DR. FRED JONES on Classroom Management: Strategies To Take Control Of Noisy Students (PART 1 of 3)

well thank you very much it's certainly an honor to be here and to have two hours to talk to you about what i've been doing with my life for the last 45 years we'll be looking at classroom management which is simply the skills that a teacher uses every day on the job and as was mentioned we studied the the teachers that were already highly successful and trying to figure out what made them so successful so i'm going to demonstrate some things i'll be down here on this level instead of up above and so let me just begin with a story of how i got started in this i'm a clinical psychologist by training so i had an indirect interest in the classroom and at ucla when i was in graduate school which is a very long time ago we're in the middle of the behavior modification revolution and i'm sure you've heard about consequences and behavior modification and all that in your courses and we we were we thought we were quite quite hot but um i wasn't that impressed with it and i think the reason is that i come from a family of teachers so my mother my sister my aunts great aunts great aunts back 150 years teachers teachers teachers and so you learn some things growing up in a family of teachers that nobody actually has to tell you the first is that teachers work about twice as hard as anybody appreciates and the second is that the last thing in the world you'll ever have is extra time in fact your time is usually spoken for twice over particularly after school so if i come up with some fancy schmancy management program for you in dealing with a kid who's um aggressive or a kid who doesn't do any work or a kid who won't follow instructions if i come up with a fancy behavioral program that costs you 15 to 20 minutes a day to operate i've done you more harm than good because you don't have that time so the only thing you can really afford is things that don't take time things that are cheap things that are easy and that's not what we were doing when i was in graduate school everything was an individual program for an individual child with an individual problem and it was just horrifically expensive so we got this call from this private school where every child in the school have been kicked out of los angeles unified school district now los angeles is a big city and to get kicked out of the school district you have to go through about seven different layers i mean this is the all-star game of certified teacher killers these kids are off the wall and they're roughly junior high age so you know 12 13 14 mouthy obnoxious don't do any work and they said help come out we need help so here i go to help now classroom management hasn't been invented yet so i don't know what i'm doing and i go out there you know with some general knowledge and the teacher the principal says i just want you to look at some of our classrooms and tell us what you think so i walk into the first classroom and the chairs are empty and i'm trying to figure out what's going on i look over here now on this side of the room there's a cloak closet that stands about this high on top of the clothes closet eight kids crouched looking at me just like this and i'm trying to think what in the devil is going on and about that time the doors flew open they're kids in the club closet they came out with jackets and hats and they're having a clothing fight and the kids on the top are pelting the kids below and the kid jumps off the top and wrestles the kid to the ground now up in front of this as a young male teacher who is having a kind of religious experience you see uh he was giving his body as a living sacrifice many of us in the classroom do that you know your stomach lining your circulatory system your dental work he was doing a slow burn and i must have embarrassed him just by walking in the room so he says group now i'd been working with groups you know group therapy group process group dynamics i didn't see any group and the next thing he says is i am simply going to wait until you all settle down i thought it's november how long have you been waiting so i went to the next classroom a young female teacher also three sheets to the wind she's having a group discussion now i can tell because everybody in the room is talking at the same time who do you think is talking louder than anybody in the room than any of the kids the teacher all right class there's absolutely no excuse blah blah blah blah blah blah so by lunch i'm completely depressed i just want to go back to ucla at least i know how to function at the university you know i didn't know how to fix this so i stuck around i promised i would i followed the same kids into their afternoon classrooms now by luck both of these groups of kids who had different teachers in the afternoon had teachers who were what you would call naturals do you know what i mean just you know god's gift to the teaching profession they just have it they just are beautiful teachers just born that way right so here's what i saw with the kids who are jumping off the furniture teacher greets them warmly at the door they take their seats teacher greets the next kid takes his seat there's an assignment on the board the kids start working the bell hasn't even rung yet so by the time the bell rings everybody's in their seat working on that assignment the teacher goes around taking role and doing you know clerical work and the kids still working and then the teacher has a lesson transition says class before anybody gets out of your seat and the first thing goes through my mind is don't let them out of their seats they'll be jumping off the furniture are you crazy before anybody gets out of your seat let me tell you what i want i want you to hand in your papers here in the corner of my desk if you need a drink of water now is the time to do it if you need to sharpen your pencil now is the time to do it and when you return to your seat get out your social studies book we're on unit seven any questions you're excused and the kids stood up in an orderly fashion came forward in an orderly fashion handed in their papers did this did that back in their seats ready to go in 41 seconds quiet orderly