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Showing posts with label Discipline. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Discipline. Show all posts

Friday, December 27, 2013

The Power of Self-Control for Children

Last month I wrote that the most powerful predictor of academic achievement is actually classroom behavior, and that one of the most effective ways parents can support their child's success at school is to train them to behave at home beginning while they are still babies. It is not true that babies are too young to learn how to behave. Parents teach babies all sorts of poor behavior, usually by rewarding bad behavior with food in a misplaced effort to redirect or quiet the baby. Parents also teach young children poor behavior by accepting incomplete obedience.

For example, I was visiting in the home with a 2 ½ year old child. The child picked up a pair of scissors. The father ordered the child to hand him the scissors. Upon the third repetition of the command, the child put the scissors down on the table. The father wisely picked up the scissors, put them back in the child's hand and ordered the child to hand him the scissors. The father did not accept the child's incomplete obedience by rationalizing that at least the child did not have the scissors anymore. No, the father made a reasonable request and accepted nothing less than complete obedience. The child will take the same attitude into school. Children who are allowed incomplete obedience will also take the attitude they have learned into school. It should be easy to see which child is likely to be more successful in school.

I am not advising that parents be tyrants. I am advising that parent say what they mean and mean what they say. Another word for this is consistency. Recently, I discovered that Pulitzer prize author Charles Duhigg says essentially the same thing in his 2012 book,“The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.”

At the core of that education is an intense focus on an all-important habit: willpower. Dozens of studies show that willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success. In a 2005 study, for instance, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 164 eighth-grade students, measuring their IQs and other factors, including how much willpower the students demonstrated, as measured by tests of their self-discipline.

An excellent synonym for willpower is self control. Another one is conscientiousness. It should not be necessary to point out that conscientious, self-controlled schoolchildren behave well in school. Nor should we be surprised that classroom behavior robustly predicts present and future success.

Students who exerted high levels of willpower were more likely to earn higher grades in their classes and gain admission into more selective schools. They had fewer absences and spent less time watching television and more hours on homework. “Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable,” the researchers wrote. “Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

Roy Baumeister, author of “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength,”has studied self-control extensively and offers some excellent tips for helping your child increase self-control. One of the most intriguing things Dr. Baumeister found was that a dose of glucose instantly improves self-control.

Our work on self-control (or self-regulation) centers on the idea that self-control relies on a limited energy source. A single act of self-control consumes this energy source, and later acts of self-control are impaired as a result. Findings in our lab on sexual restraint, aggression, intellectual reasoning, emotional coping, and thought suppression support this pattern. Moreover, recent work suggests that part of the energy source of self-control is glucose. Attempts at self-control deplete glucose that is needed for later attempts at self-control.

Therefore, as incredible as it may sound, the first thing parents need to do is make sure that kids get a good breakfast before they go to school. Then, find ways to let children practice using a little will power every day. Practicing makes willpower stronger in every area of life. Practice has at least two positive effects. First, practice creates habits. Good habits, by definition, do not require willpower. One way is to help children build habits through daily routines. As just one example among many, do not have a school night bedtime different from a weekend bedtime. Bedtime should be the same every night. Second, habits become a default response requiring less willpower to implement.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Surprising Secret to Academic Achievement

Over the years parents have often asked me how they can support their child's academic performance at home. Until very recently, I gave all the standard answers. However, after pondering many years of observations, I have concluded that if I could pick ONE THING parents can do to support success, it would be to insist their children behave at home. I see scholastic problems developing at a very young age, even in the high chair. As just one example among innumerable similar examples, I know just such a family with a baby in a high chair. The parents say they want the child to sit down in the high chair while they feed him. The baby wants to stand up in the high chair and turn around. Although the parents tell the baby to sit down, they do not insist on compliance. In fact, they will follow the baby to the back of the chair and give him a spoonful of food. Naturally, the food reward reinforces the very behavior they would like to extinguish. It all starts from lack of consistency. When parents issue a directive, they must accept only complete compliance, not something less. Otherwise children take this same attitude into school where it becomes the number one source of academic difficulties, manifested by attempts to lower the teacher's bar and find shortcuts which substitute for real learning.

