Channeling student behaviors

It’s always interesting to me watching students at the beginning of a school year. We are already approaching the end of the first month of school here in our school district, and while many of our students have settled into the typical routine, some are continuing to struggle. I’m trying to reflect on a couple of my recent learning opportunities as I think about some of the behaviors we’ve been seeing and how we as a school might respond to those behaviors.

A couple of weeks ago, I was able to participate in a training called Restorative Leadership: Authority with Grace. Much of this training was spent learning about and then reflecting on how to lead our sphere of control in a restorative way. One basic concept that fits with other thinking recently is that we should separate the deed from the doer by affirming the worth of the individual while disapproving of inappropriate behavior. We must first see our students as people. This allows us to identify their strengths, as well as areas for continued growth. Challenging behaviors are often telling us of some unmet need, and when we look at it that way, it’s easier to separate the child and the behavior.

Then last week I had the privilege to spend a day learning from and with Cornelius Minor. If you aren’t sure who that is, he is an educator who is dedicated to working with teachers, school leaders, and others to support equitable literacy reform across the globe. If I had to distill my thinking about the day into one thought, it was a question he posed at one point. He asked, “How are we making sure that our institutions are more hospitable to kids?” A train of thought that I’m thinking about because of this has to do with the systems that exist within the school culture. Cornelius pointed out that in schools, some of our approaches do not see kids. Kids know that this isn’t ok, which causes them to act out. In turn, we treat kids as if they are broken, and we give them labels. He went on to share that disproportionately, this can happen to our multilingual students, our students with learning disabilities, and our marginalized populations. If we go back to the beginning of the chain and try to fix the fact that kids are not always seen or heard in the school environment, then maybe we break that chain.

Then, today, I happened to be over by the bookshelf in my office and I noticed a book I haven’t picked up in a long time. Early in my career, the members of my fifth-grade team read the book Teaching with Love & Logic: Taking Control of the Classroom by Jim Fay & David Funk. As I reflect on all these pieces of learning from my many years of public education, it keeps bringing me back to the relational side of management, leadership, and most importantly for this post, discipline.

What if we started thinking about how we handled problematic behavior differently? If the goal of equitable work in schools is to create a more hospitable environment for kids, we must go back to another one of the basic beliefs of restorative work: We respond to situations WITH people, not TO them, FOR them, or NOT at all.

As educators, we need to think of ourselves as “child watchers” who are observing our students. What do we notice about them? What makes them happy? When do they get frustrated? What seems to motivate them?

If you’d like an idea of how to keep track of the things that you are learning about your students, there are a couple of options:

You could use a page in a notebook for each student.
You could create a spreadsheet with a list of all your students and begin filling in things you notice.
You could use a paper with several boxes on it and use each box for a different student (this was a method I used – I would have 8 boxes per page, which meant 3-4 pages for a class).

If you notice that there is a student’s page or box that isn’t as full as the others, it’s time to create some opportunities for learning. Seek that student out for 2 minutes a day to talk about anything not related to school. It’s amazing how much you can learn in a few short stints of time.

The more we notice about our kids, the more we can use those things to our benefit. As an adult, if you have a student who talks out in class and causes disruptions, the easy solution is to remove them from their group, seat them on their own, or possibly even have them leave the room. And how does that feel to the student? That we are doing something to them, not with them. And ultimately, we must remember that the word discipline comes from the Latin word disciplina which means instruction or knowledge. Discipline isn’t about what we do, it’s about teaching how to do the appropriate thing.

What if instead, we took a moment of our day to have a conversation with a student about the impact that behavior has on the class? What if we turned it into a topic for a community circle where other students can share how talking out or creating disruptions impacts them? Next, you might be able to process with the student during an unstructured time of the day (in the hallway as you’re walking to related arts, during a passing period, or a quick chat during recess) about how their behavior has impacted others. Then, what if you find ways to feed that student’s desire to talk? Could you increase the number of turn and talks during a lesson to help that student who is talking too much? Could you make a portion of the lesson partner or group based? If you let the student know that you see what it is that they need and that you are going to try to create more opportunities for that, it may help shift the behavior. When we think of teaching as art and creation, we must ask ourselves what we can create that will support our students who are struggling.

When we create a classroom environment that provides students with a way to have their needs met, we make the learning environment more hospitable for the student that needs to talk.

Take a moment to reflect on the problem behaviors that you are seeing. See if you can piece together what the behavior is, and when it is happening. Then, ask yourself if there is a way you can take that behavior and channel it towards something more positive. In the Love & Logic mindset, this would be called providing choices within limits. We all know that there must be certain limitations within the classroom, but if we let students know when and where in their day they will be able to make choices, they should be able to uphold your expectations in other parts of the day.

And something that I want to make clear – none of what I’m saying is meant to imply that there should never be consequences for a child’s poor choices. Whether we are working from a restorative mindset, from the mindset of creating a hospitable environment, or from a Love & Logic mindset, consequences certainly can be a part of the learning process. We just need to make sure that the consequence is reasonable, natural, and appropriate. In fact, “Children will learn from their mistakes when: They experience the consequences of their mistake; and Adults in their environment provide empathy.” (Fay & Funk, Teaching with Love & Logic, pg. 37). When adults express sorrow for a student’s poor choice and the resulting consequence, children have a much greater opportunity to grow.

What ideas does this spark for you? Do you want to think about how you might react to problematic behavior? Or does this spark some questions for you? Learning happens when we reflect, so share your reflections in the comments below!

Essential skills

I’ve recently been spending some time looking at the Innovation Playlist, a series of links, ideas, and videos all about ideas for how schools need to innovate in order to prepare our students for the future. That future is one that is ever changing and hard to imagine. It’s a dynamic and uncertain place, and we need to help our students be better prepared for that.

In a recent post, I mentioned that the smartphone debuted in 2007 (see that post here). Think about all the changes that have happened since then… Off the top of my head here are a few things that are commonplace today because of the existence of the smartphone: bluetooth, podcasts, wifi, iPads, the Apple watch, turn-by-turn gps navigation, the permeation of streaming video, in-app purchases, order ahead (via an app) carryout at numerous restaurants. Honestly, this whole post could be a list of the technologies that exist because of how commonplace the smartphone has become. That’s not the main point.

Think for a moment about the exponential changes that have happened since the roll out of the smartphone in 2007. Then think for a moment about how exponential curves work (you can see an example to the right)… If there has been that much change since 2007, think how quickly our world is going to continue to change!

Looking back at the history of my posts, one of the running themes has been about the fact that the factory model of education has become obsolete. In the past, content knowledge was something that had to be given to you by a teacher. But today, content knowledge is ubiquitous. It’s free, it’s readily available, and it’s ever changing. No longer is what you know important, now it’s what can you do with what you know. That’s a totally different way of seeing education!

Beware Thomas Friedman says that our students need to be capable of innovative thinking – critical thinking and problem solving should be a given for all in this day and age. He wrote about the importance of those skills in The World is Flat which was originally published in 2005. Now he’s thinking more about that idea of innovative thinking, which to him means not only are you able to do the job you are given, but you are also able to invent, reinvent, and re-engineer the skills necessary to accomplish that job.

And what’s difficult about that is that our education system is not ideally set up for innovative thinking. You can’t create a test that is going to easily measure someone’s ability to think in an innovative way. Those skills are not easily assessed, and yet they are the skills that employers are seeking (See what the National Association of Colleges and Employers say they are looking for in job candidates here).

Add to this, much of what we do in the traditional model of schools actually discourages creativity. As educators we often discourage creativity when we expect students to:

Answer with what others think is right.
Find answers rather than ask deep questions.
Shoot for efficient answers in our classrooms rather than allowing deeper exploration.

