Practice Makes Perfect

Professional Development: Session 3

PURPOSE

When a student does something inappropriate in class, he or she is usually expecting the teacher to react in a certain way. He knows he has an audience and is often putting on a performance for that audience. Many of us, from time to time, make the mistake of dealing with the behavior in front of the audience, and this rarely works out in our favor. 

In the last session, we spoke about the difference between rules and procedures and you were asked to evaluate and assess what you already had in place. In a perfect world, all of our students will do what we need them to do every single day without reminding and without incident. Obviously, this is not a perfect world so we need to have a plan for when students are not the angels we know they can be. 

Today we will look at a very effective way to deal with inappropriate behavior in the classroom and, more importantly, stop the behavior from happening in the future. 

IN-SERVICE

In previous sessions, we have spoken about ways to get your students’ attention and how to establish clear rules and procedures. It probably goes without saying that every single strategy you have used in the classroom thus far has worked beautifully every single time and you have had no issues whatsoever. Or, if you are like most of us, you find that some students are a bit more challenging the others and it takes a little bit more creativity on your part to manage them. 

Today I will be sharing one method you can use to get those students back on track, without engaging in a battle of wits and will during your teaching time. This, like all of the other tactics we have and will discuss, is just one of the many ways to steer students in the right direction. You should do whatever you feel comfortable with and whatever you have the most success with, as long as you have a plan going in and stick to it. 

This particular tactic is called “The Private Practice Session.” This can be used for a student who repeatedly ignores the classroom procedures. The example I am using is for a student who talks too much and calls out in class, but it can be used for most anything. 

Here is the script: 

Meet with the students privately and say, in a tone of concern, not frustration, “I’ve noticed that you’re having trouble remembering our procedure for raising your hand before speaking. Don’t be too hard on yourself for forgetting. I’m an adult and I sometimes forget things, but I know how embarrassing it can be to keep forgetting in front of your friends. So here is what I’m willing to do for you. I will give up my lunch today and practice with you so that you will become really good at following that procedure and be less likely to forget. I’d be happy to do that for you, I’ll see you at lunch.  Obviously, you are pretending that you think the student is just forgetting to raise his hand, surely he would not purposely ignore the procedure! The key is that you are not sarcastic and that you tell the student that you are willing to give of your own time to help him. It’s subtle but do you see the difference? Instead of taking the student’s lunch away from him, you gave him yours. So the student comes in at lunch and you say “Thanks for coming in. Okay now pretend that we are in class and you have something you want to say. Show me what you’ll do. “The student slowly raises his hand and you say, “Great! I can give you 15 more minutes of practice. Do you think you need more practice or do you feel you have it now?” The student always will say, “I have it” then you say “Great. See you tomorrow. Oh and if you forget again tomorrow, that’s my fault. That simply means I didn’t give you enough practice. I’ll even stay after school if you need, just let me know.” 

Please note that this technique takes less than a minute, and helps to achieve the goal which is to change the behavior. 

The goal here is to change the behavior and to deal with the student away from his or her audience. It is also to inadvertently get the student to reflect about the behavior, something that "lunch detentions" do not really accomplish. 

IMPLEMENTATION

As Bob Ross said in the beginning of this post, “There are no bad kids, just happy little classroom challenges.” Some students need a more creative approach to change the behavior to what we would like to see in the classroom. I’m sure you will have many opportunities to try this method out or at least some variation of it, but the assignment for this session is to try it out once. The idea is not to be punitive but to be “willing to help” until the student is able to follow the procedures in the classroom. Maybe some of you have tried this before or have tried a different variation? Post about your experiences or share your thoughts. Your comment is worth one professional development hour but your dialogue is invaluable. 

Thanks for reading- 

                         Whitaker & Breaux (2013). The Ten-Minute Inservice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass