I want to turn this recent comment here into a blog so that it will become searchable. (Stephen please note that a search on “classroom discipline” on this site will bring many blog entries from past months and years that may be worth reading on this topic as well.)
Stephen wrote:
… it’s hard not to adopt those postures when I go in day after day to class after class of students that challenge me minute after minute (I’ve made some progress, but the progress is very slow)….
I responded:
Keep the postures. You need them now. But start making the changes on the inside, where the kids can’t see them. Forgive them for their having adapted behaviors that push your buttons – they are only repeating what they see all the time in other classes. I have three suggestions:
1. Do you know how wine bottles come in boxes and each bottle is separated by an accordian-like cardboard square thing? I suggest that, as you work from a story script, focus only on one bottle of wine – one sentence – at a time. Don’t just open up all the bottles at once and pour them all over the place. Make yourself totally understood via Point and Pause, Circling and SLOW. Pour out the wine of language bottle by bottle, line by line, and don’t go deeper into the story until each single line is totally understood. Do lots of recycling. How is that connected to getting their little asses to shut up? It makes things so simple that they understand totally. When they understand at the level of what Dr. Krashen has recently termed a state of transparency, they are with you. It is when they don’t understand that they are against you. Do you see that when you go all over the place and too fast, that they can’t keep up, and then they start acting out? Pour out each bottle, each sentence in the script, SLOWLY and then reach for the next bottle/sentence and work your way methodically through the story. Today I got through only the first three lines of Mike’s story about Chester. Our elephant, Pissedophe Christophe, didn’t even turn around and see the chair. Let go the idea of finishing the story. Just be clear with them, above all (and that means SLOW). This brings discipline.
2. Now, and this is the obvious part – do the above, sentence per sentence, teaching with strict adherence to those rules that we discussed here today in the form of the comments to the Suck Zone blog. Those people who posted are all heavy hitters with the rules, and they are all saying one thing – the rules work. So, as you go through the script slowly with total transparency, enforce the rules and you are two thirds of the way there. Is this your weak spot?
3. The third suggestion I have is to love yourself more and to forgive yourself for not having achieved greater discipline by now. The sad fact is that our schools, our kids, via television and all of the other devastating stuff in the pop culture, are in a state of total chaos. The technology revolution is about to deliver a body blow to the entire system. So, take that into consideration when you berate yourself. We all suck at discipline because our kids have no discipline. What we DO have that others in our field don’t have is a way of teaching that attracts kids’ interest. We can run with that. How? By taking everything that we have learned about TPRS and keeping on keeping on honing our methods.
In conclusion, I am asking you to consider, as a way of looking at the discipline issue, to
– make certain that you make yourself 100% clear to your students when delivering CI. Pour out the entire bottle before going to the next one.
– use those rules. Come from a place of loving strength, because they are children and need to be told the rules.
– always remember that we teach in conditions that now, historically, are the worst they will ever be. What we do is service work, and make no mistake about it.