The hard truth no one wants to accept is that the most fundamental difference between high achievers and low-achievers (barring physical challenges) is classroom behavior. Every teacher knows the “good” kids tend to do well, and the disruptive kids do not. Our society does not countenance such a bald idea, so teachers couch it in terms like “does his best, “participates well," “cooperates with others,” etc. If researchers were brave enough to ask the right question, behavior would probably surpass every other variable in predicting academic achievement, even to the extent of overcoming the negative impacts of poverty. And do not worry. A loving insistence on compliance with parental directives is not “controlling”or“authoritarian,”nor will it stunt your child's creativity or critical thinking skills.

Nevertheless, beyond saying what you mean and meaning what you say, all the good advice still applies:

Adequate nutrition and sleep.

Provide a special place to do homework.

Set a regular time for homework and remove distractions.

Make sure homework is completed.

Make sure your child has a special place to record homework assignments.

Have plenty of reading material at home and encourage recreational reading.

Show that you value reading.

Turn off the TV.

Limit or eliminate video-game playing and cell phone use.

Help your child learn to use the internet properly.

Involve your child in day-to-day problem solving while shopping or completing household tasks.

Monitor after-school activities such as music lesson or sports teams. If the child is not doing the homework, reduce after-school activities. Perhaps ask the teacher to send a report home evey home every Friday.

Focus on the child's personal progress and improvement, not on test scores. Test scores that are too high are worthless. It means the test was too easy. Teacher, parent and student learn nothing useful from such a score. Better to level up the test than shoot for high scores which can make everyone feel good, but nothing more.

Double check with the teacher before hiring a tutor. Especially in math, tutors typically teach tricks for getting answers on homework, but do very little to help the child learn the concepts or acquire number sense. Teaching the child tricks can undermine the teacher's effort to provide a quality education.

Establish routines

Establish rules. Every home needs reasonable rules that children know and can depend on. Have your child help you to set rules, then make sure that you enforce the rules consistently.

Make it clear to your child that he has to take responsibility for what he does, both at home and at school. For example, don't automatically defend your child if his teacher tells you that he is often late to class or is disruptive when he is in class. Ask for his side of the story. If a charge is true, let him take the consequences.

Work with your child to develop a reasonable, consistent schedule of jobs to do around the house. List them on a calendar. Younger children can help set the table or put away their toys and clothes. Older children can help prepare meals and clean up afterwards.

Show your child how to break a job down into small steps, then to do the job one step at a time. This works for everything—getting dressed, cleaning a room or doing a big homework assignment.

Make your child responsible for getting ready to go to school each morning—getting up on time, making sure that he has everything he needs for the school day and so forth. If necessary, make a checklist to help him remember what he has to do.

Monitor what your child does after school, in the evenings and on weekends. If you can't be there when your child gets home, give her the responsibility of checking in with you by phone to discuss her plans.

PBS has some suggestions for parents.

No matter how hard you try, your child may struggle academically at some point in his school career. Here are some strategies to help you both cope when the going gets tough.

Let your kids get frustrated. When kids are having a hard time with homework or a school-related subject, they often explode with anger. And parents wonder “What did I do wrong?” “You didn’t necessarily do anything,” advises Michael Thompson, Ph.D. “Sometimes when kids feel misunderstood at school or frustrated by a subject, they get angry or provoke the parent — as a way of making you feel as helpless or angry as they feel. It’s almost like your child is saying, ‘would you hold my hopelessness for a while?’ Or ‘I need you to feel what I am going through, so I am going to make you angry.’”

Take a break. If your child says “I can’t do it!” and throws the pencil down, take a little break. Maybe she needs to rant and blow off a little steam. Come back in five minutes and start fresh. (Those five minutes could save you an hour of struggle.) This also gives a child a chance to “save face” and start over, without even discussing the previous difficulty or outburst.

Don’t always try to have a rational conversation. When kids get very upset about school, the upset may get in the way of their being rational. So wait it out instead of arguing or grilling children about the situation. Once they cool down, you might be able to talk it through.

