Classroom management isn’t micromanagement.
It isn’t narration and correction. It isn’t guiding, advising, or praising students through every this and that.
It isn’t shepherding them like little soldiers from point A to point B.
This is handholding—which is a gross misunderstanding of effective classroom management. It’s also terrible for students.
Yet, it’s remarkably common.
In fact, most teachers and administrators consider the combination of these tactics good classroom management. After all, they can keep a lid on an otherwise unruly classroom.
But handholding severely limits social and academic development.
Here’s how:
It removes purpose.
When students aren’t free to follow directions and pursue objectives without your frequent input, they turn their brains off. Their very purpose, which is the driving force behind intrinsic motivation, is ripped from their hands.
Purpose, weight, responsibility, ambition . . . these feel good and are the key to making students awake and alive. They provide confidence and eagerness to tackle difficult challenges.
Take these away and you create either good little lemmings who brainlessly robot their way through each day or massively frustrated students, bitter over having their agency erased.
It creates immaturity.
When you do for students what they can do for themselves, you communicate loud and clear that they can’t. You tell them that you don’t trust them, that you don’t think they’re good enough, old enough, or sharp enough.
Treated like babies, they behave like babies. Their maturity level regresses because they aren’t given enough freedom to learn, grow, and develop.
Unused, muscles atrophy. The difference between a classroom run by a teacher who handholds and one whose teacher knows how to shift responsibility is light years.
It encourages learned helplessness.
With the teacher on top of everything, not only making all decisions but talking, praising, and ushering students through every lesson and routine, students lose the ability to think for themselves.
When the weight is lifted from their shoulders, they become vegetative. They go through the motions. Their mind drifts and daydreams. They check out.
And when it’s time to get to work on their own, they require reteaching, restating, reminding, and mollycoddling. They need to be personally pushed and prodded to take any responsibility.
They need to be peanut-butter-spoon-fed like a stubborn newborn puppy.
It induces boredom.
Without purpose, without responsibility and imagination, without freedom to try and succeed or fail, life becomes tedious. It becomes dreary and hardly worth the effort.
Students, in such an environment, either grow sleepy or excitable. They tune out or they look for more interesting things to occupy their mind, like tapping, joking, or poking and bothering the student next to them.
This is why you see so many teachers stopping mid routine or mid lesson to deal with yet another squirming student or interruption. This is why they look out on a sea of slinking bodies and melting faces.
It produces resentment.
Have you ever watched a sporting event on TV and the announcer talked so much it ruined the experience? Or been on a tour and the guide limited your freedom to walk and enjoy the sights without their constant chatter?
This is how students feel all day with a handholding teacher. They become so stifled and defeated and tired of being steered and baby-talked that they become resentful.
This is why the nicest people in the outside world can be so disliked when they step in front of a classroom to teach. It’s also why students become less and less motivated as the year goes on.
Too much teacher always equals unhappy students.
What To Do Instead
The fix isn’t difficult. In fact, it’s so much easier than handholding (which is an exhausting way to teach) that it’s almost like doing a different job.
It also results in happy, engaged, independent, mature, and purpose-driven students. The opposite of the above.
So what is it?
It’s to teach what you want in a highly detailed way, check thoroughly for understanding, and then shift responsibility in toto over to your students to do the work, perform the routine, meet in groups, solve for x, participate in discussions, etc, etc, etc.
While you observe from a distance.
There is a lot to this topic, including how to empower your students to take full advantage of the freedom (within boundaries) you give them. When you get a chance, please check out the Learning & Independence category of the archive at right.
We’ll also be sure to revisit this crucial principle of SCM in future articles.
In the meantime, if you haven’t done so already, please join us. It’s free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.
First graders? Please give specificity. Thanks!
How do you accomplish this at the beginning of Kindergarten when the students don’t know how to do anything independently? Do you have an article or a book to address this?
Thank you,
Thank you for being the published voice of reason many of us have known for so long. I hope your words plant seeds into the minds of the extrinsic motivators and pedagogy swings in the direction of the intrinsic purpose driven theories of classroom management.
