Form & Function

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Ben Slavic

83 thoughts on “Form & Function”

  1. Kevin Clemens

    “Now this is an astounding shift we have made together over the past year from focus on form to focus on function and look at the results – many of us now have control over our classes in a way we never have before. Again, it’s mainly due to jGR, the breakthrough of the century.”

    With a week of classes left, I like Greg find myself “staring out a window” almost daily. Why? Because I didn’t follow through on jGR. I let lots of things slide, and gave scores that were way above what the students were doing. I was soft, because it was easier than demanding real attentiveness, real engagement from them; it was easier than dealing with frustrated parents of high-achieving rude students who think of themselves above everyone else in the room. I was soft, and I have paid the price. all. year.

    And yet, this transitional year to CI has been so much better than my previous 2 years of “shove-the-grammar-down-their-throats and get angry when they don’t care.” Has the year been difficult: absolutely. Has it been worthwhile: we tell stories, we laugh often, and all of us have a little more Latin nestled deep within our subconscious.

    Next year: jGR. Choral Response. Jobs. Looking each and every kid square in the eyes every day and letting him know that he matters, what he does in my class matters, and I care about both.

    Next year: a spine.

    1. Jennifer in NJ

      This. Is. Absolutely. 100%. My. Situation.

      I need to hear from this PLC how to really get it going. An organized way of keeping tabs. A consistent check and balance system.

      1. lamunoz

        I think your desire is valid, Jennifer. Here’s my .02, for what it is worth. Last fall, I was desperate for a sense of progress, so I jumped into jGR as soon as it was ‘invented.’ October? Can’t remember.

        After making a ‘jobs’ spreadsheet and even explaining all the jobs by going over the list of jobs and their descriptions – I edited Ben’s descriptions a bit, BTW. I didn’t really understand some of the jobs myself until I tried them out, with the help of the students. Then, I explained to the students that I thought jobs would make the year more enjoyable. Some of the jobs were a better fit than others, but I’m not sorry I just gave out the jobs to whoever wanted them. With 40 students per class, I needed all the help I could get. Next year, I will get a better sense of where the students are at before matching them up with a job, I think.

        Anyway, the one job, a point-keeper, seemed to me to be the most helpful thing for jGR. The kid adds points or takes away points on your behalf. You can get a pretty good idea of who is volunteering ideas, etc. Students can use a spreadsheet, if you want accuracy.

        I am thinking, for next year, maybe having my point keeper write a ‘T’ if they see any side conversations, after first establishing that when a particular student gets a particular number of ‘T’s, they will have a private chat with me. I don’t know….

        Does anyone use the point keeper as a way to keep track of all sorts of things?

        My point keepers were scrupulously consistent and responsible.

        After posting the jGR and going over it a few times, for 6 weeks, they received their grades. Wow! That was when they knew that my class was ‘for real.’ They really did need to do what I said in order to get an ‘A.’

        Seeing the students have a positive experience *because* of the jGR and the jobs made me so thankful to this blog. It has been a great learning experience for me and the students.

        It has been relatively painless, developing my ‘spine’ this year. 🙂

        2. lamunoz

          Grade scheme:

          60% quizzes and final (teacher assistants help grade)
          20% from cute responses and avoiding distracting behaviors (point keepers)
          20% choral response. (I just eye-ball it; the quiet kids do not have a leg to stand on — they know that they need to be more involved. However, the kids that sit far away have a valid complaint if they get a ‘B’, right?)

          1. lamunoz

            P.S. My real secret is that did a bang-up job doing TPRS this year, but then I watched movies in French for the last 4 weeks of the year!

            Hahahahaha! I don’t care what anybody thinks!

    3. Chris R

      I tell myself every quarter, when I get new students that I’m going to grow a spine and be consistent (my biggest weakness). I told myself at the beginning of this year that I was going to grow a spine and have one of those classes where other teachers look and say “he runs a tight ship”. Never happened and the past month and a half have been absolutely horrible for me, I’m in survival mode. Still have 2 frickin weeks left too. I need this summer so, so much it isn’t funny. If it wasn’t for the fact that summer is around the corner, I’d consider a new job right now. I’ve actually been puttin out applications to other schools because I’ve even been questioning if upper middle class suburban middle schools are for me. This last quarter has been just bad bad bad. I’ve discovered this year that while growing a spine is great, you also need a set of balls to go with it.

  2. Angela Williams

    I agree Kevin! Last year, I thought that I was horrible at CI/TPRS because the kids weren’t responding the way I wanted them to, but now I realize that it was because I (keyword: I) didn’t consistently enforce the rules/consequences/procedures/expected behaviors. It is so much easier to let things slide, but that’s when we get into trouble in our classrooms. We have to step up, be consistent, and I believe that our kids will see that we do care.

    “Next year: jGR. Choral Response. Jobs. Looking each and every kid square in the eyes every day and letting him know that he matters, what he does in my class matters, and I care about both.

    Next year: a spine.” WE CAN DO IT!!!!!

  3. Bob Patrick

    The big three! This is brilliant. Choral response only happens, fully, when all of the other jGR stuff is in place: square shoulders, bright eyes, clear desk, etc.

    Jobs for students helps regulate SO much, like ME. If I have a timer watching how much time I stay in the target language, I easily make 90%. If I have an artist, I get such great material to use on subsequent days (makes my life so much easier). If I have a writer, then offering our stories back for reading just get easier. AND, those kids who might fall out of the jGR stuff have things to do to keep them focused and engaged!

    Teaching to the eyes: there really is nothing else that moves both teacher and students into that “hum” place where we all forget that we are speaking another language. Hypnotic? Probably, in the best sense.

    Tomorrow is my last day at work until next school year. I’ve just written the BIG THREE on my white board so that it’s the first thing to greet me when I come back in August.

  4. jen

    Yep. I “thought” I was enforcing jGR, but clearly I was not. How do I know this? Because of a situation I have created in which the whole tenor of the class is now just creepy. It’s this one class. And only a few kids out of the whole group, but boy did I ever blow it with these guys. Stuff slid by rather insidiously, creating a low-grade toxicity that exploded suddenly last week. Ick. One one hand I cannot wait to “be done with” this group. On the other hand they are teaching me the big lesson right now, so I need to embrace it and them and all of it or I won’t come out the other side as a more evolved human being.

    So the lesson I am in the middle of is all about the spine. It contains the nervous system, after all, so it’s kinda important to have that in integrity. Hmmm. Choral response 100%. All the eyes. All the voices. All the time. Jobs. Duh. Unemployment sucks. jGR to keep it all hugged into center.

    I can’t put my finger on “where I went wrong” and I am not going to waste too much energy going back in time. Feels like the year started great w/ tons of positive energy, even through first semester (I found some notes I had written dated Jan. 30 that made me think things were still relatively ok). But somewhere along the line I got really derailed almost without noticing until I crashed.

    Three more weeks! Congrats to y’all who got ‘er duuunnnn & hope to see some of you over the summer.

  5. Ben

    I wanted to expand this article entitled Form and Function to include more detailed aspects of classroom management next year, but somehow it got published today – I meant to publish it in a few days.

    So look for its republication in the next few days in six or seven segments with added details, details that I consider necessary for a thorough, even exhaustive, discussion about classroom management for next year using our secret codes, the acronyms.

    Greg’s original point about this newly labeled strategy of vCU is a huge point, and a strategic jumping off point for what I hope becomes over the next week a COMPLETE look at our classroom discipline options for next year.

    Ending the year with great hope for next year, because we have great tools to fuel our hopes, will make us all relax more over the summer, because we know that, thanks to the acronyms, we “got this shit”.

    So thank you Greg for raising this key point. Now we can really arm ourselves with confidence for next year. And thanks to Kevin, Angela and Bob for their comments above. The Form and Function discussion here in May hopefully launches great discipline in all of our classrooms next year.

    1. Diane N.

      Yay! Great. Will there be a classroom discipline flowchart as well? Something like that. That would be great — seeing all the elements in one place so nothing gets forgotten or neglected.

    2. Michele Rhodes

      true true true! Blaine really pushes the choral response requirement too – but it’s just so hard to make it happen unless you’re (excuse my Ben Slavic language 🙂 hardass! and I’m so not! I will be working on this too. Thanks so much guys for this work. it all rings true and resonates with me and many others I see.

  6. Ben Slavic

    Warning: Big ramble.

    It’s just that we can’t expect the discipline piece to slot neatly into our teaching just because we follow a set of templates. That’s form. And yes, the form is necessary in the form of the Classroom Rules, jGR and vCU, but I feel that there is more involved in this than just making the right managerial moves while using grades as little silver hammers to tap out all the rough spots in our classroom.

    Having spine is about form AND function. If it were merely about form, we who use the rules and jGR and vCU would not be having problems with discipline right now.

    So what about function? What about how the kids behave and, honestly, what about how we behave? What about that part? That is the part we each have to reflect on for ourselves. That part is about our relationships with ourselves and what we will and will not tolerate from other people.

    The image in my mind of Greg at the window waiting for his class to calm down has seared into my brain. It’s an image of each one of us on some level, no matter how much outward visible control we have of our classes. It is a very moving image to me. It is a very deep image to me.

    What I think Greg was doing at his window that day was more than waiting. He was feeling what was going on. jen often brings this aspect of teaching to the discussion here but not enough. Greg wasn’t judging himself in a negative way. He was being there in that chaos. Wow.

    We need to become more aware of what we are feeling when we teach. We try to control so much, but good teaching is not, has never been, about control. It is about freedom.

    That is why we are like moths to the flame with CI, we know it can free us into doing real teaching, not control teaching. We want us some of that. Once we have one good story under our belts we can never go back to using control tactics to control children, which is just so ridiculously draconian, and, to be blunt, fucked up.

    And the fact that 99% of language teachers use shame and control in their classrooms in our country doesn’t make what they do any less fucked up.

    My hero Greg was just accepting his failure, and not judging it as bad, and not freaking out and using the tool of weaklings, anger, on his misbehaving students.

    He was just standing at that window being there with the shit behavior from the kids. Thinking that he would never have that particular “lost” classs again, he was in those moments creating, or looking forward to creating, a new version of Greg as a language teacher.

    That was the second step Greg took in growing a spine, in my view. The first was when a few months ago he launched CI in his classroom at a speed about 500 times faster than any other teacher has done in the history of teaching.

    The process of growing a spine happens when we accept and change our core response to the kids. It’s the big part of the change. We can make 100 templates (now there is a nightmare) but if those templates don’t address that invisible interchange with each kid, the function of our teaching, nothing will happen.

    What is the nature of the invisible world interaction with each kid and with the class as a whole? That is the question of function. It has to be firm but loving. The kids cannot be allowed to think that they have even the tiniest bit of power to be insolent. They are subordinates.

    But schools now have made insubordination normal. So kids come expecting to be insubordinate with us. But we can’t do CI when kids are insubordinate. So this is a life or death situation for us. We either develop a core response to the kids that is loving and calm yet firm or we should probably leave the profession.

    Now, like Chris said, do we conclude that the kids are from the wrong part of society for our CI and therefore we need to find another school? Do the little privileged memorizer robot kids from rich families, since they would rather memorize to get into college, because it is so much easier than being human, really mess up our teaching so badly because they want worksheets so bad that we need to leave that kind of student population? Yes, I think so. I would rather wait tables than teach those little memorizer shits.

    So we try to find other schools where kids can handle the rigor of CI? I think we do. I did. I left East High for Lincoln because the kids are much nicer, because they aren’t so white. Sorry. Get over it. It’s my experience. I’m only talking about East High though. Weird place. But I think we should move schools to find where the real people are, those willing to embrace the rigor we offer as teachers. Robert just said he turned down a school for what sounded like reasons of who was in the school. I think we should do that.

    Teachers and Homer Simpson and Family Guy and all adults have been successfully made to be dolts and there is nothing we can do to change the mindfuck that TV has brought to our culture except meet it head on with power and dignity in our classrooms. We have to show up as adults.

    Now, if we became teachers so we could stay in high school all our lives, that ain’t gonna work. No camouflaged cheerleaders and football stars in the classroom please. We have enough of those assholes in school buildings right now. The kids need adults. Be an adult.

    Damn Ben you be rambling now.

    We are all to some degree Michael Scott. At least we’re not Dwight Schrute. Who in The Office are you as a teacher? I love Stanley’s style but I don’t think it would work in my classroom. Andy would get creamed because he, like Michael, wants to be liked too much. Jim? That could work. Toby? I don’t think so.

    Those are the guys. What about the women? Which woman in The Office would be the best teacher? Pam? The women don’t count much in that show, do they? But that is changing fast. Again, however, we all have to be the change. We can’t want it, we have to be it.

    All I’m trying to say here is that discipline is much more about growing a spine than having the right rules. It has a lot more to do with not allowing people to fuck with you, especially when they are children.

    I think that the reason I became a teacher had nothing to do with sharing my love of all things French with kids – it was to teach me to love myself by being strong when people hurt me.

    Growing a spine ultimately is about loving ourselves, really. If we love ourselves as we teach, the kids will pick up on the self respect that comes with loving oneself, and they will change radically in how they behave.

    1. lamunoz

      I think many of us may have a world view/reasoning that keeps us from succeeding in the area of discipline.

      My excuse, for years, was that I really was meant to be an elementary teacher. I would say to myself, “Well, you just aren’t good at discipline with older students.” People told me, especially students, that I would make a good elementary teacher. So, I just operated on that level. Until I actually went down to the elementary to teach Spanish. The students were lovely, but I couldn’t stay. The politics were just as bad. Everyone wanted the kids to do ‘scissor and glue’ activities. TPRS made me seem like a lazy teacher to them, I guess.

      So, I went back to H.S. — I was there to stay. So, I decided to be whoever I had to be to get the students to listen to me. BTW — it was hard to be ‘mean’ but it felt right somehow.

      The End.

    2. Greg Stout

      Sorry for another quote from “The Courage to Teach” but I just read it this weekend and it’s so applicable to this issue of existing in chaos, being aware of our self in it without judgement, and evaluating ourselves to see if we can sense what deep things inside us actually need to change (and not just grasp for the next superficial fix- usually through doing more “stuff” to fic the problem). By the way, I didn’t really “get” this book and didn’t really like it before becoming a French teacher, but now it reads to me as if it were written specifically for what we all do.

      Anyway, Palmer describes a scenario in one of his semesters teaching college where three girls in his class behaved very immaturely, didn’t participate in his class, and distracted the class while he was teaching. Basically, he didn’t confront them directly, but addressed the issue of discipline to the class as a whole, hoping the three girls would get the message. Later in the semester he ran into them on campus and did confront them with anger about their behavior in class, but engagement in class only improved with one of the girls. This is what Palmer shares about his experience in the book (hope I’m not breaking copyright laws here…)

      “I have reread and relived this miserable episode many times. It causes me so much pain and embarrassment that I always try to leap quickly from the debacle to he natural question, “What could I have done differently that might have made for a better outcome?” But when I lead this exercise in workshops, I insist that participants avoid that question like the plague.

      “The question is natural only because we are naturally evasive: by asking the question too soon, we try to jump out of our pain into the “fixes” of technique. To take a hard experience like this and leap immediately to “practical solutions” is to evade the insight into one’s identity that is always available in moments of vulnerability – insight that comes only as we are willing to dwell moe deeply in the dynamics that made us vulnerable.

      “Eventually, the how-to question is worth asking. But understanding my identity is the first and crucial step in finding new ways to teach: nothing I do differently as a teacher will make any difference to anyone if it is not rooted in my nature.” (pg 71)

      Sorry for such a long post, but I think as teachers we’re especially vulnerable to jumping straight to trying “fixes” that in reality only mask the problem. I’m not sure exactly what my “problem” is that I need to confront in myself in order to get the discipline thing on straight. That’s something I need to delve deeper into now that this discussion has brought me there. I’ll post about that once I have reached some insights over the next few days just for the sake of being open. This discussion is SO NEEDED!

  7. jen

    This thread is hitting every nerve. It is the core of the core of this work. Ben said:

    “All I’m trying to say here is that discipline is much more about growing a spine than having the right rules. It has a lot more to do with not allowing people to fuck with you, especially when they are children.”

    This is heavy duty boundary stuff. And I am the queen of no boundaries. This year, and my failure once again to set firm boundaries, is showing me exactly, on multiple levels “not even related to school” why it all got so swampy and stagnant. Last week I stole a river metaphor from one of my teachers when talking to one group. I think it works pretty well as a visual. Basically a river needs banks or else it turns into a swamp. In order to have flow, we need banks to the river. I think I started the year with some pretty nice banks, but allowed them to erode by not maintaining them. In retrospect, aided by all of you reflecting in this thread, I can see that the primary tool we have in maintaining the river banks is the 100% choral response. Erosion over time happens when we accept 98% one day and then as the days go by suddenly we are at 40% almost without realizing it. This is what happened to me. I say “almost” without realizing it because externally it can seem “not so bad” or “pretty good” or “ok” but there is that little nagging feeling inside. The gut feeling that we are so accustomed to overruling. This is where I get into trouble. It is basically denial and lack of awareness and fear.

    Now there is no flow (of CI or anything else for that matter). I am also doing the window staring. A lot. Sometimes I stare at a point on the floor in front of me and breathe. I’m sure I look like a jackass, but it is better than getting angry and having some nasty reactive outburst.

    “…not letting people fuck with you. Especially when they are children.” This is colossal. And probably so obvious for those of you who are great at boundaries. But for me this work is about undoing a lifetime (or more?) of patterns. “Habit is a hell to which people cling in an attempt to stop the flow of change.” This quote is from a book called “Anatomy of the Sprit.” Frankly it is freaking me out to read it. At the same time it is shining a light on all the dark places that need it. So yeah, like Ben, my teaching “career” is not about a conscious decision to “share all things French / Spanish” but instead is one big lesson for me to evolve into a person who is grounded, confident and living from faith rather than fear. This is all just dawning on me.

    Here is another relevant quote from that book: “Every choice we make contains energy of faith or fear, and the outcome of every decision reflects to some extent that faith or fear. This dynamic of choice guarantees that we cannot run away from ourselves or our decisions.” Oh damn! All those choices I made throughout the year that were fear-based are now rearing their heads big time.

    Some examples of me making fear-based decisions:

    1) I was looking forward to doing Robert’s soccer talk on Mondays. Lots of kids are really into soccer so I thought this would be the perfect thing. BUT when I tried it, “it didn’t work.” So I bagged it. “It didn’t work” because I did not stop the class when the out of control chatting started, in order to establish the protocol by which we would have a group conversation about the various teams. So I abandoned the activity. The joke is on me, though, because the “protocol” is the same whether we do stories or soccer. Golly! I even have a poster on the wall to prove it. But I was afraid. There was so much energy and I did not see (or chose not to see) that I had to provide a structure to channel it. Somehow it didn’t seem so scary to stick to stories BUT that is where the 98% -97%-90%…….response began its gradual erosion.

