Let Teachers Take Back The Classroom

During my 39 years in the classroom, my classroom management methods were pretty simple. 

Only a handful of explicit rules. We're here so I can help each of you become better at reading, writing, listening and speaking; anything that gets in the way of that is not okay. This classroom is meant to be a place where nobody needs to fear disrespect or mistreatment. Treat all students with respect all the time. That pretty well covered it.

I also subscribed to the theory that keeping focus on what we were doing, not what we were supposed to not be doing, is useful, and that keeping the class moving right along (Joe McCormick, my student teaching co-op liked the term "punchy quick") and knowing what the heck you're doing go a long way toward keeping the classroom managed. 

For 39 years, that worked well for about 97.6% of the time, even as the tides of various cohorts shifted over the years. 

But based on surveys and countless pieces of anecdotal data (aka stories teachers tell me), I have to admit that something seems to have fundamentally changed. There is more disorder, disruption, and outright violence in classrooms. There are new frontiers in attacks on teachers being found every day, like the mass defamatory social media accounts set up by Malvern PA middle schoolers. There are a variety of theories about why this is happening.

Pandemic hangover. Thanks to the pandemic disruptions of in-the-building schooling, a whole lot of students just kind of lost the knack, the skill, even the inclination, for Doing School.

Squishy liberal ideas. In the face of charges that discipline was being inequitably doled out against students of color, schools stopped doing any doling at all. Others tried implementing ideas like restorative justice, which just led to all sorts of chaos.

Parents these days. Gentle parenting and other modern parenting trends are creating unmanageable children. 

Bad top-down policies. States impose rules about how certain populations may or may not be treated in school and schools suffer the consequences. 

Cultural ick. A decade or two of arguing that schools are terrible and teachers are evil grooming indoctrinators eventually trickles down to children. A culture in which our very highest officials regularly bully and belittle and break rules with neither shame nor consequence trickles down to students, too.

Young teachers are wimps. I know a lot of young teachers. I don't buy this one.

Something in the water. Cosmic rays. Who the heck knows. Not a popular explanation, but I've heard it more than once.

Further complicating the discussion is that some folks have attached particular explanations to particular politics, and it's not a political problem.

We have, on the one hand, people who sincerely want to address issues of equity and sensitivity and are doing a lousy job of it. Restorative justice and trauma-informed practices and all the versions of positive behavior reinforcement are not terrible ideas, but they take a lot of time and training (and therefor money)--and none of them mandate that students never suffer consequences for bad choices. 

See, several things can be true at the same time. Is misbehavior often the student's way of communicating underlying issues that they need help in addressing? Yes. Should students experience consequences for their misbehavior? Yes. Should students be handled with respect and care for the baggage they bring with them? Should teachers be mindfully aware of equity issues in how they treat their students? Yes, and yes. Should the classroom be an environment where the teacher is safe to teach and students, including the ones that are not causing trouble, are able to learn? Yes. Does every individual child deserve support, empathy, and consideration? Yes. Can a single child who goes off the rails regularly make life miserable for a teacher and all the other students in the room? Yes.

All those things can be true at once, and therefor proposed solutions have to treat all those things as true rather than, as some folks tend to do, declaring that only certain sides of the problem need to be addressed. That means that those who want to blame it all on liberal squishiness are only looking at part of the issue, and those who don't want to talk about any classroom management problem spike because saying it exists might feed the conservative trolls--they have to ease up as well.

Most of the solution for issues of classroom management is located exactly in the administrative offices of your district and building. 

I've seen all manner of problem principal. Send your problem student to the office. In one case, the principal would have the student pull up a seat while the principal talked about how he'd done way worse stuff when he was a teen and ten minutes later send the student to class. In another case, the principal would browbeat and bully the student, pushing them into a corner until they either broke down or blew up and earned a suspension that never should have happened. Or there's the hands off principal--the one who, if she's in the office at all, will ask you if you have made five contacts with the home and sat down with parents three times. In all cases, what teachers learn is that they shouldn't bother asking for help from the office.

Every building has its actual written behavior policy and its operational rules--the rules that the office really follows. Like the school where the dress code is only enforced for certain young women. Or the school where bullying is dealt with directly unless the victim is a LGBTQ kid. Or the school with different rules for white kids and students of color.

Teachers and students both learn what the unwritten policy really is and conduct themselves accordingly. 

Do teachers have responsibility for managing their classrooms? Absolutely. But the tools they have are directly related to the tools that the administration lets them have. The most basic thing you learn as a teacher is whether or not administration has your back, and nothing else will have a larger effect on your classroom management style and effectiveness. 

Are there teachers who use ineffective policies in their classroom? Are there teachers whose lackadaisical or biased or, yes, even racist policies cause them and their students plenty of trouble? Are there teachers who send students out of the room every ten minutes for sneezing disrespectfully?  Absolutely. Whose job is it to straighten those teachers out (or show them the door)? Administration's.

Behavioral issues require a vision of both trees and forest. Often the issue is immediate--right now I cannot help 20 students in this class better understand a simple algebraic formula because Pat won't stop throwing books at the windows. That needs to be dealt with Right Now because every minute that I'm kept from providing instruction is a minute I can't get back. But in the big picture, I need a plan for the long term, something more useful and thoughtful than simply playing daily whack-a-mole with Pat's outbursts. For success, I need to deal with both the forest and the trees, and it helps if I have someone to work with me on that,

A building administrator's job is simple--create the conditions under which each teacher can do her very best work. That includes helping her with the tools to manage her classroom. It is possible to be fair and just and sensible and equitable and still have classrooms where teachers are able to take hold of their classrooms and do the job they entered the profession to do. But that only happens when your school either A) gets really lucky or B) makes a deliberate, thoughtful attempt to create such a culture.

It will not happen if either the Repressive Military Camp or the Land Of Do As You Please Camp dominates. It will not happen if I get caught up in either forests or trees. The push for discipline and for empathetic flexibility will always be in tension, and there is no tension in education that a couple of pundits can't blow up into a full-sized battle. As with most educational tensions, we have to keep adjusting year after year, and if the surveys and anecdotal evidence is accurate, something is out of whack right now. 

This is another of those posts that could rattle on forever, because the issue is not necessarily complicated (see my classroom rules above), but it is complex (see all the other factors I have skipped over). Once again in education, if someone is touting a simple silver bullet to address the issue, they're probably selling something, and it's nothing you want to buy.

The one plus is that this is an issue that offers broad agreement from a wide variety of people. Nobody wants schools that are unfair and unjust, and nobody wants classrooms where there's so much chaos that education can't occur. We may disagree on what exactly that looks like or how we get there, but at least we're looking at the same horizon.