Redirection as a classroom management strategy is common, accepted, and wholly uncontroversial.
Touted from Baja to the Canadian Rockies and circumnavigating the civilized world, it’s recommended de rigueur without a second thought.
“Just redirect” they say, so easy and breezy.
It rolls off the tongue. It requires no explanation. And it really can get students back on track.
So what’s not to like?
It’s not accountability.
Whenever you redirect misbehavior you ignore your classroom management plan. There is no other way to do it. Redirection always replaces what should be a consequence.
Therefore, there is no accountability.
Yes, you can give a dirty look or raise your voice, which redirectors tend to do, but this isn’t fair and effective accountability. Further, it creates resentment and less intrinsic motivation to stay on track.
It makes you inconsistent.
You can’t have both a classroom management plan and use redirection. Technically you can, of course, but it will make you by definition inconsistent.
Y0u’ll have to choose, given the severity of misbehavior, whether to enforce a consequence or redirect. This will always result in disaster. Angry, confused students and chaos will be the norm.
It’s micromanagement.
Because students don’t learn anything in a psychological sense from redirection, and because there is no true accountability, the strategy will cause more and more off-task misbehavior.
Your students will grow tired of your broken record and eventually just tune you out.
Before long, you’ll be using it all day. You’ll be that tired, frustrated micromanager endlessly sighing in the teachers’ lounge you promised yourself you would never become.
It causes immaturity and dependence.
Where there is no accountability and its accompanying reflection, there is no growth. With redirection students don’t have to try to control themselves. They don’t have to self-discipline or work to ignore distraction.
It requires nothing from them and everything from you. Redirection supplants brain and willpower and the progress and maturity that comes from doing for themselves.
It interrupts learning.
If you redirect rather than follow your classroom management plan, you’re going to have to redirect a lot. Although, again, it can get students back on track in the moment, it doesn’t change behavior.
There is no possibility of improvement.
So instead of teaching great lessons and drawing your students into the love of learning, you’ll struggle through fits and starts. Your classroom will become like so many others: a boring, annoying mass of distraction.
Only Accountability
So what should you do instead? Have a classroom management plan that protects learning and follow it to a tee.
It’s that simple.
The benefits, especially if you use the SCM way, are many and far-reaching. And instead of every day being the same old beater that dies before reaching the speed limit, you’ll experience actual change in behavior.
I see too many teachers breathless and racing to put out another fire by redirection, hoping to smother the coals before they flare up to0 high. But like simmering embers and trick birthday candles, they’re never extinguished.
Only the fire hose of accountability has enough power.
PS – As for whether or how you should redirect a student daydreaming instead of working, this is a topic we’ll save for another day.
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Can you give a brief example contrasting what redirecting vs. following the plan looks like?
I would like an example also!
I love your content and your beliefs on CM. But this is I can disagree with. Students need redirection, it’s quick and efficient. Our kids know there are consequences if behavior is truly unacceptable. So asimple nod or look to get a student to be engage is totally fine. A kid unknowingly tapping their pencil, a nod or quick redirect is fine. Just my thoughts
Redirection can de escalate and break a pattern of the students behaviour. When they are calm you can still go back to that moment and look at accountability and tools for them to learn to self regulate more often?
Redirection is a chance for students to reset and make the right choice, especially students with different emotional, behavioral, or learning needs. You are ignoring the fact that they are children who are learning, they aren’t prisoners or soldiers. Each student is an individual with individual needs, some need redirection while others do not, redirection should be a part of the classroom management plan. If it’s minor and not really disruptive, a look or quiet reminder is more beneficial to the entire learning process than stopping the teaching program to discipline.
If you redirect rather than follow your classroom management plan, you’re going to have to redirect a lot. Although, again, it can get students back on track in the moment, it doesn’t change behavior.
I agree this is my issue being inconsistent because i want to teach the lesson. I have two rules: not to talk out of turn or get out of seat without permission and i need to follow that plan more consistently with all grade levels. Classroom management seems so much work. It’s annoying to have to give consequences constantly. But i guess thats what dealing with people is. Teaching seems like 80 percent classroom management and 20 percent content and i wish it was vice versa. But i have to accept that’s my job, not to redirect and ignore to try to do the content, but to wait and enforce. I hope I get better as this is my first year at this school. Also i am supposed to read from a script which i feel makes classroom management even harder?
I agree with this, in spirit, but redirection is one of the most common accommodations I see on IEPs. You can’t redirect some kids and not others without creating disparity. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that it will disappear as an accommodation, so where does that level us?