    2) A level one class of 8th graders “could not handle stories” so I made them read. Way too early. But it shut them up. I ran away from standing in the truth that is CI / teaching / life on Earth, which is I must walk the walk. Model the behavior. Be the change. So I bypassed the discomfort of truly being in the moment, and the discomfort of it, practicing the skills we are all learning together. Just like the thousands of reps we need on the structures, we also need thousands of reps over time to create new patterns in our bodies.

    And now, in a grand culmination of decay, in the past 2 weeks I have had my worst teaching moments ever. A student accused me of being racist. That is pretty much the low point for me. The incidents surrounding the accusation, however, are the sum total of my lack of boundaries, lack of respect for myself and failure to create a safe classroom. Again, all of this is obvious intellectually, but I guess I had to truly feel the precarious unsafe feeling that the students feel when they are in my class. I now feel it in my body and understand the reality of it. In the past 2 weeks I have wanted to walk out the door and never come back. But I see that if I do that I will continue my pattern of running away. So I am not going to do that even though I feel like the biggest tool ever. I don’t know if I can undo any of this damage in the final weeks of the year. Probably not. But I think I have to summon the energy to act as if I can or that defeated feeling and energy of despair will continue to infect the group. I do know that I don’t want to cave in. So yeah. This work is not for the faint of heart.

    Ben’s last paragraph above sums it up perfectly:

    “Growing a spine ultimately is about loving ourselves, really. If we love ourselves as we teach, the kids will pick up on the self respect that comes with loving oneself, and they will change radically in how they behave.”

    1. lamunoz

      Jen,

      I am so sorry to hear about your horrible experience. If I could think of any words that might comfort you, I would write them. Again, so sorry…

      –Leigh Anne in CA

    2. Greg Stout

      Sorry everyone for making a comment a minute during the last 24 hours -I’m really just avoiding the process of logging into my district’s outdated grading program and making up end-of-semester numbers, which is no fun at all when you have this blog to be on.

      jen, you said “Sometimes I stare at a point on the floor in front of me and breathe. I’m sure I look like a jackass, but it is better than getting angry and having some nasty reactive outburst.”

      I love those two lines! Ideally, of course, none of us will have to experience this again next year with the work we’re doing on immediate and proactive discipline. No, we will DEFINITELY not experience this next year. But in a situation that has already come to chaos, your non-reaction in those moments is very noble -far from the “jackass” you feel like. This is exactly what most kids’ pseudo-adult parents and teachers do NOT do. That is, the pseudo-adult’s m.o. is to flee through an emotional reaction to avoid confronting the child’s misbehavior head-on in a constructive way (which is not the pseudo-adult’s fault per se, since they were probably treated the same way by their parents/teachers. But the cycle has to stop somewhere, which it will with all of us hopefully).

      I think in those “jackass” moments of breathing and staring, you’re really went into a Jedi master super adult mode. I sincerely admire you for being a “jackass”, if that’s what you want to call it. Think about it -the MOST mature thing in that situation is exactly what you did. To not flip out under chaos, but endure it until you’re able to maturely and calmly breach a real solution (which in this case is the work we’re hopefully going to all accomplish this summer on discipline). And I think even if it’s only in their retrospect, this burns a very important image into the kids’ brains to help them later in life. I think they will remember that language teacher they had in that really bad class who did not lash out at them, but held her ground calmly and firmly in the midst of chaos. I’ve actually been helped by memories of teachers like this during trying times in my own life way after I knew the teacher. But they might not think anything of it at the moment -or they might even think in the moment that you really are a “jackass” becuase their developing brains can’t see it differently yet. Does any of this ramble make sense?

      Last thing! To illustrate, I was deeply impacted by a college professor in this same way:

      I made money in college by playing piano for private lessons in the music department at my school. One day in a singer’s lesson, from what I can remember, the girl was somehow not very prepared and her mind just wasn’t in the lesson. The professor (a former operatic career-soprano, who is very petite and softspoken, which adds to the power of this memory for me), was working through a passage that was proving very difficult to the girl and the girl was stumbling and becoming frustrated. Eventually the girl got very worked up and started crying and excitedly offering reasons as to why she was unprepared (I was just awkwardly sitting at the piano in silence). The professor, sitting calmly in her chair, acknowledged all the girls excuses with a terse “okay” and told the girl several times, “breathe, breathe, breathe….”. The professor didn’t make a SINGLE reply to the girl’s reasons for being unprepared or mention the girl’s crying. After giving the girl a moment to catch her breath and stop crying, the professor made her go back immediately to the same passage of music. The girl eventually got through it with success.

      That professor’s hard-core refusal to let the singer avert the matter at hand through an emotional escape really impacted me forever.

      Just wanted to share that.

      1. Greg Stout

        Because, since we are really always teaching people around us something, if there is a moment (or week or month or year) of chaos in our classrooms, we might as well use it to teach/model the mature way to respond to problems.

        1. Diane N.

          Thanks, Greg. “Jedi master super adult mode” is something I will try to remember, too, as I wait (again) for talkative students to stop and return their attention to the class.

          I find at those times that I dislike being an elective teacher because it feels higher-stakes how I react/respond to student misbehavior. I want to be fair, firm, and patient, but children are not themselves fair in their assessment of what’s happening. I’ve been told that I’m “serious” and really it’s just me and my Chinese influence, mostly. Anyone else know what I mean? The sense that students (who are very ill-equipped to judge wisely) are sizing you up and deciding if they like you, and therefore if they will continue with your class/engage in the activity/etc. Bugs me.

      2. sabrina

        Greg,

        you wrote :

        “That professor’s hard-core refusal to let the singer avert the matter at hand through an emotional escape really impacted me forever. ”

        That is a powerful image indeed. Averting a situation in which emotiuons are playing is a very hard thing to do indeed. We are emotional beings after all, but we are also rational beings, which sets us apart from other species.

        By remaining grounded (to restate Jen), and breathing (that would be me), and detaching ourselves (that would be Jedi supermaster) from an emotional situation purposely is to show and model our kids that we are the adult in the room and that we can proact rather than react.

        I love your ” jedi super master” allegory. Now we need to all become jedi supermasters next year!

        1. Greg Stout

          Sabrina, I’m wondering how “jedi super master” will work in France. I don’t know how much direct instruction time I’ll get in front of the whole class as an assistant. Really I’m becoming a “jedi super master” discipline teacher for when I’m back in the U.S. (probably still NC) teaching French after next year. It might be a totally different thing in France -closer to ESL maybe? I don’t know…are middle school/high school kids in English classes over there usually at a conversational level by the time they get to those levels? I’m sure they can’t be pure beginners with all the English media/pop input they get, no? I won’t know the kids’ “levels” for sure until right before I head over in October, and nothing really until I can actually meet the kids. I’m actually regretting somewhat that I won’t be at my school in August to nail discipline for good now that we’re uncovering the real issue (having a spine). But that just buys me more time to really internalize it all.

          1. Sabrina Sebban-Janczak

            Greg,

            I have had foreign exchange students stay with some of my students for two weeks this and last month. They are teenagers in “seconde” through “Terminale”, which is the equivalent of 10th through 12th grade.
            Their english is so so, not good nor bad, but remember they’ ve “studied” it for 7 years or so. I’ll be curious to hear from you when you go there how you rate their language skills.

            As you may know, in France we start learning a foreign language much earlier than here in the USA, so we typically start at the equivalent of middle school, or toward the end of primary school. Not only that but we typically take two languages. I took three but that was b/c I was a language nerd.

            From what I’ve read recently, and talking to teenagers in my family and friends when I go home, I’m not too impressed with their english, although it is for sure better than what most US kids taught a second language the grammar way here can do after 4 years.

            That’s why we need more people like Judy and YOU (now going there) to spread the word of CI.

            Who knows? I may move back to France and give Judy a hand, she sure needs it. Too bad you can’t make it to her conference this summer as I am sure it will be awesome. I can’t wait to meet our european CI colleagues.

            Hope I answered your questions but again, you’ll be able to judge for yourself in a few months. We’ll be anxious to hear about your new experiences and how they relate and contrast with ours here. The only things I suspect you’ll be surprised with is kid’s behaviors. I think you’ll find more respect from kids towards the school culture and towards their teachers in general.

            I am so excited for you Greg. It would be fun to meet you in France, may be over winter or spring break!

  8. sabrina

    Jen,

    Thank you for talking so openly and candidly about these very painful teaching moments. I feel your pain Jen. I can’t wait to hug you and tell you that your courage inspires me.

    Your pains are our pains, your learned lessons are our learned lessons, thank you for your trust and for sharing with us these very intimate moments.

    “Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
    ? A.A. Milne

    1. jen

      Merci 🙂 I am so thankful to have such amazing support here. It is a huge step forward for me to let this stuff all sink in and not react and avoid what is really happening. CI teaching is real life, and it forces you to face yourself. I can’t hide behind the curriculum because the “curriculum” is me and the kids. Nowhere to hide. We all have to show up. That can be really scary. The past 2 weeks showed me that I have not shown up fully. This shift is confusing enough to the kids, and even more so when I do not model “show up fully.” The great news is that I am stronger and clearer for going through this w/o bailing!