So… If our system isn’t set up to train students for innovative thinking, what are the things that we can do to better encourage innovative thinking in our students? What are the ways that we can disrupt the system from the inside? Here are a few ideas that I picked up as I explored the Innovation Playlist (linked above):

Have your students invent a science experiment – what is it that they want to test? How do they want to share their learning?
Ask students to write a creative essay – by encouraging creative thinking in the context of the classroom, you give them permission to think about the things that provide them wonder and curiosity.
Give your students the opportunity to come up with an interesting historical perspective on an event that they care about.

These types of activities push our students real world thinking that integrates what they know from multiple perspectives and fields of knowledge. These also create more opportunities for student voice and choice. While they may be harder to assess, they push the students to a culture of learning, which is very different than a culture of being taught.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you found ways to provide your students opportunities to be innovative thinkers and learners? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Lost at school

I have recently been reading the book Lost at School by Ross Greene and wanted to share some of my thoughts with all of you as I wrap up the book. For a while now I have wondered if a traditional school discipline system was capable of reaching some of the students that I see who have the most behavioral challenges. I have been an assistant principal for 6 years now, and one thing has remained consistent throughout those years – on average, about 30% of the referrals that are written for students in our school go to the same 10 to 15 students. This small group of kids can take up huge chunks of time for teachers in the classroom. These students also spend huge chunks of time outside of the classroom, which means that they aren’t receiving the access to learning that we want all our students to receive.

One of the main ideas of Greene’s writing is that “kids do well if they can.” My experiences when I was a classroom teacher would have wanted to tweak that statement a bit and say “kids do well if they want to”, but the problem with that version is most kids know exactly how we want them to behave (just ask them what they did wrong), and most of them even want to behave the right way. The reason they don’t is not a question of whether or not they want to behave, rather it’s a question of whether or not they have the tools to be able to behave.

If a student in your class is struggling academically, it’s most likely that they are lacking some skill to be able to perform successfully on the tasks that you are asking them to complete. What do we do when this happens? We take time to work with the student, we figure out where their gaps in learning are, and we try to reinforce those weaknesses. It can be time consuming, but it is what we are charged to do.

Behaviorally, students who struggle the most are not acting out in an effort to make things more difficult for us. They aren’t acting out because they don’t have support at home, and it’s not about the kids that they are around. What it’s really about is that kids with behavioral challenges lack important thinking skills. I believe we need to start thinking of these behaviors as something of a developmental delay.

The most important thing to remember

If we begin to think of behavior as a developmental delay, what does this do for our typical methods of handling student discipline? It definitely has me thinking about things differently.

The facts are that those 10-15 students that I was referencing earlier have received all kinds of different disciplinary actions and interventions throughout their school careers: detentions, in-school suspensions; out-of-school suspensions; conferences with administrators, parents, and teachers; and a variety of other strategies. Even with all these forms of discipline, many times those students are referred to the office again just a day or week after serving a consequence. What this tells me is that traditional discipline simply doesn’t work for some of our kids, and if it doesn’t work for some of our kids, is it truly beneficial for any of our kids?

Greene describes the issues that our struggling students have as lagging skills. Those lagging skills sometimes lead to unsolved problems, which in turn can lead to a behavioral outburst.

As an example, one of the lagging skills that Greene talks about is “Difficulty handling transitions, shifting from one mindset or task to another.” We might see this lagging skill manifest as an unsolved problem of having trouble transitioning from recess where we are running around, making noise, and socializing to the classroom where we need to be quiet and sitting in our seat working independently. When we can identify a lagging skill, and then label an unsolved problem, it becomes much easier to support students in solving this problem.

By shifting to Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS), we might be able to better help our students who struggle most learn coping skills for how to deal with their unsolved problems in more appropriate ways. While it can take time to work through this process with students, the reality is that those students are already taking lots of our time, and most of the time we are working in a reactive mode where we simply respond to the behaviors after they have occurred. The CPS process will allow us to have proactive strategies to support our kids.

In next week’s post, I’m going to go a little deeper in the strategies of CPS, and what it looks/sounds like in a classroom setting.

