Understanding time-out, its purpose and function, is key to its effectiveness.
Yet, as I visit classrooms, many teachers get it wrong. It’s not a dunce-cap punishment or place for students to feel shame, which only causes resentment and more misbehavior.
Rather, time-out must be a place of reflection and determination to do better.
To ensure this is the case, you must create a classroom your students enjoy being part of. This is essential. Because if your students don’t like you or sitting in your classroom, then time-out won’t work.
There is no leverage.
Your students must look forward to your class. They must appreciate it and desire to be a valued member of it. Done right, time-out is a revocation of this special privilege. It’s what prompts change on the inside.
When they look out at their classmates and say to themselves, “I want to be there with them, instead of here in time-out,” then you have a real tool that can transform behavior.
“I want to be there, not here.”
If the experience of being in time-out is no different (or even better) than the experience of sitting and learning as part of your class, then time-out means nothing. You may as well not even use it.
Everything we do here at SCM supports widening the gap in experience between being in time-out and not being in time-out. The idea is to expand this gap so far that even the most challenging students emphatically choose the latter.
Personally, I want to make my classroom so gratifying that they despise time-out.
The good news is that although it takes knowledge and commitment, making time-out something your students want no part of isn’t difficult. Any teacher can do it.
From being consistently pleasant to teaching compelling lessons to following through like a referee, every strategy we recommend at SCM is designed to provide meaning to your consequences. The more they matter to your students, the better they’ll behave.
Again, it’s not about punishment. It’s not about lecturing, scolding, bribing, or directly trying to convince students of anything.
It’s about using human nature and the natural inclination within every student to leverage them into deciding of their own accord to be well-behaved.
When it comes from them, when it’s their choice—that just so happens to be inspired by the classroom conditions you’ve created—then it sticks.
And you have your dream class.
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