  9. Judy Dubois

    We are always stronger when we face (or have our noses rubbed in) our weaknesses. My second year in the lycée I had a nightmare class. I saw the industrial shop teachers, who have them in small groups working on machines doing things they enjoy doing, admit that they could get nothing out of them and some of the boys had an attitude that scared them. And I had them all together in a class that counted for nothing with them. I survived and fortunately we teachers were able to convince the “proviseur” to take drastic action so that half of them did not return the following year. It was a very negative experience. But I came to realize that it had helped me grow a bit of spine, because it gave me a yardstick to measure behavior by and I could distinguish between a genuine hard case criminal and someone who simply hadn’t learned to express frustration in a helpful manner. On the one hand I knew how important it was to be respected, on the other hand I knew that most kids just want to know that someone is listening to their pain. When I was raising my own children I learned that if you tell a child that is crying because they’re hurt, “Ohh, that hurts!” they’ll immediately stop crying because you’ve received and acknowledged their message. But when they are screaming their pain, if you say, “ohh, that’s nothing, be a big boy/girl, don’t cry like a baby,” they’ll only cry louder. Teenagers are much the same. If you recognize and acknowledge their pain, they will stop whatever they are doing to get across their message (I hurt!).

  10. John Piazza

    One thing I really do plan to do, as an extension of my spine, is to STOP GIVING WARNINGS. I will tell them the policy at the beginning of the year. It will also be on my poster every day. When you give warnings, they don’t listen, and if you don’t ruthlessly follow up every time you give a warning, those words (and everything else you say) soon become meaningless to the students. Or, you can get stuck in the situation where students thing you can’t give them a consequence if you haven’t given them a warning (or a yellow card, or a strike, or whatever). Here’s a better way to get the word out. During class, ask offending students to see you after class. Don’t say any more during class. Then, when you are no longer on stage, give them their consequence, and call home. Or just call home without even saying anything to the student. Soon, word will get out that you mean business, and that no warnings are given–just action. They will take each other’s warnings much more seriously than anything you say.

    Also, I will make sure to have an empty desk at the back of the room, and I will send an offending student, first offence, to that table. No conversation, no warnings, just go back to that seat. They lose an audience, because no one can see them anymore, except me. Most lower grade classrooms I have observed have such a place, and it works very well. Some teachers call it “the island” which has a pretty neutral connotation, and it’s just a place for them to go and collect themselves. Most want to return to the group, others may feel the need to stay there for a while, and that’s fine too. Sometimes, they need someone to give them permission to chill out.

    So, no warnings, and an island. These will be two major elements of my action plan for next year, from day one.

    1. James Hosler

      My approach, if I am having a spine at the time: Tell the offending student or students plainly that some specific behavior or set of behaviors is destructive and that it needs to stop. Then the kicker: AS SOON AS IT HAPPENS AGAIN–AND IT WILL ABSOLUTELY HAPPEN AGAIN–THERE MUST BE A CONSEQUENCE.

  11. Judy Dubois

    I do believe that a warning, as a reminder that the student is starting to approach a border line, is needed. But they must be very early, not when the student has already crossed over the line. We’re dealing with teenagers who are not always aware that they are creating a problem. And a warning that is not heeded must have a consequence. Otherwise it’s not a warning, just a teacher letting off steam. I also would always talk to a student before calling home. If you expect them to act like adults, it’s important to treat them like adults. In my own situation, French parents were so protective that they were rarely a solution. I once called a mother who assumed that her son was once again cutting class and started telling me about his horrible toothache and that he was on his way to school, whereas he had been in class all morning.

    1. James Hosler

      I remember reading in some researchers somewhere or something that teachers should never give warnings because basically a warning or a system of warnings is a system of free passes for students to act however they want a certain number of times.

  12. Ben Slavic

    I no longer believe in consequences. The assumption with consequences is that we:

    1. can remember who did what when (in the midst of everything else we have to do, right?)
    2. can be consistent.
    3. can sufficiently effectuate change in a kid via a warning.

    Consequences don’t work and warnings don’t work. The kids could care less. Adults have not been consistent in the past with them, and so all of a sudden they are going to listen to us?

    Nope. Not me. Not next year. I’m jaded of course, but it is a good jaded. One born of seeing how the road to hell really is is paved with good intentions, and with the patently false and extremely naïve belief that “a good talk” with the offender will produce a change in their behavior. Nope.

    Here is the basic shape of the policy toward discipline that I will enact next year in my own classroom:

    I will enforce discipline via:

    1. Classroom Rules
    2. jGR
    3. vCU
    4. instant phone call to parent during class.
    5. instant removal of the offending kid to another classroom as per our Lincoln system.
    6. Constant confrontation of my own inability to avoid using English in the classroom, which is the source of most discipline problems in the CI classroom.

    If these are unfamiliar to anyone in the group I will be publishing a series of posts on the form and function topic over the next few days in which those six things will enter into the discussion, since the form and function discussion is really a discussion about classroom discipline.

    James please take note of these six things for obvious reasons.

  13. Ben Slavic

    Yeah I think I meant the vague kind of consequence. That kind. We need to learn to act in the moment more. Maybe I mean immediate consequences. I’ve always wondered why we (not me any more) tend to ignore inappropriate behavior in the moment. 1-6 are all things we do in the moments of teaching. The word I like is confrontation but not in the negative sense of me vs. the kid. But immediate response.

    1. John Piazza

      I agree that most of these words have a negative connotation, and as a person who naturally shies away from any sort of conflict (so what the hell am I doing in a room full of 12 year old boys?!), those negative connotations really resonate with me. I think a word like “responsive” is more neutral, but retains the “bite” of action. We need to know when a response is necessary, and not back down. It can be a fine line between responding and “coming at” someone. Many effective administrators, negotiators, etc. really walk that line, and cross it from time to time, but they do not err in the other direction, as introverted 4%ers tend to do, at their peril. On the matter of consequences, I am also understanding effective ones as happening right away, even if it means saying to a kid “after school, I will call/email your parents about this,” and then following through on it.

  14. Ben Slavic

    (Warning: what started out as a quick comment became a rant.)

    Why the “after school” part? If a drunk starts hitting people at a party he is removed tout de suite. Not after the party.

    This drunk image is not hyperbole – it is apt. When a child who doesn’t have boundaries starts in on those hard to detect inner battles with the teacher for power, for the sound waves of the classroom, that is even worse than a drunk starting to hit people.

    That is because our work is subtle and therefore is more easily undermined. We notice the drunk but we don’t always notice the kid trying to poison our classroom. Some of us don’t even notice when we are being sabotaged, because we are so proud of how great the circling is going. We’re the first to go.

    We think that it’s all about the story. It’s not. The story is the form. But the work of CI is about the function. Read the original post here for those definitions.

    We need to pull our heads out of our asses on this form/function point. I will not add a single new post that is waiting in the already jammed queue here until this form and function discussion has been sufficiently addressed.

    So if you don’t like this discussion, go read another blog. This could last all summer. And it should, because in this discussion lies the dynamite needed to blast us into the realm of good classroom management. Make no mistake: our CI classes will always suck until we first and immediately solve this problem of our students’ behaviors.

    The kids have gone covert – actually they have been covert for some time. Many are passive aggressive just as a reaction to being told to be quiet and take notes – they don’t like that. It doesn’t feel right to be ignored in favor of a book, a fraction, something that happened in history, or a grammar rule or verb chart.

    So the powers that be go on a rampage to fix their schools by slamming teachers up side the head to find out “what works” in terms of teaching techniques (form). But it is not the teacher who needs to change. It is the kids, who are as a whole non-participatory (failed function). They have become robotic and do not know how to function in a classroom, and we let them. Dumb us.

    So we need to teach them. But it is so hard now. To the degree that they interact with machines, they have become cyborgs. The images on screens today, starting with the Star War clones invasion, or before that Darth Vader, is a reflection of the culture. It is very apt.

    So it becomes apparent in the general dialogue about classroom discipline that it is not about what we do but what they do. Student re-education. Making them believe through our actions that we care about what they think and how they behave, and that they are more important than a reflexive verb.

    When they see themselves being ignored in favor of the language, they start to act out. That’s what kids do. But ignoring the slightest bit of inhuman response in a kid is a major red flag.

    We just can’t ignore any more of those subversive comments any more in the first weeks. After school is too late. I fear that many of us in this group cannot do this thing. I think that most of us will crash and burn because of one or two drunks in each of our classes next year.

    It happened last year and the year before – what makes us think that it won’t happen next year. And about this time of year, each year, we will again think about the pleasure of quitting, but then we realize what the job market is like, and we come back for another year.

    As a general rule, we grumble in the spring, apply for other jobs, don’t get them, put our tails between our legs, and end up right where we started last fall, and part of our hearts dies a bit more each year. Because we can’t train kids in proper behavior. Because we are afraid to confront a teenager. Because we don’t know how.

    After school is a weak response to a tragic situation, that a child would be so bold as to try, consciously or unconsciously, to ruin our teaching. But they do all the time. Just look at the comments from those teachers brave enough to speak up about what is happening in their classes right not, at the time of loss.

    I really don’t think that even with those six swift kick in the ass moves listed above, we can keep them from growing up to be tin men/clones of each other via social networking cyborg freaks. They balk at the human change we bring as any machine would. They make the youthful mistake that since they can bully one teacher they can bully them all.

    TPRS? CI? Shit. Those are just tools to bring kids back to being human. We think CI is the answer. It’s not the answer. Making CI work via strong and vigorous discipline is the answer.

    TPRS/CI have attracted so much attention because they work to change a horrible situation into a good one. They are like seeds but they need water – our courage to confront shit behavior in kids – before they can work.

