The background on this article is that over the past few days in the comment fields we have been looking around for the right response to Jason’s question about managing jerks. I thought that Erin’s comment today pretty much summed up in a few lines what classroom management really should be in a comprehension based classroom:
…I don’t even count bathroom passes anymore. You want to go, you ask in Spanish at a moment when you are not interrupting. I do not have time to police bladders; it takes me out of the language. With behavior disruptions, I do everything I can in the moment to bring the student back to attention: proximity, eye contact while pointing at rule, waiting pointedly, asking specific questions that have already been answered by the class. If you don’t get what I’m doing, you go to the hallway where I will deal with you later. I used to have the name on the board=warning and checkmark=consequence (what was the consequence? I always told the kids I would decide later. I like them not knowing.) Even that is too onerous in a CI classroom….
My read on this is that we must, whether we like it or not, redirect kids. Notice the terms she used:
do everything I can in the moment
bring the student back to attention
proximity
eye contact while pointing at rule
waiting pointedly
asking specific questions
This is a proactive response. It is not a confrontive one. This is what we should be doing.
What I have been unable to do is, in those moments of creating comprehensible input, in those creative moments when I am circling, slowly repeating, pounding the structure, following the energy instead of making it go where I want, doing all that good stuff that we try to remember to do with happiness in our hearts when we are teaching, I am susceptible to two mistakes:
1. I neglect to address the kid who is breaking any of the Classroom Rules. (By addressing the kids I don’t mean pointing to the Classroom Rules in a military way or threatening to kick the kid out, but requiring with a smile on my face – one that masks my steel resolve to never let that kid or any kid to ever cross me with any kind of rudeness – that is what the Classroom Rules are to me.) I know that I am not the only one who sometimes ignores kids who are not focused, or at least who are faking it, with my encouragement, until they make it.
2. I break out of the CI into a dumb ass lecture in English about discipline, thereby awarding a win to the kid who caused me to do that.
So the two mistakes I make which destroy my instruction are to ignore the offender and/or to break into English to set norms in place that should have been set in the first two weeks of August.
Notice that Erin’s description of being in charge of her classroom, the norms she offers, include neither ignoring the kid nor using English. In her description of what she does it’s all about staying in the language, winning the ball if it were a soccer game, and using a set of invisible signals – those things she describes above, to convey to the kids that she will not be thrown off the CI and that the child will at least not disrupt others (which John referred to today in his comment* on this topic).
That is teaching. It shouldn’t be, but most of us are not in a financial position to ignore the realities we are in in the buildings we are in with the kids we have this year in the real world. So we must do those things that Erin describes and not do the two things that I tend to do.
Notice also that Erin does not use the term “confront” in her norms. She uses terms that describe what a true teacher who is loaded down with too many kids who don’t care must do. If we had nothing but motivated kids or paying adults we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.
I would add only one thing, and I experienced it today in my classes. I was kind of teaching as if my hair were on fire. What that odd expression (I can’t even remember where I heard it) means I have no idea, but to me it describes something that I totally got into doing today. The kids were in Blahsville today, and so I just decided to teach for myself if not for them. In other words, I was loving how cool the Petit Prince was and how cool the white dinosaur who was taking Pedro to the empty house with the refrigerator in it and I didn’t really even care much if the kids thought it was cool. It was cool to me and since it’s all about me and since I love me some French I brought the house and just enjoyed my own self and some of the kids went with me and we had a great time. The power was not in what I was doing but in how I was doing it, with joy. I was enjoying (read “bringing joy to”) the awesome stuff that I teach and if no one else in the room wanted a piece of what I was offering that is fine, I was offering it to myself. So that’s another thing, another way, to deal with this, but at the end of the day we must do as Erin has described above, that is, be in the present moment with what is really going on in the invisible world in our classrooms and not allow kids to rain on our parades, because:
1. a well-taught story resembles a good parade much more than a school classroom where kids are dryly “learning” things they don’t care about.
2. what we teach has value and importance in the world much more than we think.
3. when we work with kids who don’t want to learn and if we put our hearts into it even if seems like an impossible task, we are growing in our hearts and learning things in our hearts that our minds will never know and at the same time we will be learning the secret of teaching, which in my experience I have learned is to give without any thought of return.
4. we are the adults in the room, and our students are the children, and the children need firm and not wishy washy leadership. They need a form of leadership that traditional teachers cannot provide because the product that they offer is worthless and the kids on some level know it, whereas the product we offer (training in interpersonal human interaction AND in languages) is a product that is of supreme importance right now at this critical time of history when all seems lost in the world but isn’t.
*John’s comment:
And, the interpersonal modality in the ACTFL standards supports us, period.
Contributing positively to the classroom community is not a game. It’s basic, civilized human interaction, perhaps the most important skill they can learn for success in life.
Also, the language acquisition of everyone in the room is hinging on this. Therefore, any time a student is disrupting, all acquisition stops. No strikes, no tallies. It’s just common sense, and students need to learn common sense (both the what and the how) by seeing us model it in our classes.
When we are teaching from the standards, and from a place of compassion for ALL our students, we don’t need to justify or explain our responses in the moment. If we know that a kid is abusing bathroom privileges (and we know it if we know our students), we don’t let them go. Then we let another kid go who is not abusing those privileges. They all are watching how we will respond, and they are learning important lessons from that. If the first kid is clueless of what is going on (although they are probably playing dumb for attention/disruption), we tell them to see us after class. We deal with it, but we don’t let that stuff interrupt the flow of class.
I feel compassion for the kids who are not aware of how disruptive and disrespectful they can be–often they are acting out because of crap at home. And it is good for them to experience being denied privileges now (by a human being rather than a rule), and then have us explain it to them, so that they aren’t baffled in their first job when their boss makes them work night shift or thanksgiving, or lays them off when one employee has to go.
Not that all jobs are fair, but the human element makes a huge difference; interpersonal relationships trump abstract principles of fairness in the day to day decisions people make. If we can model that in a supportive way, we are really helping our students learn how to survive and thrive both in school and out of school.