Things happen. Interruptions fall from the sky.
Events and incidents out of your control invade your well-ordered peace like the hordes of Cimbri.
A fire alarm. A student yelling outside your classroom. A schedule change. A recess downpour. Colleagues you count on drop the ball. Lost connectivity. Loud construction. Power outage. The food never arrives.
And hundreds of other possibilities. It can make you want to run crazed and screaming for the exit.
Instead, you hold it together.
But your insides roil. Your vision narrows. Your face tightens. You search your mind for a fast solution, for a ready salve to smooth the rising tide of impatience and excitability riling up your students.
You must make a decision now. Or else the wheels will come tumbling off as the rickety bridge comes into view. Ahhhhh! Hang on tight!
Being in the midst of it with 24 or 30 students staring at you and expecting you to fix everything can be overwhelming. Furthermore, your rising stress will cause you to make poor decisions.
Your present mood and disposition also transfer to your students. The more anxious and frustrated you feel, the worse they’ll behave.
So what’s the solution?
Well, here at SCM we’ve long promoted the benefits of maintaining a professional distance—from students, from the job, and from situations out of your control.
This way, by staying out of the narrow frame and backing out into a broader view of the world, you’re better able to make decisions and less prone to react emotionally when things don’t go your way.
This underscores the importance of relying on a classroom management plan, calmly following through, and beginning each day with a steady and confident mental state through morning visualization.
If you’ve never done this before or you’re new to teaching, keeping professional distance is one of the best things you can do to enjoy and prolong your career.
But it takes work. It takes daily practice. It takes discipline to work at it every day until it becomes second nature.
Over time, however, not only will it become your default personality—even if you’re normally a nervous sort outside of school—you’ll become the Dalai Lama in stressful situations.
For those who practice the discipline of never getting too invested or deep in the emotive weeds, unexpected events act as a trigger to draw back, run cooler, and breathe deeper. To become more relaxed and see the big picture.
The motivation of which goes beyond just feeling better at the end of the day. You see, allowing for mental space between you and potential stressors will result in clearer thinking. There might be chaos swirling around you, but you’ll still be a cocoon of clarity and focus.
And here’s what I’ve discovered: You’ll able to quickly choose the right path. You’ll be able to detour, get the needed information to your students, and move on without a hitch.
Yes, the unexpected will still strike at the worst possible time. But it will no longer ruin the moment, let alone your whole day. A penny on the tracks, nothing more.
Then off you go over the bridge and to the other side.
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I weakened in the moment yesterday. Lost my planning period and didn’t have time to prep for my lesson. Covered a class that kept me focused on their behavior. And felt the wheels falling off when I returned to class.
Thanks for this reminder, Michael.
I am interested in knowing more about this idea of professional distance, of not being too emotionally invested. How to stay calm when kids are interrupting and even insulting each other (saying “rats” under his breath or “shut up”). Or asking to leave to use the bathroom in the middle of class when i asked them to go before coming into intervention. They know its policy but they ask to go when bored and i insist one at a time but even so i need to remind them of my policy. Giving them two warnings and then parent contact isn’t enough. With the younger groups for the phonics games i am having them stand in the first part of the lesson as a signal its okay to talk now (because talking is part of it), and then we sit and raise hands during the subsequent reading time. But some still get squirrely and even try to sit under or on their desks. Yes, I haven’t been teaching long. I want to stay calm and pleasant, but i feel like my classroom management is ineffective at times. Professional distance? Don’t take their behavior personally and keep insisting on kindness and give a yellow card to each and every word or noise of chairs being scraped or pencil being tapped? Yellow card if get up without permission. One child claims she has ADD and needs to stand at back of room but then she moved around and we have a tiny room so this bugs another girl who says it is unfair and distracting. This ADD may just be an excuse. I want to smile and not get rattled and calm so visualizing how I respond is a good idea. Anyone have suggestions for a relatively new teacher who is teaching groups of all grades, k5-6?
Just keep working on being consistent and read articles from smart classroom management that are related to your questions. For the ADD, find out if she has an IEP or 504 (maybe ask classroom teacher). If she does, you may be required to make Accomodations and will want to see the document. If not, you may want to talk to her classroom teacher for ideas and/or find ways to build movement breaks into the time you have with them.
