It’s not because it’s unnatural to you.
It’s not because of your age, lack of experience, or personality. It’s not because of where you work or how many challenging students are on your roster.
The reason you’re bad at classroom management is because you don’t know what works and you’re afraid of your students.
Let’s take these one at a time.
1. Knowledge
Effective classroom management is knowledge-based. Students behave predictably to certain strategies that work together to create a motivated and hardworking class.
These strategies must be aligned to achieve this objective. In other words, they must adhere to a particular approach. Each strategy supports and strengthens the rest.
Your understanding then must be comprehensive.
If you don’t know how to effectively teach routines, for example, then it’s unlikely your students will be able to work independently or behave maturely. The same is true of how to teach and enforce your classroom management plan.
It all transfers and works together to create a well-behaved class. Thus, unless you’ve taken the time to learn the ins and outs of the SCM method, your lack of understanding is going to sabotage everything you do.
There is a fair amount to learn, but it isn’t difficult. Our approach is simple. It’s paint-by-numbers. Apply it and you will succeed. But you must know what to apply and, just as important, what you must stop doing.
The Total Classroom Management Makeover is a great place to start. It describes what you need to do and not do to begin implementing SCM successfully.
But knowledge must come first. In this day and age, confusion and uncertainty about classroom management will result in chaos, misbehavior, and debilitating stress.
2. Fear
In the past, I’ve spent hours upon hours personally walking groups of teachers through the entire SCM approach. I’ve modeled every important strategy and answered every question.
Many of these teachers experience immediate and dramatic success. For them, it’s a life-changing moment; a complete 180 from misery to joy.
They’ll never again return to their previous state of confusion, misunderstanding, and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. They can focus entirely on their lessons and academic improvement.
For others, however, it’s a different story. They learn well. They can answer correctly every question assessing their SCM knowledge. They’ll even give me a smile and a big thumbs up and tell me everything is amazing.
And then I visit their classrooms.
This happened very recently at a school I was working with. As I approached the door, I heard students yelling out at the teacher.
- “I don’t know what to do!”
- “Why are we doing this?”
- “What page are we on?”
- “Can we play on our laptops?”
- “Justin pushed me.”
Playing it cool, the teacher reacted with silly sarcasm. He warned them. He reminded them. He talked over them. He tried to get them to work on an absurdly easy assignment of which they were completely unprepared for.
I stayed less than five minutes. It was a disaster and I was embarrassed for him.
So why, if he knew what to do, didn’t he do it? Because he was afraid. He was afraid that if he actually followed the steps and strategies and held his students accountable . . .
- They would rebel and behave even worse.
- They wouldn’t think he was cool anymore.
- They would complain to their parents.
Plus, he felt he knew better. He felt that his students needed to become unburdened. He felt sorry for them. His empathy and need to be their friend precluded him from asking much of anything from them.
Two important points:
First, his fears were and are unfounded. They have absolutely zero merit. In fact, the opposite is true. Teachers who use SCM are respected and admired.
Second, any form of empathy that lowers standards hurts children. “Toxic empathy” is apropos. It does real harm. Sadly, people who believe high standards are hurtful and discriminatory dominate the profession.
They make up the majority of every school. In reality, they should be nowhere near a classroom.
How to Be Good
To be good at classroom management takes knowledge of what works to create a polite, motivated, and well-behaved classroom from scratch.
It also takes a modicum of courage and belief that all students can succeed despite any and every circumstance.
Armed with these two, and only these two, you can be an unstoppable force for good in your community. If most schools or districts were to embrace them, it would transform education.
It would upend the failure that it is and rebuild it into the envy of the world.
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