In their book, Made To Stick, authors Chip and Dan Heath describe the story of Jane Elliott. Jane was a third-grade teacher on April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Struggling to explain the tragedy to her students, Jane decided to try something unusual. She separated her class by eye color.
She placed the brown-eyed students in the front of the room and the blue-eyed students in back.
She then explained that the brown-eyed students were smarter and superior to the blue-eyed students and therefore would be allowed extra recess. The blue-eyed students were told that they had to wear special collars around their necks to mark them as inferior.
What happened next affected the students deeply.
The brown-eyed students started discriminating against the blue-eyed students. They became “nasty” and “vicious” and taunted those wearing collars. Within a single school day, friendships were lost.
The following day, Jane reversed the experiment. She told her class she had made a mistake; the blue-eyed students were the superior group. Upon hearing this, those with blue eyes cheered and ran to place the collars on their now-inferior brown-eyed classmates.
While in the inferior group, students described feeling “sad,” “bad,” “stupid,” and “mean.” They were so affected by the negative label that even their academic performance dropped.
Studies done on Jane’s students ten and twenty years later showed that they were “significantly less prejudice than their peers who had not been through the exercise.”
What Jane Elliot did was remarkable. She took something abstract to her students—discrimination—and turned it into a concrete experience.
This made her lesson stick.
Making Classroom Management Sticky
One reason why teachers struggle with behavior is because of the way classroom management is typically presented to students. Traditional approaches like directed teaching and lecture style are slippery, conceptual, and hard for students to grasp.
When it comes to classroom management, scratch-the-surface teaching isn’t going to cut it. To make your rules, expectations, and procedures sticky, they must be made into an experience.
Here are two simple steps that do just that:
(1) You Show Them How
This is a critical first step to experiential teaching and one of the most powerful strategies you can use. To get your students to meet your expectations and behave as you desire, you must show them exactly what you want.
Have your students follow you as you go through the process of turning in homework or lining up to go to recess or being asked to go to time-out. Walk them through every detail. Show them how a good student listens, learns, and behaves.
Put yourself in their shoes—literally. Wear your hair different, put on clothes popular with your students, carry a backpack. These props lend authenticity and detail to the experience and act as hooks along a memory map.
(2) They Show You How
Now it’s time for your students to practice what they’ve learned. Have them show you how to turn in homework, line up, or go to time-out.
Test them on it.
What does good listening look like? How do you ask a question? Show me how you get ready for literature circles. What does it look like to break rule number three? Make them prove to you they understand your rules and procedures by actually performing them.
Classroom management is more effective when students are able to experience what you want from them—rather than merely being told what you want.
Time consuming? It’s good teaching. Go through both steps every time you teach a rule or procedure, and you’ll be happy with the results.
Further Reading
Although primarily a book about marketing, Made To Stick is a good resource for teachers. It covers six qualities you can use to make your lessons stickier.
For more information on experiential teaching, there is an entire chapter devoted to it in the book Dream Class. It’s called, “Show Them How.”
Also, I mentioned in passing that Jane Elliott’s experiment resulted in lower academic scores for those in the inferior group. If you want to know how to do the opposite: raise test scores by changing how your students think, see the chapter titled “Transform Limiting Beliefs.”
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How to make classroom management effective