Thanks for the advice! I think the thing that also will help me the most is eye contact. I am supposed to be reading these scripts but I would prefer to memorize all the lessons and give the gist of them because i think the kids really need to be looked at so I can see how they are tracking. Reading lesson scripts doesn’t seem to work well for me. I think our eyes, and pausing and waiting is vital. Does that make sense? I have to prepare lessons for 7 grades so i cant memorize it all, but I don’t like reading scripts. Does anyone else struggle with having to follow a set script?
Since 2004, when required to use scripts, I use a fun accent for the script lines, then paraphrase it in a sweet Southern accent that I use with my West Virginian husband…when I want him to be “receptive.” (Ha!) The scripts are Upper Register (Think Ruby P.)
My “say it plain” is middle register …fun and friendly. Heck…sometimes I even take it right on down to the slang and ask for someone in the ‘crowd’ to paraphrase it. This is the true test of comprehension…The ability to put it in “your own words.”
A lot of the lingo in the script is imperative, because the curriculum is going to use the same verbiage throughout the year….so, it’s important the kids learn those terms.
You’re on stage…be entertaining…have fun…keep there attention: TEACH!
It takes a while to get the hang of good classroom management and the fact that you’re fairly new to teaching and you’re already here is a great start. It took me 5 years before I discovered Smart Classroom Management and my classroom management has improved drastically. When you’re new, teaching can be overwhelming. Just focus on one area at a time until you’ve mastered it. Start with classroom management… having a script is something I’ve never had to dealt with, and it sounds like an awful way to teach. I’d recommend buying the Happy Teacher Habits book and giving that a read… or Inspire. Both are excellent. Follow the classroom management plan as best you can and remember that you have children in your room. They’re still learning by how to manage their feelings and they get bored when they don’t care about a subject. Your job is to make the content interesting as best you can and teach them how to manage their feelings and persevere when you can’t. Good luck with your teaching career, and figuring out what to do with your scripts!!
Flying by the seat of my pants as I get shot out of a cannon without a helmet; I forgot it at home next to my lunchbox. This is my life as an educator in my position. I find humor and joy in every moment. I treat every crazy occurrence like its a I paragraph in my book…the book that I NEVER have time to write.
Good one! I think its so easy to focus on the negative and forget all the positive things happening. It takes effort to think of those and also to have a sense of humor. I love your thought about pretending its a comedy movie and laughing it off.
What does that actually look like?
[Insert big disruption here]
1. Deep breath
2. ???
3. ???
4. Moving on to great idea
https://smartclassroommanagement.com/2022/03/25/how-to-be-a-better-calmer-teacher-with-visualization/
Visualization, seeing your self and your ‘teaching day” as a success. The schedule, lesson plan, environment, self-regulation…all things we can control….so those “shot out of a cannon moments” can be met with humor and embraced as joyful learning moments.
Good stuff…I really liked this article…I could definitely relate.
May I reminisce? When I was student teaching in the spring of my senior year in college, a pack of wild dogs appeared outside the classroom windows. All the kids immediately ran to the windows to watch this group of about 10 barking, active dogs. Talk about distractions and getting the kids to go back to their seats and refocus on the language arts lesson! As an inexperienced teacher, I had no idea what to do; I felt helpless. SCM has the solution—thank you!
Sometimes you may need to stand with the class and watch some crazy dogs as long as it is not too long. Then, “Wow, that was exciting! Let’s write a paragraph about it so we’ll always remember how fun that was!”
This sure brings back memories. I have now been retired for 3 years from teaching in an elementary school. But boy, do I remember those frustrating interruptions and schedule changes. But something that Michael promotes is preparedness, planning, and procedures. And even if, as in this article, we are talking about totally UNEXPECTED situations, which can range from someone popping their head in your door to tell you something, a loud noise outside the classroom, or (as happened to me once) another teacher coming in the room, tripping over a student’s foot and falling and breaking her ankle, you can be mentally prepared. And for those newer teachers asking how, well, you need to have planned ahead of time how you will react in general to interruptions, from minor to major, and you need to have created procedures for yourself and your students for those just in case scenarios. Even as an experienced teacher, if I was planning on giving a lesson I had not done before, I went over it in my mind, through every step, thinking about what could go wrong and how that would be handled. That is one reason why Michael’s columns here can be so useful; he asks all teachers to be professional and set professional standards for their classroom. And preparation is part of that. So do your best to prepare for the surprises that will come your way. Ask yourself what is your plan for internet or electric outage? Medical emergencies? Extra students in your class? Etc., etc. If you have come up with some plans I am sure that you will then be able to be that calm and collected teacher and leader that he is talking about in this article.