    The confrontational part is where we have failed at and people think that TPRS/CI don’t work. They stupidly dismiss it. Because we are too timid to make it work in our classrooms.

    Change comes with a price. It means we have to teach children behaviors they have never seen before in a classroom. It started with jGR. It ends with this discussion. I make no apologies for freezing all other activity here until this topic has been sufficiently discussed.

    I am looking for a small group of teacher here who have followed all the threads here for the past year or so and who are willing to fearlessly implement a way of disciplining kids that actually works next year.

    The goal is that in the late fall we can all agree that we together met the challenge I am laying down now to the group, so that we could say, in November or so, that we solved the problem of classroom discipline in all of our classes and that as a result the CI machine is up and humming.

    If we don’t get the function piece down, why even do comprehension based teaching? That would be like buying a bunch of beautiful flowers and planting them in shit. They will die in the shit behaviors some of us allow, because we are too timid to confront the drunks in our classroom, because for some reason we don’t think that a kid having a side conversation, or a kid with a head on the desk, or a kid with an attitude that is aimed at our gut, is a problem.

    Those behaviors are a problem. I challenge this group to confront OURSELVES via discipline of OURSELVES when we teach. I call this dVC – discipline Via Confrontation. Confrontation of ourselves.

    Discipline of ourselves via confrontation of our own weaknesses in dealing with kids who are the product of a radically out of balance society. Where will the healing of a society come from if not from its teachers?

    1. skip

      I may have missed the answer to this, but I wonder if you have actually called home during class and if you have described how that went?

      thanks
      skip

      1. Ben Slavic

        No skip, because doing so didn’t occur to me until a week ago as a part of this discussion. But I will, and I will report back to you in the fall.

        I’ll even tell you when it happens – it will be when, after patiently explaining my rules to my classes for the first three days or so and giving them a chance to accept the rather startling new learning environment they find themselves – because their teacher gives a shit – some kid doesn’t want to hear it.

        Most will hear it, but there is usually one holdout. Usually a boy. He’s toast, three months in advance. Can’t wait to share with you how the call went. Hell I wish I could record it. Why? So you could hear the confidence and cheerfulness in my voice:

        “Hello… Mrs. Whatever? Yes, It’s Braden’s French teacher, Mr. Slavic. Listen, I’m calling from my French class and Braden is here with the other students and he is having some difficulty with his behavior…what?… oh yes, right now in class! I don’t like to put things off and your son is really having a hard time understanding the expectations in French class this year so far. We really need to talk. Just one request for tonight – please ask Braden to explain those expectations to you. I will give him a sheet right now explaining them and the two of you can go over them so we don’t have to let this thing get out of hand. I can’t teach French if Brandon is busy trying to distract everybody by speaking English, right? Thank you! I’ll talk to Braden tomorrow to see how it went tonite as the two of you talk about French class this year. And thank you for your interest in supporting Lincoln High School!”

        1. skip

          My school is big on FERPA…(student privacy laws). I wonder if doing this in front of other students would be an issue? My hunch is that it would only be necessary to do this just once in each class per year…. I cannot wait to hear how it goes…. I am much too gallina to go first 🙂

          I might be brave enough to hold a student after class and call home before the student can leave…. I wonder if that would be enough of a deterrent?

  15. mb

    It seems like I am just ‘afraid’ of the 4%ers. I have felt so under the microscope this year by colleagues, that when a 4%er says that they’re not learning anything, it scares me. Looking back in retrospect, that 4%er (one in particular) never really participated and turned the classroom toxic — we had so much more fun when that person was not there!!! but that person was an upper classman, and found everything CI to be “stupid”. This person also repeatedly made comments in class about how wonderful the other teacher was. I also heard through the grapevine that when my colleague’s position was terminated for next year, this student was telling other students that it wasn’t fair that “good, effective” teachers are let go, but that the “ineffective” ones are kept!!! (ouch!) I am probably going to have this student again next year. But…..I need to figure out how to 1) teach more effectively, (which means) #2) how to shut up a kid like this next year!!!
    I’m *IN* Ben — I’ll take the challenge! 🙂

  16. Ben Slavic

    MB I figured you’d be one of the first in. You’ve not backed away from too many battles thus far, that’s for sure.

    You bring such a great point here – that in fact, in one of the ironies that seems typical of life – the very people who are looked upon as role models of what (in this case) a student should be, are the enemy. It should lessen the ouch that you described above to know that that kid is without equivocation a wringwraith.

    Look at this four percenter for real – he/she comes in, is allowed to make derogatory comments about people and ways of doing things, when things were swimming along just fine.

    Does the child really have some sort of insight that allows them to see better than you, the teacher? This is how far out of hand this point about form vs. function has gotten – we don’t even notice grossly inappropriate behaviors!

    This is what we must stop. And the point about wolves in sheeps clothing – four percenters – must be included in the general discussion. Thank you, MB, so far it’s just us to, but I have a feeling others will join us in this crusade. I’m already counting jen in. She of the warrior mentality.

    2. Greg Stout

      Count me “in” too, as long as “in” just means that I’m all about “fearlessly implement a way of disciplining kids that actually works next year” and not that I have anything earth-shattering to say about how to do it or that I’m any good at it *yet*. But I’ll definitely participate in the discussion. To say that I need to get this part of my teaching straight next year would be an absurdly ridiculous and hilarious understatement to anyone who witnessed my classroom this year. Count. Me. In. There is some serious training of children to be done next year. They will know how to act in our classrooms. They need it like no other. We’re doing this because we’re rising up as real adults….because the kids are worth it and have too many “baby adults” in their lives as it is.

        1. Greg Stout

          jen, your openess about your classroom on here has helped me a ton -thanks for your candidness with all of us. Especially when chaos in my classroom has mirrored exactly things you’ve described from your’s. Next year we’ll be posting on here about how NOT chaotic our classes are because we dealt with behavior issues head on as the major thing they are, and didn’t file them into the back of our brains to wait for them to go away. We’ll post about how some kid thought he would try just a little taste of the Chaos Cookies one day early in the semester but how we stopped him before he even started reaching out his arm…long before the rest of the class was clamoring for the Cookies. The regimented and militantly enforced absence of chaos, weak responses, unrelated chatting, etc. will free everyone in the classroom to enjoy safety and maximum language acquisition (And really beyond all that to just give them the powerful experience of being part of something with their peers and a real adult where EACH OTHER are the focus of attention, but it all happens in a way that is very disciplined, focused, peaceful, loads of fun, and all the other good stuff).

  17. jen

    Feel the fear and do it anyway. Alrighty, I’m in. Warts and all. Btw, the Brene Brown Vulnerability and Shame TED talks really helped me to frame this work, once again. I know several months ago someone posted those here and I remember watching them. Then last week one of my yoga teachers posted them (randomly ? ha!) so I watched them again last week. Might be a good starting point or at least a place for each of us to reflect on our individual work that needs a kick start.

    I don’t know what will emerge from this but hell, it will be a rollicking ride.

  18. Ben Slavic

    Could you post that link jen?

    I think the starting point is to realize that a child of 15 is still a child. We’ve all heard that line about how their pre-frontal cortex is far from being fully formed and so their ability to make decisions is compromised. It’s part of being a child. Even if their bodies are as big or bigger than ours. That’s the starting point.

    Next, we accept my argument that it is in the how and not in the what that our classroom discipline salvation lies. We have thought naively for so long in the TPRS world that if we just learn how to do PQA and stories we would unleash the CI beast and we have never really seriously agreed here that the enemy is not the method but the process.

    If we can’t, therefore, agree that we will not allow children to control what goes on in our classrooms, and that includes both the assholes and the four percenters, then we should not jump on this bandwagon. This bandwagon is for those who are willing to brook no compromise in how they train their students in August and September. Because after that it’ll be too late.

    The work we are going to be doing in the fall will be different as a result of this conversation right here. We will win this time, or we will go down in flames trying. If that happens, then there is no hope for American education and we can let Obama and his kids and Rahm and his kids and all those kids of privilege take over, like they want to, memorizing verb charts all the way to an even more badly split nation.

    1. jeffery Brickler

      I am in! I got my ass kicked so much this year and it was because I let those damn kids get away with shit behavior. Those who read my woes understand how important this discipline piece is. I will do it. I will not have another year like this one.

      1. Greg Stout

        Wow, I’ve missed out on some good discussion here the past few days. That’s what I get for going without internet at home. But I’m catching up on everything now that I’m back at school.
        I’m with you jeff! And I’m with Ben (as I’m sure we all are) in the idea that the behavior part is way more important than the CI part. There were times this semester, usually right after a bad day behavior wise (mine and the kids’) that I would think, “This CI stuff is pointless if the behavior and lack of discipline continues like this”. But then I would ignore the thought and forget about it until the next day. But the thought was definitely in the back of my mind nagging away the whole semester. The essence of the thought was “THERE HAS TO BE DISCIPLINE” and also “Discipline precedes instruction” (Ben’s quote?). I guess I ignored it because I knew that I didn’t know what to do about it except survive the year and try to do better by norming my classes right from the start next year.

        Now that the year is ending, though, and because of this discussion, I have perspective to see which things exactly I will confront right away next year and be unrelentless with, over, above, and before, any CI. It’s almost comical to look back over the year at times where I CONTINUED teaching in the midst of kids texting, having side conversations, doing work for other classes, putting heads down, listening to their ipods, etc. AM I CRAZY? Yes, I am! For teaching with that stuff for even one second. No more. This madness is over effective the last day of this semester, which is tomorrow (because let’s face it, it really is too late at this point).

