Management Tricks

Hello everyone,

I was talking with the principal yesterday about classroom management tricks--things to help you keep order in the classroom.

Here are a couple of things (call them tricks if you want to) we agree are useful to keep in mind:

1. It's usually best not to tell students exactly what you will do if they break a rule. It's enough that they know that there is a consequence for their misbehavior, and that the consequence is intended to help them behave. This is a very useful idea, and it solves a multitude of problems with classroom discipline. Mr. Del Cueto's method was to hold eye contact with the offender, take a notebook out of his pocket, write something in the notebook, then put the notebook back significantly, all the time holding eye contact as well and as seriously as possible. When the student inevitably asked, "What did you write?" Mr. Del Cueto would simply say, "You'll find when the time is right." (What he actually wrote was usually something nonsensical or unrelated, but the student never knew.)

Sometimes students would try to negotiate: "What would happen if ...?" I learned that it is never useful to tell them exactly what I was going to do. That always led to a cost-benefit analysis by the student ("Is it worth the punishment for me to misbehave in this way?"), which usually led to misbehavior ("Heck, yes, it's worth it!"). My answer came to be something like, "I will do as little as possible to get you to behave. If that doesn't work, I will do more. I will keep doing more until I find the thing that bothers you enough to keep you from misbehaving. What I do will be individually tailored to your circumstance and tastes. Don't challenge me on this, because I won't give up before you do." What they imagined was worse than anything I would ever consider doing.

By all means, give them a consequence, but let it start small if at all possible. "The look" is usually the best.

2. Parents are your greatest resource. However, it's very important that if you say you're going to call the parents, you must actually do it. If once you say you're going to call, and you don't call, you will mark yourself as someone who lets people get away with things.

Usually with parents, it's sufficient to say something like, "I just wanted to let you know that your child was misbehaving in my class today. I thought that you would want to know, and that you could talk to your child about how to behave." Do not make the parents feel that you think they have failed. (If you have already raised a teenager, you know that it's not fair to blame the parents for all of the decisions a teenager can make.)

The nuclear equivalent of using the parents is to invite them to attend class with their child. It works very well on 9th grade boys.

3. Never say you're going to do something, then fail to do it--unless you make a public apology for having said what you said. (This is another reason why #1 is effective. Since you haven't threatened anything specific, you're not in a position to have to apologize for having said something stupid in the heat of the moment.) Mr. Del Cueto suggests that if you threaten to do four things to punish someone, and you do three of those things, but fail to do the fourth, the students will regard you as someone who does not keep your word.

I have occasionally threatened a student with a consequence that was silly or poorly thought out because the kid upset me. By the end of class, I realized that what I had threatened was unreasonable. I apologized to the student for being unreasonable, then I offered an alternative consequence that I thought was more reasonable. The general idea of #3 is not to bind you to foolish, unreasonable threats. It is meant to prevent you from NOT following through on reasonable consequences (such as phone calls home), and to help you to avoid losing your temper in public and making threats that you can't possibly follow up on.

If Mr. Del Cueto remembers anything else we missed, I'm sure I'll get an email from him, but I thought that these things we discussed were worth putting in print.

Best of luck in your management,

Jeff Combe