Principal at a regular elementary school with a subgroup of verbally abusive and physically violent students would handhold same as she escorted them around the school, and into other classrooms, while doing her daily business. She even brought one handheld, foul-mouthed boy who had previously punched an administrator into a classroom to observe and disrupt their honoring the tragic death of the K9 partner of an officer. In addition, she gave the subgroup reward parties with pizza, chips, cookies, and soda tables set up in the community hallway leading to the gymnasium even though there was a “no food” policy for all schools set by the School Board. She felt permitted to do this under the guise of “principal discretion.” Years later, people assumed her contract was not renewed.
Thank you. I fully agree. I battle this each year with my incoming third-graders. The first month is always rough with the tough love, but I push the responsibility onto them. They are perfectly capable!
I have 3rd graders too, and this article has opened my eyes to a place I feel I can improve. I would love to hear a few of your specifics on tough love- I’m not sure what first steps to take to reduce “micromanaging”.
I have been a teacher for 41 one years. I just retired at the end of July. But there is, so much I still wanted to share with my students. I don’t regret it. It is like a lost oppertunity. Carpe deum (hope I spelled it correct) is a reality when you are a teacher. And I tried to share that with friends and colleagues. But they don’t seem to understand that every moment is an opportunity to reach out and touch a spirit, a challenge, to be able to get across the child. I really enjoy each of your emails and am always looking forward to the next.
Beautifully said. Thank You!
This is awesome, but can you give ways to do this.
Thanks for the timely reminder, Michael!
Quite a few years ago, I discovered Michael Linsin and SCM. I spent an entire Saturday reading every article in the archives. And I’ve been a disciple of the method ever since because it works.
This would be my advice for those of you here who are asking for more information. Read through the archives! They will give you the answers you’re looking for. And it’s free!
You can also buy Michael’s books, which are great. But I’d start with the archives. Just pick an article and jump in!
I’m just an aide but I have opportunities to do this and I admit I still find myself mothering the “special students ” in particular when they need to be challenged to try too, just as any of the students should. Thanks for the reminder to stop mothering so much as well as ease back on the constant praise. I know in my heart that after awhile it’s not even heard. This was a much needed article for me.
Please don’t say ‘just an aide’. You have such an important job!
How different is it for kindergarten? I believe you suggested that the Smart Classroom Rules be sort of condensed for kinder and you suggested to possibly skip the letter home bc kinder students sometimes forget why they received the letter. So how much freedom and responsibility is realistic for kinder? What are the expectations for 5 year olds?
Thanks!
Jan
Hi Michael,
How do we implement this, without having a me against them situation, if we are team teaching and the other teacher is constantly barking? Also, being a high school teacher, it’s hard to break the mindset of helplessness when that’s how they are trained by other teachers the rest of the day. Is there something we can do about this?
Your articles on letting students’ autonomy and sense of purpose flourish are my favorites. Thanks, Michael!
I notice some readers asking about kindergarten. I teach older students, but I know a fantastic and experienced kindergarten teacher, and she would say it takes time. Very young children are still learning to recognize and name their feelings and to understand what others around them might be thinking and feeling. But like older children (and all of us), they need opportunities to exercise the muscles of self-direction and self-regulation. For ideas about what that could look like, maybe check out Tools of the Mind, or a play-based preschool program, or a great kindergarten teacher’s classroom. There’s a lot of research on how imaginative play is important to young children’s development — in part because it gives them the freedom to test out choices and learn their consequences, instead of just being told what to do.
Hi I’m new to your blog , thanks for your great articles!!!!
I can understand what you are saying. I agree with your comment on making students responsible. That is the main idea in teaching. However, with the populations today, some form of handholding is necessary in order to reach the goal. Forms of handholding is an attempt to develop purpose, maturity and to increase student responsibility. When guiding and advising, it is to be done is such a way that the student actually makes the decision as to correct decision or the correct choice is.
For me handholding is great to use. But also, there are times when it should not be used in order to measure growth and in especially the young child.