How does it feel when a student challenges you or gets in your face? Threatened? Insulted? Do you feel mad, afraid or embarrassed? How is your response to that student driven by those feelings? Do you give a forceful response? A timid one? An angry one?

When students are in conflict with teachers, it’s natural to have a strong emotional reaction. How do teachers prevent that reaction from causing their own responses to escalate the intensity of the interaction rather than reduce it to a manageable level?

Think of how adults learn to integrate cognition to override other emotional responses. For example, when we were children, many of us had certain fears, such as fears of thunderstorms, barking dogs, or bees. When exposed to those situations our reaction may have been to panic, causing us to flee, hide, or swat at the bees. As we aged and developed experience, we learned that those situations might not have posed the dangers that we perceived (although that knowledge may not have eliminated our fears). When we realized that the bees were not interested in stinging us, they were just looking for food, other bees, or their hive, we learned to tell ourselves to remain still while waiting for the bee to fly away. We learned to train our thoughts to override our feelings and to delay our emotional reaction until the perceived danger was gone.

As teachers we can do the same thing. When in conflict with a student, we can tell ourselves that questioning authority is a natural part of child development and that we are not in any danger. Recognizing this, we can remain calm and provide a more thoughtful response. We may present the student with choices, consequences, or distractions or even choose to ignore them. We do not need to respond with increased forcefulness, greater hostility, sarcasm, or other behaviors that are likely to escalate the conflict.

Teachers are adults, complete with the wisdom of experience. Children are only in the process of developing experience. Armed with that awareness, we can train ourselves to respond more effectively to children.

As we continue to do our work with teachers, we are aware of how tired everyone seems to be by this time of year. These last few months have brought on extra pressures for many of us. Most districts are experiencing personnel and education cuts. Being a teacher is difficult even in the best of times. Most people could not do what we accomplish as teachers.

We would like to remind all of you that our jobs as teachers are difficult and that we need to make sure to take time for ourselves and to recognize our efforts and accomplishments. Teaching is the noblest profession.

Louisville, Kentucky. We’d never been there before. We were honored to be asked to visit St. Francis High School in downtown Louisville to share some of our ideas with parents from the community and with the St. Francis faculty. Both groups brought a lot of enthusiasm to our seminars, discussing issues and asking questions, many of which we had not heard before.

St. Francis has a strong parent group supporting the efforts of the school. We were thrilled to meet them as well as parents representing other schools in the area. Our presentation focused on the importance and challenges of setting limits for children of all ages. While it helps to begin setting those boundaries when children are young, we agreed that it’s never to late to give our children the gift of following through when they test us. When kids know they can trust us to keep our word, even when it means holding them accountable, it creates an environment of safety and predictability; a place where growing children and teens can thrive.

The St. Francis faculty is an amazing group of diverse professionals. The school director proudly shared the accomplishments of these master teachers. We were impressed by their genuine commitment to the school’s philosophy of teaching students how to THINK. This philosophy aligns so well with ours. We believe that the key to classroom management is to teach kids how to take responsibility for themselves. When students push boundaries in a way that requires a teacher intervention, we want to make sure our response to their behavior doesn’t cause more of a disruption that their behavior does. We do this by offering a response that causes students to THINK, not react. In this way, we avoid the likelihood of having behaviors escalate while preserving the dignity of the student.The teachers at St. Francis shared our commitment to treating students in this manner and raised many other questions about how to achieve this within their unique environment.

We’re grateful to those who brought us to Louisville to work with these wonderful groups of people and we’re looking forward to having an opportunity to return to this exciting and vibrant city.

Diane Gossen and Harry Wong are educators whose work we greatly respect. They have recently endorsed our new teacher training materials: MORE TIME TO TEACH: Responding to Student Behavior.

Here is what they had to say:

“ChildSense educators Jeff Fink and Jon Halpern have created a very helpful and professional in-service program for teachers. Today’s classrooms need these techniques which offer practical ways to be a strong monitor. They show how to set bottom lines for students while still modeling respect and caring.”
~Diane Gossen

“More Time to Teach is an excellent program: logical, simple to use, and
obvious once the teachers view the program.”
~Harry Wong

1. Think before you act. A teacher’s response to student misbehavior can sometimes be more disruptive than the students’ behavior

2. Do what you say. Teachers sometimes struggle with holding students responsible for their own behaviors. They may believe that by giving students another chance they can improve the student-teacher relationship. Unfortunately this usually just confuses students. The student-teacher relationship is actually strengthened when teachers do what they say they are going to do and respectfully hold students accountable for their behaviors.