respectful quick i didn't know what had happened i'm trying to figure out what happened at lunch i'm coming up with theories like they all got doped on ritalin or something i couldn't couldn't think what had happened then they had an a class period a lesson it was a a lovely lesson the kids took turns they were respectful to the teacher and the class period ended and they stood up and walked out just as nice as any group of kids you've ever seen and i have no idea why now had it happened one time i would have thought it's just a fluke something weird happened today but instead the second teacher was also a natural now she had her own style she had her own personality but she was just one of these gifted teachers once again the classroom was orderly productive respectful the kids went out now here's what i learned at the end of the first day i didn't learn how to run a classroom but i learned this much you can take kids who are jumping off the furniture in the morning and have them eat out of the palm of your hand in the afternoon if you know how i didn't know how but they obviously did the second thing i learned just by watching the teachers is they were emotionally warm they were not of the don't smile until christmas mentality they they were enjoying being around kids and the third thing i noticed was they weren't working very hard these teachers were not going to be going to burnout workshops someday they were you know going about their business but not killing themselves it was obvious to me that the kids were doing most of the work the kids were working much harder than the teacher was which somehow sounds logical so i'm trying to figure it out i come back on tuesday same thing wednesday same thing thursday same thing so i have to conclude this wasn't a fluke they do this every day so i got the teachers together i told how wonderful they are they said oh thank you dr jones what i said was what i want to know is how do you do it how do you get the kids to just do what you want to do when you ask them stop doing what you don't want them to do when you just ask them how do you get the results that you get and they looked me right in the eye and they said well i can tell you this much dr jones you have to mean business has anybody ever heard that term before meaning business my mother was an old third grade teacher i had certainly heard that term growing up and i i i knew enough to say right you have to mean business and how do you do that exactly and they saw it they said well i'll tell you this much dr jones on the first day of school that classroom will belong to them or will belong to you if you don't mean business it will belong to them and you will have a long hard year makes sense i said right now exactly how do you do it they said a lot of it has to do with your expectations their behavior will not exceed your expectations if you don't expect it you won't get it sounds good to me i said right now exactly how do you do it they said a lot of it has to do with your values if you value every child as a learner do you hear what's happening in this conversation i'm pushing the simple operational question exactly how do you do it what's the operation and the harder i push the more nebulous the answers are getting we're going to expectations now we're going to values i said wait a second wait a second give me credit for high expectations give me credit for high values what i want to know is what are you doing imagine i'm your substitute you're out tomorrow with a sore throat i'm your substitute i'm standing in front of your class it's nine o'clock in the morning time for things to begin here i stand now tell me what's the first thing i do well that slowed him down he saw it and then they said well i can tell you this much dr jones you had better mean business that's where we started and i learned that day and many subsequent days in training teachers the natural teachers could not tell me what they were doing if their lives depended on it if you push them really hard for specifics you get some you know dribs and drabs some kind of good ideas some homilies but they cannot give you a method they can't tell you how they're doing it what they're doing and this is the best explanation i can give you just having worked with families and teachers over the years the skills of classroom management are nearly identical to the skills of parenting it's just on a group basis how do you get a kid to do what you want them to do when you ask them to do it to do it the way you want it done when you want it done to your standards any parent is going to be dealing with this when they ask the kid to make their bed or clean their room they want it done now right the way i want it done school teachers are doing that all day long with one routine one assignment after another all day long but it's the same type of skill so here's what i learned if you want to be a natural teacher choose your parents very carefully because that's your methods course have you ever seen a four-year-old role-playing a parent you know pretending to be mom your daddy have you ever heard your own words coming out of their mouth and you think oh i better watch what i say because they're taking it all in and they're recording it you know in their little video camera and their body is the playback mechanism and so they are learning how to parent by the time they're four years old they have seen how you get them to do something thousands of times how you teach them to talk to you respectfully thousands of times how you get them to quit picking on their little brother or sister thousands of times they have it down by the time they go to kindergarten it just lays dormant those skills of management lay dormant because nobody's asking them to use them and often the first time you see these skills is when um a kid is in a leadership position like in high school when they're responsible for getting you know getting out the student newspaper or getting together the you know the the assembly or what have you and all of a sudden somebody takes charge you do this and you're responsible for this and next thursday we need this and i look at that kid and i'm thinking i hope you go into teaching because you're