Lost at School has me completely rethinking the way that we look at student discipline. If you are curious to know more, or like me are feeling that the current student discipline methods are not working for some of our kids, I highly recommend the book as a way to learn more. Add it to your summer reading list!

I know that there are some of you reading this who have probably read Lost at School as well. If you have, let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Steele - behavior (2)

The value of communication and collaboration

Lombardi - Work Together

About a month ago, one of my posts (What are you learning?) made reference to the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook report. I want to come back to that report today and look at the top 6 items on the report. As I look over the list it keeps bringing me back to one of my favorite questions when thinking about learning in our classrooms: What do our kids need in order to be successful in the future? This list can help serve as a guide.

NACE Attributes Employers Seek

Think about some of the most successful companies in our world today. Whatever the company is, if they are trying to be innovative in their field, they are focused on creating the best products possible for their customers. What does work look like for those innovative companies? I’m guessing that they are concerned about their teams of employees working together to create innovation.

Think for a second about your best lessons. How many of you can claim that every aspect of your best lesson for your students was imagined, planned, created, and developed completely by you? I know when I was still in the classroom, I was constantly collaborating with other teachers to improve my lessons, to add cool new ideas, or to make the learning experience even better for the learners in my classroom. I’m guessing that most (if not all) of you will say the same thing.

If we know that innovative companies seek communication and collaboration, and we know that we achieve our own best work through communication and collaboration, and the data from the most recent NACE Jobs Outlook report shows that employers value communication and collaboration, what are we doing in our classroom to explicitly teach our students how to communicate and collaborate? Paul Solarz, the author of Learn Like a Pirate has an entire chapter on peer collaboration. He shared lots of great ideas of how he creates a collaborative environment for his students.

Early in the chapter he talks about the importance of establishing classroom expectations and norms as a group, where all members of the class have their input in those norms. As you build in and truly teach collaboration skills, students will take ownership of those skills and will help one another to be better collaborators, letting each other know what they need from one another so that all can be successful.

Even with the opportunity to teach collaboration, the only way students will be able to learn and grow in this skill is through the opportunity to practice. Be looking for as many ways as possible to integrate collaboration and communication into your lessons.

And something has to be said about the classroom environment in order to create an environment that is conducive to communication and collaboration. Think about when you are working with colleagues, how do you choose to sit? Based on my informal observations visiting team PLC time in our building, generally we sit in a group in such a way that everyone can see everyone else. Students need to be able to do the same when they have time to collaborate. Rows aren’t conducive to communication and collaboration. Seats where students are far away from their nearest neighbor don’t facilitate collaboration either.

Many of the classrooms in our school have created opportunities and spaces for students to be able to sit together and collaborate, whether it’s a small spot on the floor, a rug area, creative seating options, a couch, or high tables and chairs, there are places where students can sit together and collaborate in the classroom. To take it a step further, how many of you have considered not having a seating chart in your classroom? A true flexible seating environment can be created where there are norms about students choosing the space that they are able to do their best space. And as a safety net for you, you can always set the norm that poor choices by students may result in the teacher asking the student to make a different choice. Think about the way you would empower the learners in your room to be able to select their own seat each and every day in order to meet their learning needs!

I want to conclude this post sharing some pictures from offices for Google and Apple, two of the most innovative companies around today, as well as one of my favorite shared working space, Starbucks. I’m not saying that our classrooms need to necessarily look like these (they’re a bit extreme), but we might want to think about how spaces like this create environments where employees are able to put out amazing and innovative products. We also should realize that some of the students will be doing work in environments like this in their future. What can we do in our classrooms today to help them be successful in their future?

