Be Positive

My 13-yr old daughter recently told me about a Facebook group called, something to the effect of, “teachers stop complaining about grading 500 things because you assigned it” and I thought that was so apt.  Really, I understand that teaching can be an incredibly complicated activity in the best of times.  But complaining about 10 things (or students) a day will in no way increase your power in the classroom.

Start Planning

Planning is just about the most powerful thing/activity any teacher can do to empower his- or herself.  When you plan your classroom instruction to include everything you want your students to learn, they have a much better chance of learning it — and you will experience a sense of power that is exhilarating and practically addictive!  Try it!  You might find that you actually enjoy it. Plan for your instruction to occur in natural “chunks” of time, to coincide with students’ natural tendencies to want to move or disengage or get distracted.  If you plan for the changes, then they are no longer unwelcome and become just another pathway to powerful teaching.

Make the Student do the Work

That’s the work involved in the learning that they should be doing. If you are the one who does all the work in the classroom, then you are not experiencing your authentic power as a teacher!  I don’t remember where I originally heard this, but it has been proven to me over and over.  The person who is doing the reading, writing & thinking is the person doing the learning. I tell students who want to be “spoon-fed” the answers that I don’t need to do the work for them because I’ve been studying for 35 years and I know what they need to learn.  Make them dig and search and read and write and think of the answers for themselves.  It keeps them out of your hair, too, so that you can actually concentrate on or focus on those few who really do need your help in order to succeed in their learning.

Teach Responsibility

It is the student’s job to bring the work to you and to make sure that it is correctly formatted and presented, according to your class procedures. The procedures are followed because no one gets to benefit from not following them.  Why should a teacher spend time & energy grading an assignment with no name on it?  Or waste even more time and energy trying to find out who it belongs to?  Have a basket that you put those assignments in – students will learn soon enough that you won’t grade the papers in that basket and will learn to follow the appropriate procedures used to identify work.

Make & Follow Class Procedures

Create unpleasant, natural, random consequences for unacceptable behaviors  and pleasant, unnatural, consistent rewards for compliance and performance according to procedures. Escalating tiers of punishment or discipline generally only serve to increase the frequency and severity of unacceptable behavior. But, if the maximum consequence could be delivered, at random, for even a minor infraction ( and that is true all the time in your class), then the instances of unsuitable behavior  will drop dramatically.  Conversely, if small achievements in acceptable behaviors are richly rewarding to the class as a whole, it is in the best interests of everyone to maintain and insist on acceptable behaviors from everyone else. Peer pressure to conform to acceptable behavior will serve as a huge leverage to keep your classroom operating smoothly and according to procedures that maximize the empowerment of everyone, especially, you the teacher.

So to recap…

Stay Positive
Start Planning
Make Students Work
Teach Responsibility
Make & Follow Procedures with Consequences

The simple procedures that you use in your classroom will provide you with a tremendous boost in your authentic power as a teacher. And the more that you work them, the more powerful you become.  It takes some time on the front end to set these up and teach yourself and your students that you mean business when it comes to acceptable standards, but I know from experience that it can be one of the best ways to empower not only yourself, but, ultimately, your students, too.

Enjoy!
Teresa

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