        1. Kevin Clemens

          Greg – As I sit at my desk this morning trying to gear up for the final few days of classes, your comments hit home; especially this one:

          “I guess I ignored it because I knew that I didn’t know what to do about it except survive the year and try to do better by norming my classes right from the start next year.”

          This entire year has been a mixed bag. Doing CI has been great, but I’ve got nothing left. Next September is going to make or break the year. They need to be completely retrained. This October, just when the I was getting the CI train moving, I had a senior leave the school in lieu of a suspension (and undoubtedly eventual expulsion) after berating me over a jGR grade. Looking back, that killed my confidence in what I was doing and following through on my expectations of them. And thus the year has been about survival.

          This discussion has been great to have at the tail end of this year. I feel that all this talk about discipline is really about helping students to see that what we do is an invitation to be a part of something greater: a shared enterprise, a break from the all too often hum-drum monotony of high school, where they can more engage in real human interaction. But that requires helping them and us (dVC when necessary) discover a new way of being in class.

          So yeah, I’m ‘in’ too. Not that I have any particular wisdom to offer, but because next year must be different.

  20. sabrina

    Jen,

    Thank you for this beautiful Ted talk reminder!

    BTW it was Bob Patrick who had originally brought it onto this blog. I found the link and the following comments. I remember being so touched/inspired/enlightened by those 2 talks. They profoundly changed me and affected my perception on shame versus guilt and vulnerability.

    Here is the link to that original post and the following comments by some of us:

    https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/10/18/ted-talks/

    You know I had to listen to those two talks again, thanks to you Jen and here is a quote that struck a cord with me. It is taken from “the Shame” one with direct implications for the work we do and really relevant to the conversation Ben started sparked by Greg’s comments.
    Here it is:

    “There’s a huge difference between shame and guilt. Here’s what you need to know: Shame is highly highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. Here’s what you even need to know more : guilt is inversely correlated with those things. The ability
    to hold something we’ve done or fail to do up against who we want to be is
    incredibly adaptive. It’s uncomfortable but it’s adaptive.”

    Wow!!!! So can I say that I’ve failed this year with following up with how and what I wanted to accomplish discipline wise with my students. It’s uncomfortable but it’s adaptive. I/WE can adapt it, change it and become better teacher next year. I surrender to my feelings of vulnerability. I confess I failed following with discipline issues too. Interestingly enough my discipline issues were all with kids in my regular Fr2 classes. My IB kids and my “gifted” 8th graders” had significant less discipline issues. So can we posit a correlation with motivation and discipline?

    On Friday in one of my regular Fr 2 class, I had a girl who was writing/doing homework for another class. This girl is extremely defiant, always has been, and her and I often go head to head, even in front of the other kids. Her behavior seemed to have changed this second semester and she was doing better, often participating in stories and outputting French and I was very happy.

    On Friday though, I caught her writing while everyone was reading silently. I asked her what she was doing and since she was caught in the act she told me. I asked her to put it away and read. She pretended to for a minute and started to write again. She reverted to our old pattern of fighting with me head to head. Finally I asked her to choose between complying with my request or have a consequence of being sent to the dean accompanied by another student of my choice. She chose the latter. So I sent her to the dean. I won’t see her again b/c she’s having surgery and not coming back to school until next year. Oh well….

    Anyway discipline precedes instruction and I find discipline to be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with, even with my own kids.

    However, I am wondering out loud here, in this conversation about finding a “one size fits all”, a cookie cutter if you will, a single mold or template to deal with the myriad of discipline issues that may arise in our classrooms?

    Just as our kids come to us with different personalities, psychological issues, socioeconomic backgrounds and most importantly personal narratives , we should be cognizant IMHO that there may exist several ways to deal with different behavior problems in our classrooms.

    Furthermore and going back to the Ted Talk, what if some of the behavior issues our kids offer us are related to SHAME in their lives? If what Brené Brown suggests holds any truth and some of our kids’ aggression, violence, bullying is directly correlated to the feeling of shame they experience n their personal lives, then don’t we need to address that appropriately?

    How do we marry empathy and discipline, the idea of being loving and firm at the same time?

    I had no idea that becoming a teacher also meant becoming a little bit of a social worker or psychologist!

    1. sabrina

      Sorry I should have added this to the Brené Brown quote so here it is:

      “The thing to understand about shame is it’s not guilt.
      Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is: I am bad , guilt is: I did something bad.”

    2. jen

      I have the same hunch Sabrina. I feel like this discussion is not going to yield a template or checklist, but more of a deeper awareness for each of us so that our ability to act in those moments where we absolutely need to act, will be informed by our own groundedness.

      That sounds totally hokey, probably. But I can’t think of another way to express it. Yes we need guidelines and all, but this work is mostly about us confronting ourselves so we can be clearer. We’ll each respond according to the situation, our school atmosphere, the individual child, etc. The “uniformity” if that is even applicable will be in our consistent response immediately. That is what I imagine at this point. Who knows? My thinking will likely evolve throughout the discussion.

      1. sabrina

        Jen,

        I love what you said:

        “I feel like this discussion is not going to yield a template or checklist, but more of a deeper awareness for each of us so that our ability to act in those moments where we absolutely need to act, will be informed by our own groundedness. ”

        So being grounded becomes a corollary of good discipline, and then and only then can the magic, the alchemy of CI unfold. Right?

        Don’t ask me how or what the ingredients of that magic are b/c IDK (but w/o discipline it can’t happen). That is why it’s called magic I guess. I just know how it feels but I can’t quite describe with words. I wish I could bottle that feeling b/c it doesn’t happen often, but enough to keep me yearning for more. I guess it is what keeps me going back to teaching when it’d be much easier to go back to work in the corporate world.

        Paradoxically, when the magic happens time becomes intemporal and space becomes ethereal, and/or vice versa. It feels like the moment transcends time and space and you are just there, with the kids, in total symbiosis.

        Is that what you mean by being grounded? I’ve got to get a handle on this discipline stuff so the magic can happen more. I think Yoga is a great place to start being grounded. Perhaps b/c breathing is so essential when practicing it.

        Nice morning ramble I guess.

  21. mb

    jen said:
    The “uniformity” if that is even applicable will be in our consistent response immediately

    CONSISTENCY = the one-size-fits-all

    Kids CRAVE consistency!!! they WANT borders; they believe it is their JOB to push us and push us to see how FAR they are ABLE to push us. They do this at home and wear their parents down, so they know that if they keep it up they (the kids) will win. Then they lose respect for you because you were no longer a responsible adult (responsible = teaching them right from wrong and making them accountable)
    I learned this from raising my own two children. I am now better as a mother (now that they are in their 20s!!!) since I have been a teacher. My own kids still try to push me, but they no longer win — and they are ADULTS!! I have learned to hold my ground. But, this comes from trial and error of working with high school students.

  22. mb

    I also need to add: as adults we are not to be ‘friends’ with kids, nor should we strive to be. I see too many teachers who “want the kids to like them”. NO! we NEED the kids to RESPECT us! then they will ‘like’ us. They may not like what we make them do, but they WILL like and respect us. (except the darn 4%ers who think we don’t know what we’re doing!!! because they just want lots of fill in the blanks tests that they have historically succeeded on!!!)
    They will respect us if we do not let things slide. I have had kids as freshmen who bitch and moan that I do not allow gum, food, drinks, cell phones “because other teachers do!!!” But, as juniors and seniors (sophomores are just so damn quirky – they don’t even know whether they are coming or going!!!) they yell at the lower classmen for being so disrespectful and “stupid – cuz it’s the school rules and Mrs. T’s rule!!!!” But, those upperclassmen also bitch and moan about teachers who let kids rule the classroom and let their control go because they are unable to learn in those classrooms.
    One thing I learned while student teaching, and I use ALL the time now, is this quote from my mentor teacher (who learned it from HER mentor teacher):
    “when you act like that you are taking away the rest of class’ opportunity to learn. Do NOT do that to your classmates. The rest of you – if you want a good grade in here, isn’t it necessary for you to LEARN?” and then let the peer pressure begin!!!

  23. Ben Slavic

    …the moment transcends time and space and you are just there, with the kids…

    This actually happens. I have called it the Pure Land and it doesn’t happen very often. But it is real. And it can’t be intellectualized but is a feeling. And it is worth it. And it will be different for each of us. But it is something to work for. I believe that the work James and I are doing on the templates/flow charts will facilitate the arrival of the Pure Land in our classrooms.

    Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/07/08/the-pure-land/

      1. John Piazza

        I too have caught fleeting glimpses of this Pure Land, and my students in one of my classes, the classes in which we have had some experience of this, will say to me, “can’t we end the year by just making up some crazy story?” And I hear that they are asking “can we return to the Pure Land?” But I also know that, at this point in the year, it just isn’t going to happen. But we did experience that together, and it really sticks with them.

        So, the question is, how do we consistently set the stage for blast-off into PL? Or is it even possible if we are actively “trying,” just like with acquisition?

        1. jen

          John, tell me if I am mistaken, but I think I remember you posting about the beginning of the year in your classes and you did a long period of community building to teach the rules and to get to know each other??? Was that you? I remember that in your post (or whoever posted it) you mentioned specifically not getting into a ton on language so that the focus was on the group and the process.