already there so i began to watch the teachers and i would get together with them every day after school and we'd brainstorm what are you doing we try this we try that what looks right what doesn't look right and over a period of of months and years it slowly began to cobble together a picture of what the specific skills were the things that were instinctual for the natural teachers but they couldn't label i was coming up with the description of skills that already existed so let's start at the beginning what is the biggest single difference that i notice now of course you know let's assume that we have lovely people who love children all that kind of stuff you know when you just look at the behavior of the natural teachers and the rest of the faculty who are you know having a hard time if you just stand in the back of the classroom day after day week after week and watch it slowly starts to dawn on you what some of the critical differences are and one of the biggest differences is this the teachers who have a lot of behavioral problems don't wait wait let me stop right there what do i mean by behavioral problems when we think of behavioral problems discipline problems what we often think of is the big problems you know the child who's sent to the office the child who you know back talks the teacher and get kicked out of school or something like that that's not what i see in the classroom i could probably be in the back of your classroom for the next six weeks and never see you send a kid to the office that happens that rarely is not going to cause you to go home tired at the end of the day the only thing that can cause you to go home tired at the end of the day are things that happen all day long and keep you tense and exhaust you so i'm in the back of the classroom recording every instance of and i'll just use a term i grew up with goofing off do you know what goofing off means fooling around you know whatever you're supposed to be doing you're doing something else right now that's goofing off fooling around i'm in the back of the classroom recording every instance of fooling around doing what you're not supposed to be doing right now i found just by scoring it that eighty percent of fooling around comes under one category now before i even tell you what the category is that's the ball game that's eighty percent of your lost learning time eighty percent of your stress and eighty percent of well nagging eighty percent of goofing off is simply well let me ask you a question when you were a kid you weren't perfect right so when you were in class if you were goofing around fooling around not doing what the teacher wanted you to do right now what will you probably doing what were you probably doing if two of you are friends and you're sitting in class all morning and at some point you kind of fall off task what did you probably do when you fell off task [Laughter] talk to the kid next to you of course talking to your neighbor is 80 percent of the fooling around now that's 80 of lost learning time and 80 percent of interactions that sound like this class it's all together too noisy in here now when i look up i expect to see people working or would the two of you turn around in your seats and get some work done i am sick and tired of looking up and seeing nothing but talk how many of you are raised on sick and tired i am sick and tired of looking up and seeing blah blah blah so what i've just modeled for you twice in a row is in fact the most widespread management procedure in all of education and family life and business the most widespread management procedure in fact is nag nag nag it happens and teachers nag the kids to stop now 15 of goofing off is simply the child being out of their seat you know when they're not supposed to so what we're looking at is little problems that happen frequently big problems tend to grow out of little problems so if a kid is getting away with something they might push a little further and if they still get away with it they might push a little further and pretty soon you know they're being outrageous but when you simply watch the goofing off behavior in the classroom that is going to cost you stress and learning time it's the little stuff that's frequent not the big stuff that only occasionally occurs now with that in mind let's look at the skill that distinguishes the natural teachers from the teachers who are nagging the teachers who are nagging spend their day in the front of the classroom they write on the board they talk to the students they give directions from the front of the classroom the natural teachers spend very little time in the front of the classroom they're out here they come up with any excuse to be out among the students if they're a second grade teacher and they're reading a story to the kids they're walking among the students reading to the kids if i'm a fifth grade teacher teaching math i'm out among the students looking over their shoulder seeing how they're doing seeing if anybody needs help if i'm a social studies teacher in high school i'm out here leading the discussion calling on people eliciting feedback they're out here among the students now i want you to imagine [Music] that this is the edge of the classroom and that that's my classroom it's a big classroom and i'm in this corner and there are all the kids over there now let me ask you a question thinking back on your own misspent youth where is the goofing off most likely to begin if i'm standing here yeah over there because you learned when you were a little kid that the farther you are from the teacher the more you can get away with right yeah duh as the kids will say so let's imagine that every kid has a computer in their brain you know in the base of their skull that goes at light speed all day long and this is a dedicated computer dedicated to answering one simple question all day long and the question is is the coast clear did you have one of those in your head if you're going to talk to her and you're in fifth grade aren't you kind of gonna look up and see where the teacher is first now if you look up and the teacher's standing right here it's not as though you forswear the sins of the flesh and dedicate your life to scholarship more