Managing Students with Low Skills

Hello everyone,

For the first six years of my career, I worked with remedial reading students at Belvedere Middle School. 8th graders, mostly; the worst behaved (I think) of all the grades.

A large number of my students were gang members; some have been killed in the intervening years. Almost all were English language learners; many had learning disabilities. Some were only a few points out of special ed. classes, which meant that they had struggles typical of special ed. without the funded support.

My first year was an unmitigated disaster. My second year was mitigated, but not particularly good. By the sixth year, I had learned classroom management and was on my way toward becoming a decent instructor.

I learned something about those students as I experimented with my classroom management: They craved order and structure and discipline. It's true that they often complained about it during the course of learning the way I ran my classroom, but by the end of the year they took pride in the fact that they could be trusted to behave; and they took comfort in the fact they they were safe in the classroom--both physically and academically.

I must say at this point that I don't believe classroom management is everything. There is something wrong with a teacher whose entire effort is placed into management, and who avoids really teaching because that can be disruptive to an orderly classroom.

I also want to say (as I've said before) that a quiet classroom is not necessarily a good classroom.

But it needs to be clearly understood that NO LEARNING CAN OCCUR WITHOUT DISCIPLINE.

Now, having said all that, I want to talk a little about the specific problems of disciplining students who are, for whatever reason, poor students. I mean, how does a teacher cope with a large percentage of students who would have been like the remedial reading classes of my early career?

You MUST give them structure. Your class must be orderly and ordered. They must be able to come in and know exactly what is expected of them, where to find materials, how to do assignments, how to behave in the variety of situations that they will encounter in the class, and what behavior is supposed to be like.

Included in this structure may be very explicit instructions and even lessons on all of the above things. I had to carefully tell my students, "You must be in the class, properly seated at your desk and ready to work, or you will be marked tardy." I worked on that principle intensely at first; it was integrated into the lessons of my first two weeks.

I try to avoid spending too much time on consequences. There must be consequences for misbehavior, true, but it's not necessary to give a lengthy, detailed of consequences for every infraction. At the same time, the shorter the attention span, the more immediate the consequence must be.

I also try to take as little instructional time as possible with discipline. That means that, though the consequence must be immediate, it must still not distract from everyone else's learning. Usually, if I looked at a student, then wrote something down, it was sufficient. Or a quick reminder to meet me after class, after which I wrote the student's name on a piece of paper.

Now, it is true that there is a direct, general correlation between the skill level of the students and the behavior of the class. That correlation, however, does not mean that teaching low-skilled students need be anything but rewarding; it just means that the class requires more explicit work on behavior. That work cannot be overlooked with low-skilled students, or your life can be pretty miserable before long.

Finally, there was a trick of the mind I used to play with myself, and I found that it helped me. I realized, after about two years, that if I stopped thinking of my students as immature, disruptive middle school students, and more as super-intelligent, mature elementary school students, I was more able to manage them and communicate with them at the level they lived. I spoke to them they way I would speak to a third grader who enjoyed talking like a grown-up. When they occasionally lapsed back into their immature behaviors, instead of getting upset at their immaturity, I could be amused at how they really sometimes behaved at their reading age. It reminded me to use language that they would understand rather than get upset at them for not understanding the language.

I didn't dumb down the curriculum (indeed, they read Charles Dickens among others), nor did I ever let on that I used the mental trick. It just affected my expectations in a way that helped me to help the kids. It especially helped me to remember that I needed to give explicit, direct instruction on how to behave in a classroom--and that was worth the mental gymnastics.

Whatever you use to help you be patient with them but firm in your rules, whatever helps you to scaffold properly, whatever convinces you to teach discipline first--use it. And don't forget it.

Jeff Combe