          I would love to hear more about what you did. Like, were you using any type of activities/games or were you pretty much riffing off the basics (cards, OWI, etc.) For me this seems like a critical piece to start the year and to establish how things work. Not only for the rules but for the core work of establishing the human components of “showing up” and creating an emotionally safe space. It seems like a process like this could also be something to use as a “reset” later in the year when things get squirrely. I think sometimes I assume a lot and the kids just have no practice or frame of reference for certain things like body language, tone of voice, eye contact, really listening to someone, practicing empathy. These are the real skills we are trying to model and help them gain. It is one thing to “emphasize interpersonal skills” but quite another to break them down and hold everyone accountable for learning/practicing them. I want to be really intentional next year about building community / dovetailing that in with the rules.

          1. Ben

            This is a response to jen, and involves Greg.

            In a post from mid-year titled The Triangle of Classroom Discipline, I identifiied these three things as crucial to classroom management:

            1. Classroom Rules
            2. jGR
            3. Jobs

            I thought that focusing on those three things would bring the classroom management we needed. Clearly it hasn’t, at least in the case of many in this PLC.

            So, in a recent comment, I added four more possible classroom management strategies so that the entire list that I was going to suggest that James create a template for:

            4. Instant phone call to parent during class.
            5. Instant removal of the offending kid to another classroom as per our Lincoln system.
            6. Constant confrontation of my own inability to avoid using English in the classroom, which is the source of most discipline problems in the CI classroom.
            7. Student Secretary (Job #27 at the Jobs for Kids link, I think), described by Judy and Leigh Anne (I could be wrong on this put what Leigh Anne said about how useful this job is really got my attention.)

            The problem is that these are strategies. They purportedly focus on function (you would have needed to have followed the entire Form and Function discussion to appreciate this) but aren’t they more focused on form?

            Strategies are really about form, aren’t they?

            What is function about in teaching? No, what is it REALLY about? What does it mean to even study how a CI classroom FUNCTIONS? How do we make our classrooms function properly so we can unleash the CI beast in our classrooms next year?

            Jody in a phone call yesterday gave me an insight into these questions, and Jody correct me if I heard you incorrectly:

            Classroom management is an intangible. It is a quality of spirit, almost. It is having natural limits with others, not just in the classroom but in life. If we know how to set limits with others, we can set limits with our
            students, but, unfortunately, the opposite is true.

            I have a colleague who clearly appears to be afraid of something going wrong during class. There is a lot of energy spent controlling. It is painful to watch because that used to be me. She really thinks something bad will happen if she lets go of total control of the class.

            (Teachers who work this way, always needing to control everything, cannot make CI work, in my opinion. They will grossly misread a lot of what is said on this blog, for example about jGR, because everything said on this blog presumes that the teacher is not running around the classroom trying to get kids to shut up and pay attention. In real CI classrooms, kids pay attention because they want to. In such classrooms, the teacher drops the bullshit facade of control in favor of real control, which takes the form of honestly involved students who
            are constantly focused on the meaning and not the words and who exhibit enjoyment as they acquire the language in classrooms that honor at the same time they make fun of being a human being.)

            Fearfully using control is no way to teach with CI – the kids see straight through it. It works in traditional classrooms, where you just smash down the kid who doesn’t really give a rip what the past participle agrees with, but it doesn’t work in a CI classroom, where that wonderful lighthearted feeling of mild joy happens as soon as the CI gets going, so people become real, which shocks the shit out of everybody. (And then some kids – and parents – can’t handle it and start to push back with their rebel call of “We want worksheets!”).

            The teacher I mentioned cannot access her own personal power and therefore probably would be better off in another career. She cannot access her own personal power and therefore probably would be better off in another career. I just wanted to say that twice.

            She can’t set limits so she resorts to threats. Extra credit comes in as a control device and so she has to work harder. The kids dislike her. And yet she is a good CI teacher, in terms of the method. But that doesn’t mean shit if she doesn’t know how to relax.

            It can be said that this teacher has the form down and she may use jGR, and other strategies that I have tied to function, but, to go back to Jody’s point that real function is BEYOND mere function and has to do with a quality we possess about setting limits with others, I would like to paste in here something I just now received in an email from Jody about this topic:

            …I’ve never met a child whose life was changed by a technique. I have, however, met many whose lives were transformed by the encouragement they received from relationships with their parents and their teachers….

            Jody comments:

            This quote is from Love and Logic Institute who, of course, are all about approaches and techniques. They DO come down clearly on the side of RELATIONSHIP in the discussion, however. The question for teachers is not really “What techniques will help me maintain order and rigor in my classroom?” as much as “What are ways to have healthy, authentic, personal relationships with each one of my students when there are so many of them and I have “to teach” them all?” Encouragement over Techniques because Transformation is our true goal.

            So we can say that no techniques or strategies, even jGR, are likely to work with kids IN LANGUAGE CLASSES without the proper personal power in place behind the strategy.

            One would then rightly conclude that classroom management via jGR and the other six things I listed above are totally dependent on the strength of presence the teacher brings to the classroom.

            So, in a way, I am taking that quote above and extending it into a simple sentence: If we don’t know how to set limits with teens, then we will not be able to encourage them, because they will control the dialogue.

            The teacher I mentioned above who doesn’t know how to relax and engage (read: encourage) the kids, even though she does the techniques of CI really well, and has for twenty years (!), just looks so frazzled all the time.

            I cannot grasp why it is that we work so hard and give all of our lives over to dealing with detail and strategies connected to CI instruction, all the acronyms here, when we have a method that doesn’t require that kind of fretting over detail.

            Now, mind you, I am so far in the upper teeeny weeny upper right hand corner of What If? in the Myers Briggs test that I cannot possibly be expected to function like a CI teacher without the acronyms. I am about as concrete sequential as a lake at dawn in Japan with a bunch of monks meditating around it, making the waves even flatter. I don’t have a logical brain in my body.

            It is a handicap, no doubt, but it has the advantage of allowing me to not worry too much about anything but relaxing and having fun with my students in the target language, again with the crutches of the acronyms since I need structure.

            We are starting to talk too much about detail here, y’all. We are losing sight of the big CI picture here on this blog. I don’t want to do the reductio ad absurdum dance here. This is a place to clear our minds, not complexify them.

            I am also a Taurus, and I will keep the discussion here on Classroom Management next year until it gets to some point of resolution. (Jody suggested that we avoid the word discipline here because who knows what each of us hears when we hear that word. I will use Classroom Management more on this topic in general.)

            The one thing that keeps occuring to me as I read the comments is how hard everybody is working. That’s messed up. It took me 36 years to get to a point where I just relax, but I can honestly say that I’m hardly working. Yes, it helps to be half time, but I earned it. I just did stories for the final. I was testing three Matava stories and they all rocked.

            During the finals I continue to work on setting boundaries with the kids. I actively use everything I can think of that we have discussed over the past amazing year here together. I continue to gently require that my students sit in the way I tell them to sit and I continue to enforce the Classroom Rules and jGR.

            But thanks to my talk with Jody yesterday I am able to see that I could implement a hundred great strategies for classroom management, yet, nless I have that personal power to confront bullshit in my kids, unless I know when they are crossing the line with me and instantly stop teaching and call them on it in a loving way, I will not unleash the CI beast.

            In fact, do you know why TPRS is scoffed at by so many traditional teachers (besides their being afraid of it)? It is because teachers who lack the personal power to lovingly confront assholes in their classrooms get run over by such kids and then the observors say that the method doesn’t work when it is not the method at all that is failing, but the teacher who is too weak to make it work. How fucked up is that?

            I don’t know, y’all. I think we are making this too hard. We think that because our own teachers got all fucked up frazzled when we were students, we have to do the same. But, like Greg said, it is all dysfunctional and the cycle has to stop somewhere. He is so right! Teaching using CI is not about being frazzled!

            It goes back to the simplicity thread that John and I are so much into, a thread that doesn’t receive any attention here because we are all so frazzled. I kid you not. I am rested and ready for summer. Because of my grading system, that we talked about this year alot, where I focus on formative quizzes* and jGR numbers for grades, I have no work here at the end of the year, and the kids have been assessed much more accurately than ever before!

            *I thought of another way to grade formatively. I thought of it during an exam today. I just have the kids take out a sheet of paper and write down the translations of five sentence randomly that occur during the creation of the story. If they can do that, they get a ten since I double grades of 0-5 up to a ten scale. This could replace or add to the existing Quick Quiz plan that many of us now use.

            So let’s reflect here at the end of the year on the statement that both form (stories, CWB, going SLOW, not using English, all that stuff) and function (those seven things above) cannot work for us until we learn to find our own personal power as human beings with other people – we can practice on regular people over the summer.

            It is so true, what Jody sent me from Love and Logic, that Encouragement (which for me means setting limits with kids first before we can encourage them) over Techniques is the only way we can get to Transformation in our teaching.

            In fact, just to ramble way out of the river banks for a moment, and I know jen will resonate with this, it is highly possible that we even BECAME teachers because hanging out all day with kids who don’t know limits, when we don’t know limits ourselves, is a sure fire formula for making us learn limits. We needed to learn limits with other people so we chose teaching – that is very true for me personally. Name a harder profession in terms of dealing with other people’s crap. I dare you.

            jen asked John a question earlier today. It was about deliberately addressing behaviors with the students before even starting in with CWB. I think we should, jen. I have done it in the eight years that I taught middle school – I found it necessary at that level. Maybe it is time for me to think about doing it – deliberately AND intentionally training them in social behaviors.

            The training I used in middle school is based on Jeanne Gibbes’ work with Tribes: A Program for Social Development. We can work on this together via private email jen, if you want. I don’t have time to go into
            it now, as I want to keep this comment under 50,000 words, but it would require a complete retooling of the first months, mixing into the CWB program some of us already do in August this great stuff by Jeanne Gibbes.

