue addressing the group as though nothing special were happening. This is your normal pattern of moving, pausing, and scanning. Repeat this process until you are addressing the group while standing near the disruptors. You may want to stand near them a little longer than usual. A knowing look might be in order.

Having “disrupted the disruption,” you can now begin to move away as you continue your lesson. However, when you scan toward the disruptors, make eye contact with them for that extra half-second. This reminds the students that you are still thinking about them.

To an old pro, all of this would take place with hardly a conscious thought. But when first starting out, remember that working the crowd is work. Think of yourself as an Australian sheepdog that must constantly keep its charges from wandering off.

Working Inside the Crowd
Mixing with the Audience
While teachers can work the crowd from the front of the room, they can work the crowd more intimately if they place themselves among the students. Even entertainers will move off stage to mingle with the audience if they want more intense contact.

I have often seen good teachers walk among the students while they explain a concept or act out a part, gesturing dramatically as students watch wide-eyed. You can read a story as you cruise among the desks. You can facilitate a discussion as you move. If you need to write periodically on the chalkboard or overhead, you can do so and then work the crowd as you explain your point.

During Guided Practice
The most frequent occasion for a teacher to move among the students is during Guided Practice. Working the crowd enables the teacher to supervise students as they work on an assignment.

Teachers who work the crowd in this fashion cannot imagine not doing it. They say, “How else would you know what the students are doing? You have to check their work, especially at the beginning of an assignment, or they could do it all wrong, and you would never know.”

These teachers are “monitoring and adjusting” while getting discipline management for free. You might wonder why any teacher would not work the crowd. Yet, most do not.

Obstacles to Working the Crowd
When something that is as sensible and beneficial as working the crowd fails to happen, there has to be a reason. Something must be blocking common sense. The most common reasons are:

• Years of Modeling

My junior high, high school, and college teachers all lectured from the front of the room. Yours probably did too. When you entered teaching you had over a decade of modeling that predisposed you toward teaching from the front. Without it being conscious, this reservoir of experience defines both your expectations and your comfort zone. To overcome this pattern requires a conscious commitment.

• The Overhead Projector

Another common factor that inhibits working the crowd is the overhead projector. Rarely do teachers who are using an overhead get more than three steps away from it. It is as though they were tethered to the machine. They take a step or two while making a remark to the class, and then they head back to the projector to make their next point.

One simple way of using an overhead projector while working the crowd is to quit doing all of the work yourself. Let one of your students write on the transparency. Make it a privilege. Assign a different person to do it every week.

• The Furniture

While the overhead projector can present a formidable barrier to working the crowd, it is not the main barrier. The main barrier to movement is the furniture. We will spend the entire next chapter dealing with that topic.

Once teachers see the logic behind working the crowd, there is typically very little resistance to embracing the idea. The issues listed above can usually be addressed without any great inconvenience. But even with something as seemingly simple as rearranging the furniture, having a plan can make it much easier.

Body Language Is Subtle
As we describe working the crowd, we are beginning to learn about body language. Body language gets much more complex as the teacher attempts to remediate disruptions that are already in progress. In subsequent chapters on Meaning Business, for example, we will learn how to deal with even those disruptions that escalate into back talk and beyond.

Yet, the simple interactions described in this chapter reveal a key characteristic of body language in discipline management. Body language allows the teacher to use finesse to protect students from embarrassment while dealing effectively with their goofing off. If you protect students, they will cut you some slack. But, if you embarrass them, they will get revenge.

Chapter Four
Arranging the Room
Preview
• The biggest obstacle to working the crowd in a typical classroom is the furniture.

• The custodial room arrangement makes cleaning easy, but it creates barriers to movement.

• The best room arrangement allows the teacher to get from any student to any other student in the fewest possible steps.

• Teachers can increase proximity by removing their desks from the front of the room and moving the students’ desks forward.

• Teachers need walkways. These are not little, narrow walkways, but rather, boulevards.

• The most efficient pattern of movement takes the form of an interior loop. This general pattern can be adaptable to a wide variety of teaching situations.

