If you follow your classroom management plan every time a student breaks a rule, you’re ahead of 95 percent of teachers.
Most never get there.
However, despite your consistency, if you make this one mistake during your follow-through, you’ll undermine the most important factor in curbing misbehavior.
The mistake is this: Instead of simply informing the misbehaving student of their consequence, you give your own two cents. In other words, you add to the consequence.
This can take several forms:
- lecturing
- questioning
- glaring
- sighing
- reprimanding
- opining
- reminding
The reason this is a mistake is threefold.
1. It breaks your word.
When you first taught your classroom management plan and promised to follow it, you modeled and explained your consequences. You concluded, “These are the consequences for misbehavior.”
You even published and displayed them on your classroom wall. (You should if you haven’t.)
Your students saw this as a pact. To them, if they break a rule, you enforce the stated consequence. Period. But if you add to it, if you toss in a dirty look, talking-to, or lecture, you’re breaking your word.
2. It creates resentment.
If someone in your friendship circle goes back on their word, you’d be angry. Of course. Your students are no different. Only, they keep it close to the vest.
They let it simmer as resentment.
So when you add to the consequence, instead of reflecting on their misbehavior and deciding to improve, they’ll seethe in anger at you—which doesn’t go away easily. In fact, they often seek revenge.
3. It blocks reflection.
The goal of a consequence is student reflection.
They must wrestle with their conscience, consider how their misbehavior affects others, and conclude that being a valuable member of the class is more desirable than misbehaving.
Or it won’t work. Resentment toward you blocks the accountability process. It breaks the electrical circuit, and now the light bulb won’t go on.
Get Out of the Way
Internal struggle, which is essential for real behavior change, only happens when you’re out of the picture. Your job is to follow-through like a referee—calm, clear, and emotionally unaffected.
Then get out of the way.
Let your classroom management plan do its good work without your interference.
PS – This week’s YouTube video is When Students Deny Everything, Do This Instead. It fixes lying and denying.
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I find this interesting and helpful for affective classroom management. It is very important that as teachers we need to keep our words. What ever rules we implimated let’s maintain them in order to manage our classrooms very effectively.
I love that summer vacation is a stone’s throw away for most of us teachers, indeed here for others, and you’re still holding the line of management. It’s refreshing—I myself failed miserably at management this year and with about 3.5 weeks left feel I have no recourse but to wait again until next year…
Nope. Do it now. 5 weeks?! That’s plenty of time. If I walk into another classroom to sub and they have not been managed well, I refuse to go through a day of chaos. I do a brief but thorough job of implementing my SCM routines and we all enjoy a calm day of learning. Even with a sub. Even for just one day.
Agreed!!
Kids actually appreciate guidelines and follow-thru! It allows for them to feel safe, validated, and encouraged by a system that does what it’s supposed to do, provide an awesome learning environment for all!
Same! I was inconsistent this semester, and I am paying for it… I’ve made a terrible mess of it.
I am very aware of how I undermine myself as described in this article. I am working to curb my responses and consistently. I see theceyecrolkibg and sighing and unnecessary talk among many of my peers as well. I see the emotions derailing our management schemes daily. Its hard not to be affected by misbehaviors. It helps to remember that behavior is communication. I remind myself that my behavior is also communication. When I show a venting emotion I essentially weaken my stance. Thanks for this brief article; its ust what I need right now.
More and more often when I make that checkmark and start to walk away the student starts arguing loudly. “What I do?” Is their favorite phrase. It instantly makes me want to turn back and engage with them. And more often than not I do. If they keep talking to other students about how terrible I am for that consequence then I just give the next consequence and they get louder. And I am definitely glaring at that point. I know staying calm and just being the “referee” is what I’m supposed to do but that is so hard when they are so rude and disrespectful.
Hi Tracy,
I know the feeling for pay experiences and situations that I found myself in, but I would encourage you to simply state that you’re doing what the consequence says because the offender broke the agreed upon rule for classroom management. They’ll have to own it. It’s not personal, it’s business. Agree to “chillax” and there doesn’t need to be a power struggle.
This is a good post by SCM:
I teach 7/8th, the best thing is not to react. However aggravated i’m feeling I TRY to not let it show. Deliver the consequences, implement them, then move on to someone or something else. I tend to push that student out of my mind and just start again with what I was doing. Interestingly enough, I can see the student looking at me for some kind of reaction. I gave the one warning, and the student raised her hand to ask a question, so I called on her as I normally would and just moved on. I stopped relying and blaming the office/admins/the school/ school policy and for the most part handled my classes myself.
Teacher Guy 2026