The Classroom Rules 1

This is a necessary updated repost:

Classroom Management Tool #1 – The Classroom Rules

On the posters page of this site:

you can find the “Classroom Rules Poster”. It is strongly suggested that you use this poster in your classroom. Why?

Because it works. It is actually a collection of the eight best rules from over one hundred that I have tested over the past twelve years. These are the rules that for me at least have been shown along with jGR to have direct impact on kids’ behaviors.

We cannot expect children to know how to behave. We must be clear and show them what we want, often to the point of modeling the behavior for them. This is most true with ninth and tenth graders who may have seen behaviors allowed in their middle school classrooms that are totally unacceptable in our comprehension based classes.

When are the rules most useful? In the first few weeks of the year. If we use them constantly, at every turn, in the first month or so, we never have to use them again, which is an amazing thing.

But you can always re-norm a class if you have the patience and tie the process to jGR/ICSR and maybe do some heavy praying. If, now in late March, you find your students tuning out too often, it might be time to change the seating so that they are all facing you, with “that one group” sitting in the four corners of the room, then explaining to them the need for quiet in the classroom, and then hitting them hard with the rules – laser pointer is best for that as you physically walk over to the offending student and place a hand on their desk – at every infraction and entering daily jGR grades in the book. Those things work.

It is not enough to have the rules on the board. You have to enforce them. This is about personal power. You must have the core personal power that teachers need more than just about any one else in any profession to be able to insist in a calm way that your students behave so that you can actually teach them – dealing with any nut jobs with force outside of the classroom.

Whenever you see an infraction of the rule, each time, just do the following:

Stop teaching.
Look at the kid and smile.
Turn to the poster and laser point to the rule he just broke.
Read the rule out.
Explain what it means to the class in general.
Look back at the kid and smile.

Note that when you smile as per steps 2 and 6 in the process steps listed above, you keep the good will flowing. And yet, I have to admit to a steely gaze hidden somewhere in my warm smile, that the kids can’t see but certainly can feel. It is a kind of invisible bitchy edge that the kids know is there. I have found in 36 years of secondary teaching that that edge is necessary – it is a kind of promise that I will react to the least little bit of misbehavior by stopping teaching and going through the steps above.

Again, act every single time a rule is broken. There is no option here, no skipping over a single behavior. You will know you are doing it right when you find yourself explaining these rules very often throughout the class, if the class needs it. Which of your classes need you to behave in this way now in March?

When you send the message that breaking any one of these rules is an o.k. behavior, you may as well walk on out of the classroom, because no learning will happen.

Again, it cannot be said enough, enforcing these rules is a question of personal power, and if you don’t feel that personal power, then find some or reconsider your choice of career. Is the teacher going to have enough personal power each time he hears a little side conversation, like a brush fire, starting in some part of the room to dowse water on it in the instant that it happens?

Such little sparks are nothing more than students testing the level of personal power of the teacher. That’s what they do when they are that age. Some consider it their right, due to the completely broken system that surrounds them. Don’t take it personally. But respond to each spark with a spark of your own in the form of the laser pointer at the rules poster, and do it every time.

If a kid is not o.k. with the rules in the first weeks of the year, they can change their schedules. You must be very active in getting counseling and parents and administrators on board with the simple idea that certain kids can ruin a class completely. You must do that early in the year. You are not the one to change certain kids’ behaviors and they must leave. DO NOT ALLOW administrators to tell you that it is your job to discipline such kids. THEY ARE WRONG.

Now in March you may be feeling the results of a failed response by an administrator back in the fall. I am so sorry. Whatever is going on now with these kids, if you have them now, is a cautionary tale that you must in fact do things differently, with more force, next year. Yes, it’s time for us here on the blog to start thinking about next year and what we will do differently.

There is a Beginning the Year/Starting the Year category. You may want to start reading and planning by reading some of the articles in those two areas. I also am requesting comments below about one thing you are considering doing differently in terms of classroom discipline next year.

We can help each other get ready for next year by starting now. Summer is for resting, except for any conferences we may attend (which ALWAYS gives life), so we need to be very active in discussing changes for next year over the next two months as we start planning how we are going to get those autumn ducks all neatly lined up in a row next August, especially the discipline ducks, those loud quackers.