Disparity? More like differentiation because every student is different. If I was to give a consequence for every look or every redirect I gave in the name of “accountability “, I would be running a a prison instead of managing a classroom.
Can you please share specifics on what you mean about classroom management plan? Are you referring to behavioral plan?
This is not deep enough to help me change my course of action, I still don’t know what to do from this newsletter.
Hi Evia,
Search on his website, you will find articles about classroom management plans and how to implement them. Cheers
SPEd has turned any notion of “consequences” into an impossibility for our school, our district, and our state. I’ve literally had my job threatened by admin when trying to hold students on IEP’s accountable – sometimes for behavior that would be considered downright illegal. Our system is broken- pure and simple. Theirs is no such thing as accountability for students anymore- especially students who have learned to “game” the system. No one is ever held back, or allowed to EARN a non-passing grade, or expelled for crimes. The reality is we need a complete overhaul of K-12. I will be working toward that as soon as I am allowed to retire from system that no longer “permits” teachers in our state to retire before age 55- like I said ———BROKEN
I agree whole heartedly. The system is broken. In order to change it we need a whole cultural overhaul in America that sadly will never happen.
It’s so tempting to redirect. Sometimes, I think we feel like our Classroom Management Plan is, in effect, the bad guy. And we attempt to protect our students from it – from its consequences, from conflating us (the would be hero) with the plan (the proverbial villain). But I’ve experienced it firsthand and see it every day with the teachers I support – small, micro negotiations of the plan happening via redirection…after redirection…after redirection.
By then, the consequence that the redirection has replaced feels malicious and targeted; “You’ve finally frustrated me enough to actually enforce the consequence.”
It’s hard and, as with a lot of SCM techniques, it sounds counterintuitive at first – but this squares with my understanding of the SCM approach and my experiences.
I both agree and disagree. Middle school students are all over the place with their awareness, impulsiveness, and maturity.
At my school, a consequence means a 3 to 5-minute process. I have to give the students a reflection form and partially fill it out with their names and date. Most students will not reflect honestly, so to avoid more time wasted, I have to fill in what they did. Then, I give it to them and ask them to complete the rest.
Then I have to get on the computer and fill out a form for the detention. Then I have to later check their form to see if they reflected properly before they take it home to get it signed. Then I have to write down their name to remember to ask for the form the next day. If they don’t have it, I must repeat the process with additional consequences and an email home.
If they have the form, I have to punch holes in it and then put it in a notebook so I can keep track of what step they are on.
If I did this for every misbehavior, I would never have time to teach. I’m probably known as the strictest teacher on my campus and am more consistent with the school’s discipline plan than anyone, but I still have to redirect.
Additionally, the kids don’t care about detentions or Friday schools, so the consequences I described are ineffective. The only consequence that seems to mean something is removing them from their peers and sending them to a buddy class, which I do more than most.
Eventually, parents complain and ask, “Why isn’t my child getting in trouble in their other classes?” “Why is it just you that has a problem with our child?”
When I ask a student’s other teachers about their behavior, they tell me they also have trouble with them but do not give them consequences.
The massive inconsistencies I just described turn me into a villain, and the kids think I’m mean because I’m the only one who is consistent.
I believe it comes down to leadership from the top. The admin seems to feel they have their hands tied and are just puppets of the district leadership. The district leadership is a puppet of the county leadership. The county is another puppet of the leadership coming from the state. The leadership from the state are not teachers and never have been. They are not on the front lines. They are data collectors and politicians.
I started teaching in 1988 and am no stranger to these issues. I believe if I am trying to be the best teacher I can be, it starts with classroom management and creating a great learning environment. I do appreciate your website and would love a response.
Agree 100%.
Agree on every sentence you just wrote. Messed up and broken system of pandering.
Not specific to this topic, but what do I do if a set of students don’t care about consequences that I could enact & the school won’t allow me to put in place consequences that have enough punch? I’ve suggested things like taking away phones for a day or not going on school trips & the school admins have said “sorry. No. We can’t do that”. Thoughts?
Yes! What do we do when kids ask to be suspended so they can stay home and play video games? When they have no interest in doing anything school related and prefer to spend their time, talking and throwing things at each other?
When I was in HS my school did Saturday school rather than suspension, which meant come into school from 8am – noon on Saturday and you can’t talk or put your down the entire time. Once a student earned enough Sat schools they got expelled. Cleaned up the school quickly!