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So what are your thoughts? Have you had success teaching students communication and collaboration explicitly? What has worked for you? What concerns do you have about integrating more collaboration and communication into your classroom? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Reaching all our students

One of the challenges of teaching kids in the middle grades (I’m calling that 5^th through 8^th grade for the purpose of this post) is that physical maturity and social emotional maturity do not always match up. A couple days ago I was talking with a teacher about the immature behavior of a student. A comment that stuck with me after I walked away was “But he’s the biggest one in the class…”

Sometimes there is a misconception that the tallest kids are going to be the most mature and therefore capable of doing the most, and that the smallest ones are the least mature. But in my experience, that expectation doesn’t always work hold true.

The next chance you get, just scan your room. As you look, you will see a huge variety in physical differences among the kids that are sitting in your room. Not only are each of those kiddos physically different, they all have differences in their cognitive, social, and emotional needs. While it’s easy to recognize those physical differences, perceiving what’s going on inside a child is much more difficult. With all of these differences, how do we try to meet those needs?

Meeting the needs of all learners by differentiating instruction begins with accepting the fact that your students are all cognitively different than one another.

The Center for Applied Special Technology has been focusing their work on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL). There are three main principles of UDL, and thinking about these principles as you design learning experiences will help you better to reach the diverse needs of your students.

Principle 1: Provide multiple means of representation: We can all agree that our students all learn in different ways. This means it is so important for us to present and represent learning in multiple ways. Some students would learn best from a video clip. Others might learn best from a reading assignment. Others might need graphic organizers to help them to capture their learning. The key is to remember that if you only provide one entry point for learning, you probably will not reach all your students.
Principle 2: Provide multiple means of action and expression: We all have our preferred ways to be able to express our knowledge. For me, I love to share my learning through written expression. Others might prefer to record a quick video clip, while still others might want to create a presentation through Power Point. The same is true of our students. While we can have our big ideas and learning targets that we want students to reach, they don’t all have to show what they know in the exact same way. The more choices we offer students in expressing their learning, the more likely we are to meet the needs of every student.
Principle 3: Provide multiple means of engagement: We all know that if learners are not engaged, they are not going to be learning. Students are most engaged when they are given the opportunity to participate in authentic learning experiences that are responding to their questions, concerns, or interests. If we can give students opportunities to develop they questions or look into their concerns and interests within the scope of our learning goals, they will be more engaged, and feel empowered

Ultimately, our goal for all students is that they learn and grow. Through the use of these 3 principles, you can design learning experiences that allow our students to feel engaged and invested in their learning, and in turn you will be more likely to move our students forward in their learning. What are your thoughts? Have you seen these principles help your students find more success in the classroom? Are there any principles that you would add to this list? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Childhood trauma – part 2

Last week I encouraged you to watch the TED Talk by Nadine Burke Harris titled “How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime.” If you missed it and still would like to watch it, click here. Even if you didn’t watch the talk, hopefully there will be information in today’s post that will help you understand: 1) the impact of trauma on children; 2) that childhood trauma can affect any community; and 3) a few ways to be able to impact the lives of students and their families to improve outcomes.

Childhood trauma: it affects brain development, the immune system, hormonal systems, and the way our DNA is read and transcribed. It leads to increased risk of heart disease and lung cancer, and can cause a 20-year difference in life expectancy. Even with all these factors, many doctors are not prepared to be able to identify childhood trauma, and even fewer have the tools necessary to treat these issues.

Trauma

Many physicians, especially those that work in public health, are trained to try to identify root causes of an illness. When 50 people from the same neighborhood begin exhibiting the same symptoms, doctors are not only going to treat the patients, they are also going to look at what’s going on in that neighborhood.

Dr. Harris began to notice a pattern in many of her patients that she couldn’t initially put her finger on. She was having kids referred to her for ADHD, but she could not make that diagnosis. As she got to know more of these patients, the pattern that she found in many was that they had experienced some form of severe trauma.

