Once in a great while, especially in the first few weeks of the school year, your students may test you to see if you really, really do mean what you say.
Or sometimes there is bad luck involved . . .
- A fire drill.
- Arrival of new students.
- Wi-Fi outage.
- Hard rain against the windows.
Anything unexpected can stir up excitability and incite an increase misbehavior. And you can’t run away scared. No matter what, you still must follow through calmly.
As an SCM teacher, this is nonnegotiable.
Fulfilling your promises will go a long way toward limiting any surprise disruption and getting back to work. The worst thing you can do is show frustration, lecture your class, or bypass your classroom management plan.
Still, your class—or a portion of your class—may have showed a lack of maturity. Maybe they spontaneously ran to the windows or they started yelling and getting out of their seats in reaction to the fire alarm.
Even if it’s a momentary disruption, you can’t just let it go. Not only do you want to avoid something similar from happening again, but it’s an opportunity to get better.
So what follows are three steps that do just that.
1. Review
Review what happened like a small town newspaper reporter. Don’t mention any names. Just stick to the facts and recap in detail, leaving nothing out.
It’s most critical that you don’t show displeasure. You can even be matter of fact. Modeling is okay too. The key to this step is for students to see what happened objectively and through your eyes.
2. State
Step two is to simply state that such behavior isn’t okay and will never be accepted. Even though you’ve already taught your classroom management plan, and have followed through consistently, they need to hear you say it.
Then pause. Let your words hang in the air. Though you won’t show irritation or annoyance, your class must see your seriousness and commitment to high standards.
3. Practice
Now have your class show you how they should have behaved. Depending on your grade level, you may have to first model what you expect.
Give your ‘go’ signal and allow 30 seconds to a minute of correct, mature behavior. Yes, it may just be sitting in their seats quietly. It may be lining up to leave the classroom. No matter, let them prove they understand.
Good News
In most cases, the three steps should take about five minutes. But even if it takes longer, it’s worth it.
Again, it’s an opportunity to push the maturity envelop. It raises the bar on overall classroom behavior and personal discipline. You can even view bad moments and sudden increases in misbehavior as good news.
It’s important to mention, however, that it’s best not to complete the three steps right away. Allow for at least a couple of hours. The next day is often best.
This allows students to view the situation and their role in it with a calm heart and fresh set of eyes.
After step three, praise them for doing it right and then move on to the next lesson or activity as if nothing happened. It’s fixed and the burden has now shifted in total to your students to handle similar situations better the next time.
And they will.
PS – I’ll be speaking next month at the Rise Up Summit, which is a free online conference for Christian educators. To check it out and sign up, click here.
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Thanks. They were doing well & then picture day caused a chunk of a couple of my classes to lose their minds. Now I know what we’re doing when we have class on Tues.
What about the kids who did what they are supposed to do? They shouldn’t have to practice with the class, but leaving them out and only making the ones who misbehaved do it seems to cause resentment towards the ones who chose correctly.
The well behaved students appreciate when you act on poor behaviour. And it won’t occur over and over.
I have a class who will just keep talking over me (or shouting over me) and I can’t get control again. I use three tiles and 3 step consequences but what do we do when the entire class.is out of control? I can’t move every single seat or out everyone in a time out or call everyone’s parents!
Actually you can. I had a class like that behave poorly the first day. I sent a kid to go get the vice principal (no phone in the room) to quiet them down so I could go over the rules. Then on my planning period I quickly called every single parent and left voicemails. The students were much better behaved the next day.
How did you phrase it to the parents? What words did you use? Many thanks!
I really appreciate the time you take to write these articles – they are invaluable to me.
I would like to share my opinion on the topic of saying sorry in these matters. We teach our kids how to give a pure apology.
That apology doesn’t link our bad behavior to someone else’s (as if we can share the blame of our behavior).
We are each 100% responsible, all the way through life, for our behavior.
So when one kid hits another, the apology isn’t, “I’m sorry for hitting you when you pushed my block tower over!”
Instead, a pure apology says, “It was wrong for me to hit you – I’m sorry.”
That leaves the other kid 100% responsible for their action, too, and doesn’t put them on the defensive, because their bad behavior wasn’t mentioned.
Right away would be the time to take steps to correction the misbehavior, even if modeling is put off for later. What went wrong is still fresh and you can even assign a group to bring suggestions as to how to model the correct/desired response. Later they will have forgotten what happened or how it happened.
We had everything you named including picture day. Dressing up fancy just put everyone over the edge with excitement! When I see kids come in like that, still amped up, we spend a few minutes calming down and then talk about why we are so excited and what happened. It seems to help by getting it out of their systems.