3. Respond to the behavior, not the child. Tired of students complaining “that’s not fair?” By learning how to respond to the behavior and not the child, teachers can avoid the fairness game.

4. Predictability breeds good behavior. Effective classroom management is founded on predictability. Students need to know what the TEACHER is going to do when they misbehave so they only need to think about what THEY are going to do.

5. Give kids a choice. When misbehaving students are offered reasonable choices, it causes them to THINK about what they are going to do instead of just REACTING to the teacher.

In her article entitled Culturally responsive classroom management: awareness into action, Carol Weinstein states that if today’s educators wish to run culturally responsive classrooms, they have to be ready to ask themselves hard questions about their practice, their values and their biases. When addressing behavioral issues in the classroom, she states that today’s educators must be willing to “reflect on the ways that classroom management decisions promote or obstruct students’ access to learning.” Weinstein concludes that “Culturally responsive classroom management is a frame of mind as much as a set of strategies or practices.”

Alfie Kohn’s article, Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job!” states that kids have become “praise junkies.” He says that since young children are so “hungry” for approval, adults have a responsibility not to “exploit that dependence” for their own convenience. This is one of the most on-going controversial topics we have explored in our work with parents and educators during the past twenty-three years.

We read an article today entitled “Teaching in a Disruptive Classroom” written by Syracuse University professor Marvin Druger. Professor Druger explained that he teaches an introductory biology class of several hundred students in a large lecture hall. During the class the professor received several complaints about the classroom behavior of others.

Professor Druger decided to send an email message to all the students in his course. In his note he made the students aware that he had received complaints from students who are distracted by certain behaviors and he requested that the few students who were causing the disruption to consider their behaviors.

The week after sending the email to all the students in the large class, the results were very gratifying. “Students had stopped being disruptive and were attentively listening to the lecture and taking notes,” said Druger.

After reading this article we noted how that seemed to be a rather a simple solution. We mused over the image of having this professor teach in some of the challenging classrooms many of us have experienced!

Later, however, we started rethinking the importance of Dr. Druger’s words. Maybe his response wasn’t so simple. As teachers we often try to solve class problems by ourselves, or we go to a colleague, or maybe we just complain about our situation. What we don’t often do is what Professor Druger did: take the issue to our students. Although we are not naïve enough to think this will solve all of the complicated issues of our classroom, it is certainly a place to start. When situations are spoken about honestly and directly with our students, they become part of solving the problem. We might even receive the same response as the professor.

We were struck by one of today’s headlines: “Americans would rather be dead than disabled” (http://www.reuters.com/article). What implications does this have for us as teachers? Each year we have several students with exceptionalities in our classrooms. Just like any other student they want to feel capable, successful, and independent. It is our responsibility to help them progressively feel this way. It is far too common that students with disabilities are simply part of our class: they are welcomed and treated kindly by us. Although this is important, it is not enough. We also need to help these students become capable and contributing members of our classroom and society.

What is the difference between a warning and a choice?

A warning tells of upcoming danger. It is an implied threat, exerting one’s power over another. Here are some examples of warnings.

- “Sit down or I am calling your mother!”
- “If that happens again you’re not going on the field trip!”
- “Knock it off or I am going to send you to the back of the room!”
- “I have told you six times either quit blurting out or you are going to the Time Out Room!”

WARNINGS are usually delivered out of anger or frustration. They direct the child to do something or else they are in big trouble! Although they may work for some kids, they fail for others. They often cause feelings of defensiveness and create power struggles because they encourage to children to REACT instead of THINK. They often evoke thoughts of “You can’t make me!”

Offering CHOICES recognizes the right or power of an individual to freely use her/his own judgment. They avoid setting up power struggles between the adult and child. They cause people to THINK instead of REACT. They help teach children responsibility. Here are some examples of choices.

- “You can either sit with your friend and do your work, or if you continue to talk you will have to sit over here. You decide.”
- “I am having trouble teaching. Your choice is either to participate in the discussion and listen to others or if you continue to make noises you will have to go to the Time Out Room. I hope you decide to stay.”
- “Your choice is either to do your work now when I can help you or do it during recess time. You decide.”
- “You have a choice to keep this a small problem or make it a big one. I hope you can keep it small.”

Learning how to offer choices takes a lot of practice and rehearsal.