likely you just say i gotta wait until the teacher's on the other side of the room right i mean this is reconnaissance so kids are scanning kind of like radar seeing where the teacher is and when the teacher's over there if i feel like goofing off i might the teacher's standing right here you probably pass you know your brain just says forget about it so every kid is computing now the next thing i want you to imagine is this just zones of proximity around my body just concentric circles and let's use a stoplight as our analogy red yellow green red stop green go now in a classroom the red zone goes out to oh right in here somewhere um within that zone you're so close to me and i have such good eye contact and such good proximity that the likelihood of you two starting to talk is minimal just because you're so close and i'm looking right at you and you're getting nailed now it's not that it won't happen it's just unlikely happen now past the red zone is the caution light zone you know like on a stop light and the caution light zone is like these two rows here so you're a little farther from me i don't have quite the eye contact that we're this far away on the other hand we do have eye contact and i get pretty good behavior from the caution light zone unless i turn my back to help this child when you turn your back on the caution light zone that's when they start to chit chat now past the caution line zone is the green zone that's back here you guys are in the back of the classroom you know several rows back most of the goofing off is going to come from the green zone that's just the far side everybody knows i'm as far from the teacher as you can get in this classroom and they probably are going to have a hard time dealing with this so they'll just probably give a you know turn a blind eye toward it or not even see it at all so everybody have the three zones red yellow green every kid has a uh little little uh radar going around see where the future is okay now do you want to see a natural teacher in action do you want me to model for you what a natural teacher actually looks like in action are you ready get set go isn't that a fabulous demonstration [Laughter] no it was when you watch a natural teacher in action you don't see a three-ring circus you don't see much action at all you see a bunch of kids working that's the action and what's the teacher doing they're moving among the kids now i'm going to give you a phrase that uh is fairly widely known in in show business or teaching is called working the crowd working the crowd is simply getting out among the people have you ever seen that on television or somebody's singing or something and they go out among the crowd to be close to the crowd so here's the statement see i'll give you the first half see if you can give me the second half either you work the crowd or or the crowd works you either you work the crowd or the crowd works you now the natural teachers understand this they have a phd in working the crowd they never abandon the crowd to stand up here and create what i'll call a stable green zone now let's imagine i'm giving you a social studies lesson and it will take 25 minutes and i'm up in the front of the room that means the green zone is in the green zone for the next 25 minutes do you think kids in the green zone might come up with something to do other than my lesson given 25 minutes to sit there so what you're doing when you stay stable in the front is to pretty much declare open season on yourself you're saying to the kids in the green zone you feel like talking to each other go for it and it will happen the natural teachers are out here now let me show you how that works you're in the red zone you're in the caution light zone you're in the green zone so i'm simply walking it's not you know rapid or nervous usually it's very slow because i'm trying to read what's on your paper i'm just strolling so two steps here we go now those are in the caution light zone just look at me and compute your little computer how it feels can you feel it now let me walk two more steps can you feel it now if i'm standing here looking at you are you very likely to start talking to her no but what if i'm up here yeah exactly so what you just learned is this every time the teacher takes two steps they change your zone so your computer is saying i'm in the green zone i'm free and clear and the teacher's walking i'm in the yellow zone i'm not quite so free and clear uh i'm not quite sure and two more steps ah forget it and that's what happened i i kind of instructed with my body your computer to say and this is all subconscious you know you're not really aware to say forget about it you know just keep working don't get cute just keep working so what i realized is that when the teacher is working the crowd they're constantly setting all these little computers back to zero forget about it so by working the crowd the teacher is constantly what you might think of as interrupting the disruption the kid might want to talk to their neighbor but when they look up and see this they think twice and then they just kind of give it up and keep working now let me say something about discipline management because this is discipline management most of my schooling and discipline management at college had to do with consequences that's certainly behavioral psychology consequences what is the consequence and i think when we're thinking about discipline management we're thinking about misbehavior and what's the consequence for misbehavior i'll say to all my trainees the following i have a phd in consequences let me tell you something about consequences they're expensive by the time you even consider delivering a consequence to this kid for their misbehavior you have already been hassled to the point where you're thinking about consequences you're already had it then if you deliver the consequence what's that going to cost you are we going to have to have a meeting am i going to talk to you am i going to have to send you to the office and then have a meeting with your parents i mean the cost just keeps fire spiraling and spiraling and spiraling so consequences while they'll always be part of discipline management is the most expensive