There is a direct link between childhood trauma and adult onset of chronic disease, as well as mental illness, doing time in prison, and work issues, such as absenteeism. Eventually, Dr. Harris learned from a colleague of a study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACEs Study). This ongoing study is a collaboration of Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I believe that every educator needs to be aware of the ACEs Study. The study shows a correlation between ACEs that occurred prior to reaching the age of 18 and many health and social problems as an adult. Here are some basic stats from the ACEs Study:

17,300 adults were part of the original study
70% were Caucasian
70% were college educated
All participants have/had livable wages and health insurance
All were middle class or affluent

While there were many forms of trauma that the participants in the study had been through, the study identified the top 10 ACEs. They are:

Sexual Abuse
Physical Abuse
Emotional Abuse
Physical Neglect
Emotional Neglect
Loss of a Parent
Witnessing Family Violence
Incarceration of a Family Member
Having a Mentally Ill, Depressed, or Suicidal Family Member
Living with a Drug Addicted or Alcoholic Family Member

ACEs scores are determined by 1 point per each of the ACEs listed above. A couple things to be aware of about ACE scores: first, they are extremely common. 67% of the population had at least one ACE, and 12.6% had 4 or more ACEs. Second, the higher the ACEs score, the worse the potential health outcomes.

ACEs can also have an impact on student success. In one Washington State University study, students who had at least 3 ACEs were 3 times likelier to experience academic failure. They are 5 times likelier to have attendance issues. And they are 6 times as likely to exhibit behavioral problems.

Sunset chaser Why does this happen? For the normally developed brain, when it encounters a stressful situation the adrenal gland kicks in and releases adrenaline and cortisol, which gets the body ready for fight, flight, or freeze. For a child living in trauma, those adrenal glands are constantly being triggered, which causes their brain to have bottom up control, and prevents the upper part of the brain (those that control reasoning, self-control, learning, and understanding), from being able to take control. And what are the triggers for our trauma students? You may never know. It could be walking into their home, it could be a loud voice, it could be a simple as a facial expression. These triggers are so frequent that the trauma brain is constantly in fight, flight, or freeze mode.

One of the things that we all know is that being an educator can be a very emotional task. You become connected to your students, you want the best of them, and no matter how hard we try, there are times that they become frustrated. These frustrations may manifest themselves in many different ways. We have to be able to help our students to calm their brains and return to top-down control. Punishments and logic will not work for a dysregulated student. Instead, our students need relationships, connections, and acceptance. When we are able to stay calm when our students are not, we may be able to help get our students back to calm. Remember, when a student is struggling, it is not about us, and we can’t take it personally.

Your presence is the most precious gift you can give another human being. In their book The Trauma-Informed School, Jim Sporleder and Heather T. Forbes identified a few strategies that we can all use to interact with students (and I would suggest that these strategies work for all kids, not just those who have been through trauma). Here’s a few of them:

Respond instead of react – ask yourself “am I responding to this student as a person or am I reacting to his behavior?”
Give emotional space – allow the student to be upset, and be there to support the student when they are once again regulated.
Ask the right questions – What’s driving the behavior? What can I do to improve my relationship with this student?
Statements that show support – What do you need from me right now that takes care of you and allows me to continue teaching?
Choose your battles – sometimes it’s best to just get your class going on something, then quietly approach the student to check in.
Keep yourself regulated – drop your personal mirror and seek the cause to the problem that is happening in front of you.

No two situations are going to be identical. No two kids are going to react in the same way. What works today might not work tomorrow, but simply being aware of what’s going on in the brains of our students, and some possible strategies for when a student becomes dysregulated will help all of us to be able to better meet the needs of our kids.

What strategies have been successful for you? Are there things that you have done in the past with kids that aren’t included here? Share your thoughts in the comments below so that we can all spread our knowledge.

What does John Wooden have to do with teaching?

As many of you know, when I was still teaching, I also coached basketball. In one of the first seasons I was coaching, I attended a coaching clinic. I learned a ton that day, but one of the things that has stuck with me even beyond my time as a coach was probably a throw away comment by one of the assistant coaches about John Wooden – one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time. During the clinic we were talking about a variation on Coach Wooden’s famous secondary break, and someone mentioned one of Wooden’s books. I jotted a note to myself, and ordered it from Amazon later. When it arrived, I expected a book with information about various plays and strategy – after all it is a book on coaching. What I found however, was that the majority of the book was on coaching philosophies.