Barriers to Mobility
Tripping over the Furniture
Once the importance of mobility and proximity become clear, the next logical step is to make working the crowd as easy as possible. Are there any obstacles that you need to overcome?

Look around a typical class and you will see a whole room full of obstacles. The biggest impediment to working the crowd in a typical classroom is the furniture.

The Custodial Room Arrangement
The most common room arrangement in education is pictured in the diagram below. Now, ask yourself, “Who arranged the furniture in this classroom?”

Image

Who arranged the furniture in this classroom?

During training, teachers respond without hesitation, “The custodian!”

Now, ask yourself, “What is the custodian’s vested interest in the arrangement of furniture?”

During training, teachers respond, “Cleaning.”

Unfortunately, the room arrangement that is best for cleaning is the worst possible room arrangement for classroom management.

Right Back Where You Started
Imagine that you are standing at the “X” in the diagram below as you help a student who is stuck. You look up to see two students goofing off in the far corner. What are you going to do about it?

If you ignore the talking, other students will take note and say to themselves, “Oh great! I wanted to talk too.” I have referred to this as declaring open season on yourself. You need to do something. But, what?

Previously I described the usual options. After some nagging and a warning comes the trip across the classroom (see diagram) to “lay down the law.” You remember the silly conversation that follows.

“I am sick and tired of looking up to see nothing but talking over here... blah, blah, blah.”

The students are contrite when you are standing over them, but their repentance is short-lived. How long do you think it will take them to start talking again after you leave?

The day may come when you decide to save yourself the trip across the classroom in favor of a few well chosen words. Think of nagging in this situation as a labor saving device. At least it saves you a trip across the room for nothing.

Image

Walking across the room is usually an expensive response to a small problem.

Arranging the Room for Teaching
Imagine teenage bodies at the desks in the diagram above. With normal crowding, students’ feet reach to the chair in front.

Consequently, the custodian’s room arrangement creates five impermeable barriers between the left side of the room and the right side. How will you work the crowd? How will you move toward students who are goofing off without hiking around the periphery? During training, teachers learn the following maxim:

Anything that you do not arrange to your advantage,
somebody else will arrange to their advantage,
and it won’t be to your advantage.

The first element of Classroom Structure for which you must take full responsibility is room arrangement. You will need to rearrange the furniture in your classroom to facilitate mobility and proximity. Your objective is to work the crowd. To save steps you must carefully analyze space, distance, and movement.

The Teacher’s Desk
Move It
The first step in room arrangement is to get your desk away from its traditional location in the front of the classroom. Where should the desk go?

Most teachers just shove it into the corner so they can conveniently lay things on it. Other teachers place it at the side of the room or in the back – it doesn’t much matter.

Why move your desk? Because, it costs you eight feet of proximity with every student in the classroom!

I used to carry a tape measure with me when I visited classrooms. With the teacher’s desk in the front, the distance from the chalkboard to the students in the front row is roughly thirteen feet.

Now, stand in front of a colleague who is seated, and imagine that you are conversing with him or her. Make it a comfortable conversational distance. Look down to see how far your knee is from your colleague’s knee. It is usually about three feet.

Next, imagine that you are addressing the class. Add another two feet to the conversational distance described above. This extra space gives students to the side a decent viewing angle for the overhead projector or writing on the board.

You are now approximately five feet from the desks of the students in the front row. Compared to when your desk was in the front, you are now eight feet closer to every student in the class.

The Cost of Eight Feet
Is eight feet important? In terms of the zones of proximity described in the previous chapter, it is the difference between the red zone and the green zone.

To feel the difference, stand about thirteen feet from a group of your colleagues who assume the role of typical students who would love to chit-chat in class. Ask them, “Would you start if I were standing here?”

Next, walk toward them until you are standing five feet away. Have them imagine that they are the same students. Now, ask them, “Would you? Could you?”

You will find that when you are thirteen feet away, the students feel free to goof off. But when you are five feet away, they “cool it.” This is a tremendous increase in power for simply moving a piece of furniture.