Let your child make his own mistakes. It’s hard not to correct a child’s homework, but most teachers ask you not to take over unless your child asks for your help or the teacher requests it. Teachers generally want to know what the child understands, not what the parent understands about the material.

Put a time limit on the work. Most teachers will not expect younger kids to work longer than a half-hour on homework from any particular subject, but ask your teacher for a time limit. If your child struggles (while actively trying) and exceeds the limit, write the teacher a note explaining that was all that could get done.

Contact the school. If homework or a project is turning into a dreaded battle, talk with the school. Do not wait for your next conference. It is obviously time for some new insights and new strategies.

Help your child learn how to organize himself. This is a life-long skill that can be taught, but it can be challenging to do so. However you can help your child discover the organizational tricks that will work for him by sharing some of your own. “It’s very difficult to teach children to be organized if it is not in their nature (or yours),” says guidance counselor Linda Lendman, M.S.W. “Encourage your child to label everything. Develop strategies, like the ‘must-do list’ before you leave school (put math book in backpack). Schedule a weekly ‘clean out the backpack and clean off your desk’ time so papers don’t build up. Be patient, and try not to place blame.”

Recognize that school work will never be conflict-free. No one ever raised a child without a homework battle. “There is no conflict-free homework strategy for most kids,” says Michael Thompson, Ph.D. “At times, kids will find it fun and fascinating. Other times, it may be something they just have to do, and you have to help them find the structure for getting it done.”

Sunday, December 16, 2012

We Teach Our Students to Misbehave...

… and then complain when they do exactly as we expect. A certain student came home from school reporting on a substitute teacher the class did not like. She began her report by asking me, “Doesn't a teacher have to let a student go to the bathroom if it is an emergency?” I did not answer; I asked what happened. The class in question took place after just after lunch. A girl came in, saw there was a sub, and began “dancing” near the classroom door. The teacher asked her to sit down. She continued to loudly make a scene. The teacher continued to ask her to sit down. The girl never did sit down, and continued to interrupt as the teacher tried to finish taking role. Then the teacher let her go.

After she left, several members of the class began asking the teacher out loud, “Why didn't you let her go? You have to let people go to the bathroom. What if it's an emergency?” The teacher explained that he would have let her go a lot sooner if she had just sat done when she was asked and allowed him to finish taking attendance.

Typical of many classes with a sub, there was a video which the teacher showed using the TV monitor. The students demanded out loud that the teacher put the video on the powerpoint projector instead of the TV monitor. The teacher refused. The students insisted their regular teacher always puts videos on the powerpoint projector. The teacher still refused. (an aside: students are really spoiled by all the technology available in classrooms these days. When I started teaching, we handed out purple, smelly mimeographs and showed filmstrips on a reel-to-reel. Some people reading this post may not have any idea what I am talking about. LOL)

My little friend came home complaining about what a mean teacher the substitute was. I guess she expected me to commiserate, and she was thoroughly astonished that I had an entirely different take on the incident. I told her the fault was with the students, not the the sub. First, the girl created a public scene when she could have walked respectfully to the teacher and quietly made her request. But no. She engaged in melodramatic, loud theatrics and essentially set a trap for the sub. She probably did not have to go to the bathroom at all.

Second, the students thought it was okay to question the teacher's response out loud, but worse, the teacher thought he had to answer their objections. Third, the students whined about the powerpoint projector. I told my young friend that no sub with a speck of common sense will do anything just because the students say the teacher does it. That is exactly the way to guarantee a whole period of one piece of nonsense after another. My little friend thought that perhaps her teacher forgot to write the part about the powerpoint projector in the lesson plans she left. Maybe so, I said, but the class will just have to do without, and they should never have been disrespectful to the sub about it.

She countered, “If we like the sub, we behave.” Wrong answer. Students behave because they are expected to behave whether they like the sub or not. Students have not the power, responsibility or authority to decide that they will behave “if we like the sub.” Liking the sub is irrelevant. Shame on our society for even giving such a wrong-headed notion any positive attention.

