Classroom management: Responding rather than controlling

I have to admit that I’m getting a little scared. Normally, the first week of school is spent “training” the kids. You teach them the routines of the classroom, give them a chance to practice them, and then give them positive feedback on their ability to do them. This is how teachers often lose their voice: they spend all week long saying things like “I like the way Johnny is raising his hand” or “Thank you for not throwing your pencil down when you were upset” or “Remember rule #3: We keep our hands and feet to ourselves.” It helps, a lot, because by the end of the first two weeks of school, the kids totally know the routines and you don’t have to give them positive feedback anymore, they just start doing things naturally or out of habit.

Last year, the kids were so good the first two weeks, I didn’t reinforce their behavior and they fell apart by the third week (kids are often super good and attentive the first two weeks of school but can’t keep it up beyond that). But once the third week rolls around, you need to start teaching them curriculum, so often two things happen: you don’t have time to retrain them in routines and/ or the curriculum is so engrossing that they can’t focus on learning the rules.

And that’s what happened last year, it was too late to retrain them so we kind of gimped along for a while, doing both, and they eventually got the routines of things. But I remember thinking to myself “Don’t let this happen next year. Don’t be fooled by their good behavior in the first two weeks as an indicator of their behavior for the rest of the year. They need you to train them no matter how much they seem to know the rules.”

But this year, it feels really weird to “train” them. First of all, each time I teach them something, they seem to get it, right away. So I don’t feel the need to keep pointing out to them that they “get it,” that just seems kind of insulting. Second of all, I’m kind of ‘over’ trying to control them. I don’t actually believe that “training” them is going to keep them from making the occasional slip up. I feel like I should show them what we need to do, let them do it, and then respond to any “breaking” of the rules as it happens. Before, I was teaching them the rules to keep them from breaking them, to try to prevent any chaos or lack of adherence to the rules from ever happening in the classroom. But now that just seems silly. Teaching the rules may help them to follow them but they’re still going to break them, occasionally, and I feel like I just need to respond to that as it happens.

Third, I’m taking their breaking of the rules way less personally. Actually, I think I’m seeing their breaking of rules way more clearly. During one of the afternoons this week, a little guy was passing endless notes to two other little guys at the table near him. I saw the whole interchange and what I thought was: “Boring lesson.” Not “Oh what a horrible lesson you’re teaching” or “How can you engage him so that he pays attention” just “Boring lesson, afternoon, 8 year old.” Instead of getting mad at him or admonishing him, I just walked over and picked up the notes: the one on his desk and the many on theirs. He was immediately apologetic and felt horrible. I just put my hand on his back and said, “It’s harder for them to pay attention when you’re writing notes to them, so…” And it’s true, it is harder for them to pay attention when he writes them notes. It’s also true that the lesson isn’t engaging to him. Point taken, moving on.

I honestly don’t know how this is going to work. As the week is progressing, I’m finding myself having to give a lot of responses to kids. I’m definitely noticing that I have to remind them of the rules, individually, more than I think I did in the past when I trained them. And this bugs me a bit- in some ways, it feels like a waste of time that I have to remind them of these things. But part of me thinks that some of them need these reminders, that this is part of my job- to keep them on task or help them to focus. And I am noticing progress, they’re starting to remember the routines and I kind of feel like they’re doing it themselves, actually internalizing them because they want to, instead of doing them in the hopes that I’ll praise them for it or they’ll get class points for it.