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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