part of discipline management let me give you a piece of advice if you want to succeed at discipline management keep it cheap cheap cheap because all the time and energy that goes into discipline management comes out of instruction and sends you home tired at the end of the day so let me give you a different perspective on discipline management from consequences it's an old perspective it's been around forever an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure have you ever heard that one if you cannot prevent 90 of the discipline problems in your classroom discipline management will eat you alive and send you home tired at the end of every working day and you can only go home tired at the end of so many working days before the well runs dry and you don't have anything emotionally to give to kids anymore so what we're looking at is prevention but prevention never looks like discipline management by the time you have a misbehavior that looks like discipline management it's too late for prevention you already have the misbehavior prevention looks like other things like strolling around the room nonchalantly while i read a story to my second grade class that's discipline management it just doesn't look like discipline management so i asked the natural teachers because i'm still trying to figure this out why are you always moving around the classroom i think they're going to give me the answer you know how to do discipline management and they looked at me like that was the dumbest question they've ever been asked and i said i'm serious why are you moving around the classroom all the time and they said well i just want to see what the kids are doing and one of them looked at me like like you know i was really slow and said well dr jones if you just gave a child something to do wouldn't you be curious as to how they did it it's kind of like yeah well duh yeah i guess i would so in the teacher's mind it's all about checking for understanding it's all about seeing how this kid is doing you know and i worry about this child so i want to see how they got started on the assignment and this one i don't have to worry about because he gets an a but this one i do and i want to see how they're doing so they're just worrying about how the kids are doing and they're getting close enough to the kids to actually read the work and see how the kids are doing now for free they're getting discipline management it's like the tail that follows the dog they're getting working the crowd just as a byproduct of checking on how the kids are doing and these teachers when you say what do you do for discipline management they'll let's look at you and say well i don't have any discipline problems now that's first time i heard it i thought oh yeah right but then i realized they weren't exaggerating but there's more to it than working the crowd that's just square one we all understand you know the general objective what's going on a working crowd so i started visiting schools all over los angeles elementary school middle school high schools you know what i found out almost nobody works the crowd almost everybody teaches from the front of the classroom has a rowdy green zone and nags the kids all day i thought why is this so rare why does it take you know a few natural teachers to show this to me why why isn't this you know just part of the common lore of teaching well classroom management hasn't been invented yet so i'm still very concrete and i just started looking at the classrooms and the first thing i learned was well let me show you i think you'll be able to see it on the camera this is just a picture of a classroom you know kind of schematic drawing here's the chalkboard of the whiteboard here's the teacher's desk here is the arrangement in a typical classroom these are desks has anybody ever seen that room arrangement all right who arranged the furniture in that classroom the janitor that's right this is your basic janitorial room arrangement now what is the janitor's vested interest in your room arrangement oh what do they do for a living cleaning so if you don't arrange the furniture the way you want it the janitor will arrange it the way they want it so that they come in with a dry mop go down up down up down up around twice and out that is the most efficient room arrangement for a janitor with a dry mop now it just so happens that the best room arrangement for the janitor is the worst possible room arrangement for you let me put something in here that would be left out of the schematic drawing legs and feet imagine long skinny junior high legs and smelly side nine sneakers now given the crowding of most classrooms is this kid's feet up under the back legs of the chair in front of them okay what that means is that inadvertently out of naivete the janitor has just given you one two three four five impenetrable barriers between this side of the room and this side of the room now let's imagine you're standing here helping that student would you all point to where the disruption will begin will you all yeah you got it right there here you are there it is all predictable now here's the question what are you going to do what are you going to do are you going to use your mouth now the two of you over in the corner when i look up i want to see is this going to work has nagging ever driven a kid to righteousness so eventually let me ask you a question have you ever watched the same kid do the same misbehavior over and over and at some point you just lost your patience you know your soul kind of snapped and you said that's it have anybody ever had that feeling that's it it's time to lay down the law so you march over there now by the time you get here you've pulled the whole class off task because they've been all wondering what does happen you know inquiring minds want to know and when you finally get over there you have one of the dumbest conversations in all of education it sounds like this i'm tired of looking up and seeing nothing but talking over here and the kids go okay and what i want to see is some work on these papers do you understand okay so get your name here get the first problem copied so when i come back i see some work okay all right then you look up 15 20 seconds