Sometimes you have that group of students that no teacher seems to want. They complain about the students. They criticize their abilities and write them off as being unteachable. These are the ones that I seem to be drawn toward in teaching career as I was the mother of one of these students.
When I was out early in the year, my homeroom seemed to terrorize my substitute teachers. I arrived back to school after a prolonged medical leave to notes of students being unruly, out of control, and many having spent multiple days in detention. My first day back, the students were well-behaved and engaged. My assistant principal was flabbergasted. What is the difference between their behavior with me and other teachers?
Do I have a magical classroom management plan?
No.
Do I threaten and coerce?
No.
Many of their classes require at least 3 or more teachers to be present in the room with them due to behavior. In the morning, there is only me.
The class dynamic is 75% boys with 50% of the students having IEPs due to learning deficits and another 10% with IEPs due to disabilities that contribute to inappropriate behaviors and four students on varying ends of the Autism spectrum.
My boys are active. Extremely active. Most of my girls are not. Notice I said, “most.” At 8 a.m. in the morning, if you are not ready to go with plenty of patience, it can be a nightmare; however, one thing that I understand is boy behavior. I have plenty of patience to redirect multiple times. These students are – even when being overly active or misbehaving – respectable to me.
I recently had a guest teacher who came in to demonstrate a writing workshop lesson. She bragged on my class in our meeting that afternoon and said, “Your honors class was wonderful this morning.” I looked at her and stated, “That was my lowest class.”
She was shocked by what she saw. My class was on task. They answered questions and asked questions which reflected great thought on the subject. They were engaged during the lesson. I even had a few who helped others discretely when they fell behind getting their notebooks set up at the beginning. My principal and assistant principal seemed shocked by my class’s behavior. Of course, that was on Wednesday. On Friday, I had a student who never left my side. They needed one-on-one attention. They wanted to talk. I sat and talked with them. I listened to what they had to say.
When it comes to teaching students who seem to be unreachable or unteachable, we as teachers need to understand how to reach these students. Too often, they are given no voice. They have no one to turn to and no one who will stop what they are doing in their busy day to take the time to build a relationship. As a mom, I know how busy lives can cause us to overlook our children’s need to communicate. As a grandmother, I see the behaviors that manifest when a child feels ignored. Any attention, even negative, is attention. It’s the same in the classroom. Misbehaving gets you the attention you crave.
Remember the student who needed to talk? He sat and talked about things that had been happening in his life. Things that were coming up. Soon we were surrounded by four of his female classmates who had finished and were looking for teacher time, too. They took my hair out of its ponytail and proceeded to braid it while telling me about their memoirs they wrote. I could have fussed. I could have complained. We had five minutes left in class, and they needed to share, although two of them are the type who need to be doing something hence the braiding.
When it comes to classroom management, I have learned that forming a relationship with students is more important than anything a book will teach you. When you start to know these students, you will quickly recognize smaller details that tell you that someone is having a really bad day before they become big problems. Subtle things. The way they are walking. The way they’re fidgeting. If you know your students, you begin to know what is normal and what is not. You will also know when students just need to stop and take a quick brain break to get back on track.