This experiment will give you a feeling for the close relationship between proximity and goofing off. In your classroom, eight feet is the difference between prevention and remediation whenever you are standing in the front of the classroom.

Leaving Your Comfort Zone
I must warn you that, when you first bring the students forward, you may feel a bit claustrophobic. It takes a few hours in the classroom for your comfort zone to readjust. But you will soon come to appreciate the intimacy and control that proximity provides.

Image

Attempting to work the crowd with the custodian’s room arrangement will be so frustrating that you may give up the whole idea.

The Students’ Desks
Analyzing the Use of Space
I will show you some sample room arrangements. Do not jump to the conclusion that they are “correct.” They are generic examples that demonstrate key features of room arrangement as they relate to working the crowd.

These room arrangements make mobility easy. Once you become familiar with them, you will be able to rearrange your own classroom in a way that is best for you.

As we look at space, think of teachers in one of two different places. The first is standing in front of the classroom as they address the group or facilitate a discussion. The second is walking among the students supervising written work during Guided Practice. A good room arrangement must serve the teacher well in both of these situations.

Compact Room Arrangement
Let’s start with the fairly traditional room arrangement in the following picture. In this diagram the teacher is in the front of the room with the students separated and facing forward.

Image

The space for walkways is created by bringing the students forward and packing them sideways.

For starters, you only need two aisles running from the front of the classroom to the back rather than the four or five aisles that the custodian typically provides. As a result, you can make the room arrangement more compact by placing desks where several of the custodian’s aisles used to be.

Think of the rows of desks as running from side to side rather than from front to back, as in the custodian’s room arrangement. There are now eight students in the front row rather than the five or six that the custodian would place there.

In addition, these students are much closer to you than they were before you moved your desk to the corner. We are following two strategies to make the room arrangement more compact. We are moving the students forward and packing them sideways.

Spacing Desks
Now, imagine yourself positioning the second row of desks. First, sit in a chair in the second row and relax your legs (bent, not straight out in front of you). Second, with a tape measure, measure eighteen inches from your toe to the back leg of the chair in front of you. That distance will provide you with an adequate walkway.

When you first look at the distance separating the first row from the second row, it seems huge. How can you afford that kind of space in a crowded classroom? The extra space that we need for wide walkways will come from the space we saved by moving the students forward and by packing them sideways.

Making Walkways
The most important feature of room arrangement is not where the furniture goes, but, rather, where the furniture does not go. The objective of room arrangement is to create walkways in order to make mobility easy. I do not mean little, narrow walkways. I mean boulevards.

I want you to be able to stroll down the boulevards without kicking students’ feet, tripping over backpacks, or being blocked because a student is tall. In addition, I don’t want you to pull students off task because they are worried about being stepped on.

The diagram above has four rows running from side to side with eight students per row for a class of thirty-two students. We can now work the crowd with easy access to every student.

Generic Room Arrangements
Proximity and Supervision
Imagine yourself working the crowd during Guided Practice as you supervise written work. To supervise written work, you must be able to read it. How far can you be from students and still read their work.

With normal eyesight, you can read the work of the student sitting on the aisle as well as the next student over. But you cannot read the work of the third student over because the writing appears too small.

Normal eyesight limits you to supervising two students to your right and two students to your left as you work the crowd. This fact will play a major role in determining the placement of furniture and walkways in your room arrangement.

An Interior Loop
What is the shortest distance you can walk that would allow you to read the work of every student in the class? It is pictured in the following diagram. We will call this pattern of movement an interior loop.

Image

An interior loop allows you to work the crowd with the fewest steps.

As you work the crowd along this interior loop, every student is within two seats of an aisle. In addition, you are only a few steps from any student in the class. As you work the crowd, no student will be in the green zone for very long.

Imagine standing at the edge of this room arrangement. You would pay a high price for being in this location very long. An interior loop allows you to avoid the periphery of the room where you are cut off from the students on the far side. The interior loop maximizes proximity with a minimum of movement.

Mobility with Overcrowding
What if you have more than thirty-two students? Where will you place the overflow?

Don’t make a fifth row! The middle section of that row would usually be in the green zone. Instead, place the extra students at the ends of the two walkways that run from front to back. These locations are the most accessible to you as you work the interior loop.

Of course, you will need to take a step or two out of the loop to see how these students are doing. This produces the elaborated pattern of movement shown next. We’ll call it an interior loop with ears.

The placement of “ears” will depend on the idiosyncrasies of your classroom. You will find that one of these ears is no trouble, and two is doable. But, if you have three of them the whole idea begins to collapse because you are in the ears as much as you are in the interior loop.

Image

With overcrowding, you may need to use an interior loop with ears.

Cooperative Learning
With the room arrangements on the preceding page each section of every row is laid out in even numbers. This facilitates interactive learning with partner pairs. This arrangement is also very flexible. You can create groups of four by saying,

“Would rows one and three please turn your desks around so that we may get into our cooperative learning groups.”

Each partner pair combines with the one behind to create a foursome or “study square.”

The Wagon Wheel
The next diagram shows a room arrangement that appears to be very different from those shown previously. But it is not as different as it may seem. When you start working the crowd, you will soon find your interior loop with ears. I refer to this room arrangement as “the wagon wheel.”

The wagon wheel is most useful when the furniture in your classroom consists of large tables that seat four or six. If you place the tables at a right angle to your body, the students will be able to turn toward you easily. Then, with the same motion they will be able to return to their work.

As you can see, the wagon wheel spreads the students to your right and left while producing a fairly shallow room arrangement. As a result, the wagon wheel is particularly useful in rooms that are wide but not very deep such as a portable. To minimize the green zone, however, always make the front of the room on the long wall.

Image

An interior loop with ears fits a wide variety of furniture configurations.

Make It Work for You
You may have to rearrange your room several times before you get it the way you want it. The goal is efficiency. The optimal room arrangement allows you to get from any student to any other student with the fewest steps.

I have rearranged many classrooms over the years, and the most efficient room arrangements tend to fall into two basic patterns. The first is rectilinear or “grid.” The second is curvilinear or “wagon wheel.” But these basic patterns are only intended to serve as a starting point. They do not take into account the size of your room, the type of furniture you have been given, the location of built-ins, or the location of large tables for group work.

Play with your room arrangement until it serves your purposes. But keep your focus on checking the students’ work as it is being done and getting around the room with the fewest steps possible. After you have rearranged the furniture, walk around the room and count your steps.

Problems With a Central Isle
It is not uncommon for a teacher to show me a diagram like the one below and say,

“I think my room arrangement is close to what you are describing. I have a central aisle that allows me to get around the room fairly easily.”

Beware of a central aisle! The weakness of this room arrangement becomes apparent when you picture yourself supervising written work during Guided Practice. The distance you must walk in order to read the students’ work is 60 percent longer than an interior loop. In addition, half of this loop is on the periphery.

Image

Beware! A central aisle creates a peripheral loop and increases the distance you walk by 60 percent.

Variations on Room Arrangement
There are patterns of room arrangement other than the “grid” and the “wagon wheel” that work beautifully. You have to play around to find what works best for you. The element common to all good room arrangements is that they make mobility and proximity easy for the teacher. Here are some examples.

“Double E”
The following arrangement works well with large tables. It is called a “double E” because it resembles two capital E’s back to back. The teacher can easily stroll the central area between the two E’s while facilitating a group discussion or supervising work stations such as lab tables.

Image

The “Double E” works well with two-person desks.

Computer Labs
Another variation that many teachers use is the “horseshoe” or “U.” It is practical in most special education classrooms and with the small groups typical of resource rooms.

With normal size classes, however, the “U” is so large that, when teachers are supervising students on one side of the room, they are cut off from students on the other side. However, this design can work when students are at workstations. The previous diagram shows a computer lab with additional workstations placed in the interior part of the “U.” Using this arrangement, the teacher can look over students’ shoulders with a minimum of walking.

Image

A “U” shaped arrangement works for computer labs.

Instrumental and Choral Music
Instrumental and choral music teachers often ask for ideas that might help them during rehearsals. They feel cut off from the students in the back where most of the fooling around occurs.

These teachers typically use the same room arrangement during rehearsal that they use for a concert. This arrangement, however, is poorly suited for rehearsal where you want to hear subunits clearly while working the crowd.

Image

A variation on the “U” facilitates supervision during rehearsal for instrumental and choral music.

One practical solution is to arrange the subunits of the ensemble around three sides of an open square as shown above. Vocal music teachers often report that they can hear the altos and sopranos clearly for the first time, and band teachers like the separation between brass and woodwinds. Walkways to the percussion and rhythm instruments (circles) facilitate instruction while making it easier for the teacher to set limits on noise making.

Cutting Your Overhead
Rather than thinking of a room arrangement as being right or wrong, think of it as an attempt to cut your overhead. Remember, your objective is to get from any student to any other student with the fewest possible steps. Play with your room arrangement until you find what works best for you.

Mobility with Small Groups
Elementary Classrooms
During training, teachers ask, “What do you do about room arrangement when you are seated at a table working with a small group?” The answer is usually, “Nothing.”

The purpose of room arrangement is to facilitate mobility and proximity. If you already have proximity without moving, you needn’t go any further.

The same logic applies to primary teachers who are seated while reading to students at their feet. Management of minor disruptions can usually be accomplished by simply stopping, turning toward the disruptors, and waiting until they become quiet.

Reading Groups
Teachers of reading groups typically sit with the students in a circle while having each student read aloud in turn. This time honored format has two disadvantages:

• Low time-on-task: If there are eight students in the reading group, only one of them is reading while seven out of eight are passive. How can we increase the ratio of students who are actively engaged in reading without sacrificing teacher supervision?

• Performance anxiety: Some students get nervous when they have to read out loud. They block due to anxiety which causes other students to giggle. This causes the student who is reading to block all the more.

One way of alleviating these problems is to have the students work in partner pairs with one student reading while the other listens. Another approach is to have all of the students “whisper read” by themselves.

With both of these formats, the teacher can supervise by moving around the periphery of the group while leaning down to listen to the reading of individual students. The teacher will hear one student at a time just as well as before.

Once up and about, the teacher can then cruise among those students not in the reading circle from time to time. When the teacher is mobile during small group instruction in this fashion, goofing off and time-on-task are within normal limits.

Small Groups with the Teacher Seated
Mobility during small group instruction is not always an option. Sometimes the teacher must remain seated in order to work intensely with students. The management of small group instruction hits the wall as soon as the teacher sits down.

Within seconds “talking to neighbors” triples and time-on-task drops by over half. Traditionally, educators have accepted this high level of goofing off as the unavoidable price of working intensely with a small group. It could be argued, however, that the cost of this format exceeds the benefit.

How can the teacher relinquish working the crowd in order to work intensely with small groups without paying such a high price in goofing off? This will require an entirely new technology that goes above and beyond working the crowd. This technology will be described in detail in a later section entitled Responsibility Training.

People Issues
Teacher Inertia
Over the years I have repeatedly seen resistance on the part of experienced teachers to changing their room arrangements. I suppose this inertia is not surprising. We all resist changing what is familiar, especially when it alters our “comfort zone.”

This resistance is so great that, if you train your colleagues, you will probably want to break into “furniture moving squads,” go to each participating teacher’s classroom in turn and say, “Where do you want the furniture?”

Your colleague will often give you a funny look as though surprised that he or she must actually change things. But, after a pause, he or she will usually say, “Let’s start with my desk.”

Without your “furniture moving squads,” over a third of trainees never rearrange their furniture. This is a fatal omission. Without a proper room arrangement, working the crowd becomes extremely difficult. In addition, without working the crowd, many of the skills of effective classroom management described in subsequent chapters cannot be implemented.