            I agree that we must directly teach our students how to behave in a specific way (addressing social behaviors intentionally) and not a general way (posting rules). In that sense, even your rubric is not enough. So let’s talk about that.

            End of rant.

          2. John Piazza

            Jen,

            That was me who was talking at the beginning of the year about focusing on very few structures, and really teaching and reinforcing the rules, as long as it took. I realize in retrospect that I didn’t do this enough. I got impatient with my students’ impatience (my “problem” class contains a lot of squirrely 4%ers, and they wanted a challenge, they wanted “rigor,” they like worksheets, they love to race each other on the worksheets) and I gave in to temptation, and even in these last weeks of school, I am still fighting them daily. And they know that I won’t do anything about it, not this year, maybe not next year. My spine is absent with this group. They have won, for now.

            And Ben’s words really resonate with me: no procedure, no protocol, no classroom gimmick will help me if I don’t have the courage to respond and set limits, every time those limits have been crossed. Teachers have cause and effect reversed: we foolishly think that appropriate content and protocol will take care of our classroom management problems. Keep them busy, and they won’t have time to get in trouble, we say, or hope. Then we choose materials and activities based on what we think will improve the classroom environment. But it’s the reverse. If we don’t set limits, no content can be truly learned.

            So I too will continue to focus on simplicity and function: At the beginning of the year, I will have 3 things:
            1. the rules posted on the wall
            2. student cards
            2. a word wall of about 30 useful words.

            I am preparing to spend 2 months on just those (call it OWI, call it CWB, PQA, PMS, etc.) using a limited set of structures as a means to enforcing the limits and class rules. It’s too easy to hide behind activities, procedures, techniques. But there is no hiding when you’re up there in front of the class. You either step up or back down.

            I hope this helps.

  24. Ben Slavic

    This is an update of a comment made yesterday. A seventh point – borrowed from Leigh Anne in a comment she made – was added, because of its potential (I think the original idea is from Judy). James please take note if we are planning a template on Classroom Management.

    So far:

    MB
    jen
    Ben
    Jeff

    That’s enough. We will take this Form and Function thing, and extract an acronym to keep us focused (how can there be focus without acronyms on a site like this with almost 22,000 comments now?). I think the acronym is going to be something like dVC – Discipline Via Confrontation. I am going to list those six things from that other comment as key to dVC. And discipline via confrontation is not just about just confronting the kids – it really means that we must discipline ourselves by confronting ourselves to do the right thing for ourselves in our classroom to assure that the discipline piece is in place and functioning at the highest level before we can even think about doing CI in its various forms. Therefore, I repeat these six strategies that the four of us can focus on in the fall, and I invite James to find a way to eventually get us a flow chart on this Form and Function/dVC thread. So here are the six pieces that I suggest will lead to sufficient dVC in the fall:

    1. Classroom Rules
    2. jGR
    3. vCU
    4. instant phone call to parent during class.
    5. instant removal of the offending kid to another classroom as per our Lincoln system.
    6. Constant confrontation of my own inability to avoid using English in the classroom, which is the source of most discipline problems in the CI classroom.
    7. Student Secretary (Job #27 at the Jobs for Kids link, I think), described by Leigh Anne:

    The one job, a point-keeper, seemed to me to be the most helpful thing for jGR. The kid adds points or takes away points on your behalf. You can get a pretty good idea of who is volunteering ideas, etc. Students can use a spreadsheet, if you want accuracy.

    I am thinking, for next year, maybe having my point keeper write a ‘T’ if they see any side conversations, after first establishing that when a particular student gets a particular number of ‘T’s, they will have a private chat with me. I don’t know….

    Does anyone use the point keeper as a way to keep track of all sorts of things?

    My point keepers were scrupulously consistent and responsible.

    After posting the jGR and going over it a few times, for 6 weeks, they received their grades. Wow! That was when they knew that my class was ‘for real.’ They really did need to do what I said in order to get an ‘A.’

  26. Darren Drago

    This is great stuff! Discipline precedes instruction…….. not having a spine precedes discipline. It is up to us! If we put everything in place then we will not fear and we have a better chance to confront.

  27. Nathaniel

    There are several references to vCU. I have concluded from the above that vCU is “focus on the choral response.” Have I concluded correctly? This sounds important but I need a clearer picture of what is happening in the class. What am I actually doing in the class? Is this a subcategory of jGR? Is it something different?

  28. Ben Slavic

    It’s different, a skill that is in some ways without peer in importance. All it means is that, in addition to the other plates we must keep spinning in the CI air (SLOW, Staying in Bounds, Circling, Staying in the Target Language, etc.) we absolutely must get a choral response from our class to each question we ask. That is as per Blaine and Von – you will never see either of them demo a class without insisting on strong choral one word responses from everyone in the classroom all the time. What happens with most of us is that we forget to hold the students to this behavior, and slowly a few students take over, we forget them, forgetting the rest who then fade out, and after awhile we have a split class. A huge skill that few of us do enough. I certainly don’t. Here’s the link:

    https://benslavic.com/blog/checking-for-understanding-we-verify-by-asking-more-yn-and-one-word-answer-questions-than-we-ever-thought-we-could/

  29. Sean Lawler

    Well, reading this thread has been like reading a juicy Romance-Novel-page-turner for me today. It is a Friday in December and I feel like I lost my spine. I usually work on grades on Friday after school but who cares about that if I don’t have students sitting up, quietly listening, chorally responding, and showing me their eyes. Today I didn’t.

    No more. So, it’s going to be assigned seats, bags and books on the floor, feet on the floor (argh!), and sitting up straight. I don’t know how I let these things go.

    It’s a tricky balance; being relaxed and listening to students while at the same time redirecting them to consistently exhibit the learning behaviors. I don’t believe that all is lost. I fully believe that I can get my classes to experience this Pure Land you speak of. I believe this because I suspect I’ve already taken students to a level of engagement that they’ve not quite experienced yet in their years of schooling. I’ve already brought them up, even if not where I want them to be, and so I’ve already exercised that brain muscle in their teenage heads that’s been flaccid for too long. I just need to keep exercising it.

      1. Sean Lawler

        I’ve been reading your comments about the Ten Minute Bursts and the quick quizzes. The quick quizzes I’m starting to implement more readily in the middle of my 90 min class periods during PQA and story sessions. I’m also learning how to make them go buy quick (although repeating the question with the target structure over and over again to a silent, listening classroom serves our repetition purpose, no?)

        There really isn’t any bad will or negativity going on with my students. It’s more about the inability of many of them to exercise self-control from side-conversations and blurting out. I have to consistently remember what my students deal with in their social environments and be sure to be a consistent, warm, steady, and caring presence with a spine for them everyday.

  30. melissa sadler

    I have let the choral response slide. What is your advice to put my backbone where it belongs and start again next semester? Is it possible? Do I just jump in and expect them to respond and when they don’t wait and point to the rule or should I talk to them about it first?

  31. Ben Slavic

    Melissa I am not certain that I still agree with my statement to Greg last May about choral response:

    “We don’t get a good choral response on our yes/n0 questions because we lack spine.”

    Honestly, I find that I just can’t remember to insist on choral responses from the class. And when I forget, of course the kids forget because I am the one who has to cue them on everything.

    It is probably because I never insisted on strong choral responses when I was learning how to do this kind of teaching years ago with Susan Gross, and so I can’t do it now. Plus, I am so busy trying to remember all the other stuff.

    So maybe it’s not that we lack spine when we don’t do choral responses, it’s perhaps just not something that we remember to do. Von and Blaine have been doing it forever, so it is in their teaching muscle memory, but this is not true for me.

  32. chris stolz

    I also had to grow a spine and it’s thanks to Blaine: no strong choral response = people either not tuned in or not understanding, both of which = problems.

    My essentials: sit up, desks clear, eyes on me, no fiddling, no side talking, strong choral responses, and if either class or an individual kid cannot answer, I go back and clarify. This takes care of 90% of problems.

    The other 10% is me being lazy. I can ham it up and build stories on the fly, which is also a weakness: kids get bored with pqa and stories. So when my superstars start getting antsy I know it’s time for novel reading, movietalk, picturetalk, dictado or whatever.

  33. mb

    My friend just posted this quote on FB, and thought it was very appropriate to this thread:

    “You teach people how to treat you by what you ALLOW, what you STOP, and what you REINFORCE” ~~Tony Gaskins (whoever he is)

  34. Ben Slavic

    …You teach people how to treat you by what you ALLOW, what you STOP, and what you REINFORCE….

    This is not something teachers do easily. It took me over twenty years in the classroom to get this. Now I immediately stop behavior that I don’t want to see, with no thought in my mind of continuing the instruction until the behavior has changed. I do this in a kind way, but behind my words is a bitchy edge born of deep knowledge that we live in an out of control society and that kids have lost all sense of respect as weak teachers have allowed themselves to be played like violins by children.

    When I see classrooms where teachers continue teaching while kids talk and ignore them, it kind of blows my mind. I want to run in the room and challenge everyone in there. How can teachers who don’t enforce rules of behavior engage their classes? It’s not a game. Discipline precedes instruction. (credit: Susan Gross)

    Thus what Chris said yesterday is something we should all strive for:

    …my essentials: sit up, desks clear, eyes on me, no fiddling, no side talking, strong choral responses, and if either class or an individual kid cannot answer, I go back and clarify. This takes care of 90% of problems….

    I may not get a nice choral response each time, but I do have kids who behave.

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