Then my little friend asked, “But what if the sub doesn't like kids?” What was she really saying, that kids have the right to punish a sub they decide does not like them? Wrong again. It is irrelevant whether “the sub likes kids” or not. Students are expected to behave, period. The problem in our society is that students did not get these wrong-headed ideas from nowhere. They have been socialized to them their whole lives. As a society, we do not really expect students to behave, the obligatory first day “expectations” lectures notwithstanding. In fact, I would suggest if we are still giving these first-day lectures to students older than about ten, both students and teachers have already conceded that students are expected to misbehave, regardless of our actual words. Furthermore, maybe we need to think a lot more deeply about what we mean by “student-centered.” In addition, there is tremendous pressure on teachers to avoid sending unruly students to the office.

As a junior high and high school teacher, I also gave the first-day lecture. I told the students I was doing so because I knew they were expecting one. I told them they had heard all the same expectations every first day since kindergarten, and now that they are secondary students, they get to hear the same expectations multiple times in one day. I listed the expectations anyway “on the off-chance there is even one person here who has not heard them,” and I explained the consequences of misbehavior. Faddish and wrong implementation of “democratic discipline” models leads to specious student “empowerment.” (Oh, I do hate buzzwords).

Up until this point, the students have basically tuned out what they have already judged to be merely a stricter sounding version of the usual first-day yadayada. But then, they all perk up when I say, “Here's the catch. There are no warnings. You guys are way too old for childish warnings. And I don't do second chances, and I do not negotiate.” About the third day, a student (usually a boy) will test me. I apply the consequence immediately and shut down the inevitable attempt to negotiate. Normally, I have no more problems during the year, because the thing is, students actually know how to behave. They just need teachers who genuinely expect them to. It is the Pygmalion Effect. When I had laryngitis while teaching in a school for "troubled" (read: disruptive) students, I learned that the students really do know how to behave. I learned to raise my expectations instead of my voice.

Japanese and Chinese students have a reputation for being well-behaved. I directly observed that overall, the expectation that students will behave is a Japanese societal given that does not require an annual review. Interestingly, a study found that “Chinese teachers appear less punitive and aggressive than do those in Israel or Australia and more inclusive and supportive of students’ voices,” and this in a country stereotyped to be just the opposite.

If you doubt that we encourage the very misbehavior we decry, check out this actual example from curriculum purporting to teach “critical thinking.” Really gotta watch for that “invisible curriculum.”

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Yes, What About Student Accountability?

Brian Toporek began by asking, “What About Student Accountability?”

If college professors hold students 100 percent accountable for their own learning, shouldn't K-12 teachers ease students into taking responsibility for their own education? That's the question Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor from the University of Virginia, asks in a guest post on the Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog.

Willingham notes that among his university colleagues, the professors aren't concerned with whether students show up to class or study. "Most professors figure that their job is to teach well. Whether the student learns or not is up to him or her," he says.


First, I would quibble with the statement “professors aren't concerned with whether students show up to class or study. 'Most professors figure that their job is to teach well. Whether the student learns or not is up to him or her.'”

When I was a college student, professors did not assign "homework." We assigned it to ourselves. We did as many math problems as it took to get comfortable. We asked about the problems we could not solve. In a typical class period, there would be questions about maybe three or four of the problems. Students who did not do the work on their own initiative would suffer the natural consequences at test time.

I had one professor, an immigrant from kindergarten, who assigned and collected homework from her college students. The students vilified her for treating them as children. Students say they wish to be treated like adults, but today, professors who treat students as I was typically treated (that is, like and adult) when I was a student are likely to find themselves in front of the department chair defending their practice.

The university is no longer a university. It has become a customer-driven marketplace where the customer is always right. In my student days, complaining students got nowhere with the administration even if their complaints were warranted. Consequently, there were sometimes abuses of power. However, the wholesale adoption of the market model has not produced better outcomes.

As Judith Steele points out in her comment, "All teachers of college students are familiar with these common behaviors and habits that result in low or failing grades: late arrival to class, high absenteeism, no book purchased, work not turned in, unprepared for class, sleeping in class, and the ubiquitous texting in class."