What do you mean by redirection, please?
To me redirection means giving verbal reminder after reminder instead of immediately implementing the consequences of one’s classroom management plan. Eg someone gets up to get a kleenex without raising their hand, or makes a mean remark to another student at the table/ talking without raising hand. Instead of my giving a yellow warning card as I planned to, if I ignore it and keep trying to read my required teaching script (i simply cannot follow it verbatim), or have it not count as a yellow card, when I instead redirect and interrupt learning to say something to redirect instead of showing the yellow card and letting them consider what they did wrong. But its tricky as we are all human beings and kids tap their pencils etc so maybe eye contact and shaking head is still following classroom management plan. But for me my two rules are getting out of seat and interrupting learning by talking out of turn.
An example of redirection in preschool, two children are fighting over a toy, I would ‘redirect’ the child trying to take the toy to something else he will be interested in. This is a very common strategy in with preschool age children.
Is your messaging implying that you have to have the rules and consequences with no deviation? I need to know what it looks like.
I never said, “Yes!!!” as loudly or immediately to one of your articles as I did to this one. Redirection may be a strategy appropriate to children who are too young to be responsible (infants), but even older toddlers can take some responsibility for their actions (putting things away, cleaning up a mess, checking on friends)
Can you please give an example Mr. Linsin?
I agree, especially in large groups of teenagers. They need to see the consequences and learn to be responsible for their actions. But I’d say this changes significantly when it comes to small distractions in kids with some phsyc disorder. I have a student now (14) who is on a break from his medication, he is completely aware of his condition, he loves my subject (science) he wants to do well, but his mind tends to wonder off and it’s really hard for him to control it. He has the will and he tries hard. As soon as we make eye contact or I ask him a simple question he’s back on task putting in effort and feeling guilty cause he tries hard to deal with it. He owns his behaviour, he’s hard on himself, I don’t see the need of further consequences in cases like him. But I admit it can be tricky, there are so many kids with some kind of diagnosis (learning or psychological or emotional disorders) that’s sometimes hard to accommodate for all and still stick to your management plan and deliver a good lesson, but I guess that’s another chapter.
Thank you for the reminder! It’s so hard to follow through with my plan at times–especially with well-intentioned and well-behaved students. It makes me feel downright mean. But it always, always, improves our personal relationship. I understand why it works that way now, after teaching for 25 years, but the first few years when I saw this phenomenon take place, I was baffled and pleasantly amazed! When I go a little off-track (redirecting a student or the whole class, instead of having them back up and try again to do it the correct way when lining up, for example) I notice more and more little infractions begin to take place. Then I face-palm, apologize to the class (or student, even) for not doing my best job to make sure that they can do their best learning, discuss how we both need to improve, then proceed.
I agree with a lot of what you share but you seem to only give the issue and what doesn’t work. Can you be more specific with your examples of what does work? It’s seems like you talk around it in circles.
Michael writes most of his articles with the assumption that readers are familiar with his general classroom management plan and principles, so I’d recommend checking out his classroom management plan (see the list of categories on the right-hand side of the website) for more info on his idea of the solutions to these problems!
Interested in this article. Is it finished though? Wondered what examples of accountability you are comparing to?
When I need redirection is in transition. When we are beginning a lesson, questions are popping out, “What page!” “Can I…” whatever. Usually it is one or two students, and not really bad behavior, just an interruption that needs redirection.
A trick that has worked for me, is to just ask them to go stand in the hall. I will be out in a minute. Then I go on teaching, getting everyone up and running on the assignment. A few minute later I go and ask him/her to come back in and get started. We don’t even discuss the what and wherefore, just come back in and get started without an audience.
I teach middle school in a tough place.
Hi Michael!
Thank you so much for your blog. It has helped me so much in my first year of teaching. Which of your books do you recommend starting with for a first year teacher? I am eager to learn more and get better at classroom management!
Hi Bailey,
Definitely The Classroom Management Secret.
In my training, redirection is a useful strategy in some situations and used judiciously with students it can resolve issues seamlessly. It’s approaching a problem from another angle. Rather than focus on the problem itself, putting a lot of emphasis on it, and giving it a lot of attention, you can change the focus and move a student along in a more positive direction. Sometimes that is all that’s needed. It all depends on how it is done, the situation age and type of student. It’s not a one size fits all strategy, but used judiciously it can be an effective tool.
Can you please explain what redirection is?
I really can not understand that redirection is incorrect. I need to read more on this. I thought it teaching/ reinforcing.