To me, this was valuable information as well, I mean the guy is one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, coaching his UCLA teams to 10 national championships, including a stretch of 7 consecutive national championships. During his years as the coach at UCLA, he was able to get some of the best basketball players in the country to come and play for his team. One of the things that I found most intriguing as I read about Wooden’s coaching was in how he began his season. He was bringing in some of the best recruits in the country, there were many players who went on to careers playing in the NBA, and yet every season, no matter who was on the team, Wooden would start the first practice in the locker room talking about how players should correctly put on their socks and shoes. He felt that you had to start at the absolute beginning with everything in order to make sure that the players on his team knew the expectations and procedures that were part of success for UCLA Bruins basketball players.

Every year at the beginning of the school year a new group of students walk into your classroom. We have to look at each of those kids as our top recruits – we know that they are in the eyes of the parents who trust us to help their children learn and grow while they are here with us.

When Wooden got his top recruits, he could have easily gone straight to the basketball court to start working on offenses and defenses that the team would run throughout the year – I mean these guys all knew how to put on their socks and shoes, they had to have been successful players in high school to end up at UCLA. But Wooden knew that expectations and procedures were the key to a successful season. He started with the small things – socks and shoes. Once they made it to the basketball court, much of their time in the early part of the season were on fundamentals – dribbling, passing, footwork. Wooden understood that if you had a solid base of expectations, teaching players to play the game the way they needed to in order to be successful would be so much easier.

So, how do you spend your time at the beginning of the school year? I know that it can be tempting to think that our students, most of whom have been “in school” for 5-6 years, know what is expected. It can be easy to skip over the base level procedures. Just like Wooden could have said that his players knew how to put on their socks and shoes, or they knew how to dribble, pass, and move their feet, we could assume that our students know how to line up, how (and when) to sharpen a pencil, how to work in a small group, etc. But here’s the thing – it’s possible that the way you expect students to do some of these things is different than the way that a past teacher expected things to be done.

I am writing this post in late April, knowing that I’m not going to post it until the beginning of the school year. In my role I have the privilege of visiting lots of different classrooms, seeing how different people spend their time, and seeing what people value. One thing that I notice in April is that the teachers who have invested time throughout the year with the basic expectations – like Wooden did with socks and shoes – are currently (in April) having the most success with student behavior.

So, what are the things we need to teach on the most basic level? Here are just a few ideas that come to mind:

Transitions
What to bring to class every day
Small group time / collaboration time
Lunch
Recess
Restroom expectations

What might you add to your list? There might be expectations that are specific to your content area, or there might be things that don’t apply for your class structure. In the last couple of years I was in the classroom, I created a 1 slide power point for each of these situations along with a few that were directly connected to my content area, and I would display them every time that it fit at the beginning of the year. As the year went on, I would spend less and less time on the review, unless I noticed a pattern of issues. Then we might review for a few days. We would also spend some time reviewing each of the expectations after any break from school. While this did not always solve every single issue, it helped in the long run, and by taking the time to create these slides in advance, it was easy for me to pull one up and display for my students.

As you prepare for your school year, what are the socks and shoes type of procedures that your students need to know about in order to be successful in your classroom? After creating a list of expectations, think about the method that might work best for you to be able to teach your students those expectations. It can be easy to assume that our students will know what to do, but they might not. Maybe you will share your procedures in a power point slide like mine, maybe it’s something more involved like a student created video. Whatever the plan is, take the time to think about how you can share your expectations with your students so that they truly know what to do.

For your students to be truly successful, they have to have a solid foundation. What pieces of the foundation do you think you need to work on the most for your students to learn and grow in your class? Share your ideas in the comments below – maybe your thoughts and ideas will spark an idea for others!

The View from 518

Category: Expectations