Yes, we are all familiar with these common behaviors. Dr. Willingham even introduced his article with his own anecdote.

Not long ago a student told me a story about taking the SAT. Students were to bring a photo I.D., and the girl in front of her in line had not brought one. When she was told that she couldn’t take the test without the i.d., she was incredulous. She literally did not believe that there would be a consequence for her forgetfulness. She assumed that there would be a Plan B for people like her. When it became clear that plan B was “go home and next time, bring your I.D.,” she was angry and scornful.

I see this attitude not infrequently in freshmen I teach.


Many university departments now expect professors to organize their class as if it were a high school with multiple graded homework assignments, weekly quizzes, attendance taking, etc. and a lot of hand holding. Students complain loudly in class if the professor assigns what some of them believe to be too many problems. Actually, I am willing to hold their hands and lead them across the academic bridge to accountability and achievement that I am building for them. Many refuse to cross. They often go to the department chair and essentially get teleported. Beam me up, Scotty. Administrators tell professors to ensure somehow that every student passes, regardless of the quality of work.

Of course, starting in junior high, students in my day were held increasingly accountable for our own grades and learning. Today, teachers just say, "Just wait till you get to college" instead of training immature adolescents to become relatively mature 18-year old scholars.

However, I am sympathetic. Without administrative support, (and lack of administrative support is the number one reason teachers leave teaching), teachers have difficulty doing their jobs and training the children in the way they should go. In some school environments, maintaining control is all a teacher can manage. I once had a principal who allowed no D's or F's. He simply changed the grades of those recalcitrant teachers who gave what students earned.

I mentor a young, talented and reflective high school teacher who teaches in a well equipped school located in a high income area. Her main struggle and frustration is student behavior. There is something seriously wrong as long as administrators hold teachers more responsible for student behavior than the students themselves (and their parents).

Bryan Toporek ended by asking, "But how would you propose capturing that idea of student accountability in a revamped teacher evaluation process?" I added the following comment to his post.

Before capturing "that idea" of student accountability, ie, the idea that students are responsible for their own learning, I propose a more fundamental idea of student accountability.

Students should be held accountable for their behavior...I don't care how "bored" a student is, boredom is never an acceptable reason for disruptive behavior and disrespecting the teacher. Administrators need to be strong enough to stand up to parents who excuse their child's behavior on account of so-called "boredom." What many teachers mean by lack of administrative support is lack of classroom management support and caving to parents.

Let students be held accountable for their behavior first, and accountability for learning may well take care of itself.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Louisiana Fed Up with Unruly Students?

Gov. Bobby Jindal will push legislation to give teachers more authority to remove troublesome students from their classrooms...

Did you know that it is against the law in some places for teachers to send misbehaving students to the principal's office?

Currently, teachers can remove students only when the behavior is deemed to prevent teaching or poses an immediate safety threat. Jindal wants to add new circumstances for removal,
including unruly behavior, threats to teacher or students, inappropriate physical or verbal conduct, property destruction or harassment.

Is anyone else surprised that the idea of teachers removing unruly students from their class should be a legislative issue? It seems to me the current law is satisfactory. When students are disruptive, they are by definition preventing teaching, usually by exhibiting unruly behavior and verbal conduct. What specific disruptive behavior could possibly be acceptable under current law?

Everyone knows that teachers have little respect and esteem in American society. Many teachers are actively discouraged from sending students to the principal's office. The administration construes an office referral as prima facie evidence that the teacher is unable to maintain control in the classroom. We need to change our attitude. Education in the context of a classroom is a group activity. Education is a right and a privilege for all. If a student cannot appreciate class, even a boring class, even a class with a less than stellar teacher, simple respect and courtesy would demand that the student be somewhere else, like the principal's office. Students should not be permitted to disrupt class and interfering with their classmates' right and privilege to an education.

One tangible way school administrators could support the teachers and promote higher levels of respect is stand fully behind the teacher's decision to remove disruptive students rather than hold it against them. Teachers soon learn that their best strategy is to stay out of the administrator's radar. Teachers and students should not be punished with having to put up with misbehaving classmates.