Last week, I wrote about how to fix time-out if it isn’t working.
And I got some peculiar responses.
“What if my students like time-out?”
“What if they want to stay in time-out?”
“What if they prefer the quiet of time-out?”
“What if they’re soured on school and just don’t care?”
My first thought was to simply point them back to the article. However, I’ve been doing this long enough to know that teachers want their specific questions addressed specifically.
I get it. And it’s okay. Happy to do it. However, in order to be as clear as possible, a forewarning: I may come across as a bit cantankerous. I hope not, but I don’t want to beat around the bush either.
I owe every SCM reader the unfiltered truth.
So I’m going to give it to you. But first, it’s important to reiterate that every one of our strategies is designed to make your life easier and less stressful.
When followed as prescribed, our approach will save you time, give you maximum classroom management control, and allow you to love your job—all while doing what is best for your students.
This entails two broad responsibilities.
The first is everything associated with accountability, which includes setting up clearly defined boundaries, consistently following your classroom management plan, guiding detailed routines and transitions, and shifting more and more responsibility over to students.
This is what most teachers are working to improve, which is good. It’s important. But high levels of accountability aren’t always enough, especially with challenging students.
You must embrace the second responsibility. In the previous article, I called this responsibility essential, but perhaps mandatory is a better word.
So what is this second responsibility? It’s to create a classroom your students love being part of. In other words, you have to make your students care. This is a big part of your job.
Time-out won’t work if you don’t have any leverage.
To put it another way, your students must enjoy their day-to-day classroom experience sufficiently enough that they don’t want to waste a second in time-out.
This second responsibility includes your likability, trustworthiness, and temperament. It includes your room environment, your humor, and your ability to teach compelling lessons—among a few other things.
But is creating enough leverage really possible? In this day and age?
Yes, 100 percent. Anyone can do it. It takes time to read and learn, of course, but everything you need to succeed can be found here at SCM. All of our books address these two critical responsibilities in a way that allows you to experience near-immediate results.
If currently your students don’t seem to mind time-out, it isn’t difficult to turn it around. You don’t have to be perfect or great at everything.
Often, it’s just a commitment to being more consistently pleasant, for example, or improving your content knowledge or never responding emotionally to misbehavior that will make the difference.
But every classroom in the world has a tipping point at which it can be flipped from nightmare to dream class.
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