later what are you going to see over there so what i have just done is give a public demonstration of the fact that no matter how hard i try i can't stop two kids from talking on the other side of the room that's what the kid just learned from that lesson so when you look at the custodial room arrangement what you must realize is this you can't win there is no way to turn that into an easy life in the classroom so how do you arrange the furniture well there are different size classrooms and different sized kids and different kinds of furniture and i've pushed a lot of furniture in a lot of classrooms over the years trying to make it work and i finally realized i keep coming up with the same patterns over and over you know i'm pushing it and i'm in the teacher's classroom after the workshop how do you like this can you get around you know if i sit in the chair can you still get by all that kind of you know practical stuff here's what i learned what's important about a room arrangement is not where the furniture goes what's important about the room arrangement is where the furniture doesn't go because that's where you go the purpose of the room arrangement is to facilitate mobility so you can get around now what that means is you don't need little aisles you can't spend your day going excuse me let me through here excuse me i need to get through here because if it's that much work you're just going to quit doing it instead you need boulevards so that i don't have to worry about tripping in over some kid's shoes or their backpack i can just stroll along and be worried about nothing more than your topic sentence or what you're doing you know at the beginning of the first problem so i'm just strolling around with a nice wide boulevard now given the crowding of most classrooms that means you have to be very planful about where the furniture goes because the normal situation is just crowded so here's the first thing you do see this teacher's desk up there get rid of it well not entirely but push it over here to the corner now what does that do that frees up this area now i take a tape measure with me here's what i find the teacher's desk is three or four feet from the board the desk is two and a half feet wide so that's uh six and a half feet and then there's another eight feet out to the front row so the front row is about 12 13 14 feet from the board now let's imagine we're at a party and i'm standing here with a cup of coffee and you're seated in chairs or on a couch and we're chatting now is this a comfortable social distance for us to chit-chat while i'm standing here with my coffee am i too close or is this okay it's no it's not okay would you like me further away is this okay okay so this is a comfortable social distance now from my kneecap to your kneecap is about three and a half feet so three and a half feet is all you need for social comfort but add another two feet for viewing angle from the side and what you have is five and a half at the most six feet so the front row instead of being 13 feet away can be six feet away so the first thing i'm doing is moving everybody forward well when proximity is your objective that's a good thing the second thing i'm going to do is pack the kids sideways why because these are the best seats in the house i don't want as many kids there as possible so i'm kind of taking what would have been wasted space and turning it into space i can now use for walkways can you see how if you're planful about this you can make space in a crowded classroom now i don't know the size of your furniture but for here on out it's just plain geometry what is the pattern that allows you to get from any kid to any other kid in the fewest steps that's your best room arrangement the one that allows you to get from any kid to any other kid in the fewest steps with nice broad walkways so you don't trip over things it's plain geometry here's the problem what figure is the least average distance from every point on the plane here's the solution center whoops that kind of got away from me center halfway to the edge halfway to the edge halfway to the edge halfway to the edge connect the dots that will probably be the feature of your room arrangement that's most predictable i'll call it an interior loop so that you can walk this loop and read everybody's work so here's the next calculation how far can you read well you find that i can read this kid's work pretty easily i can usually read that kid's work but with normal eyesight i cannot read the third kid's work if my life depends on it so if you actually want to check work everybody in the room has to be within two two seats of the aisle so if you're having rows that go from side to side you might have two walkways front to back one two kids one two three four kids one two kids four rows that's 32 kids there are two basic patterns that i keep coming up with when i'm shoving furniture around and that is the following a grid or a wagon wheel now the reason i'll use the wagon wheel is usually because because 15-minute break in five minutes that could be important news for somebody if you have long tables like this you usually end up with a wagon wheel if you have individual tables you usually end up with the grid does this sound like discipline management it also sounds like you know get to the point what's the big picture the big picture is prevention prevention is the sum of many small jobs done well and so far we have only walked up to the starting line the kids haven't shown up yet so let's have the kids show up and see what happens next or as they say in the olympics let the games begin so now we have a room full of kids but before they showed up i have arranged the room so that i can get around i have in my head how important working the crowd is now i teach a lesson let's take just a typical lesson let's imagine you've taught this lesson as well as is humanly possible so the steps of the computation are here clear as a bell and then you get to the transition to what is often referred to as guided practice is when the kids get to work and do some some of this math so here is what i think of a standard teacher talk these are words that teachers have been saying for a hundred years here we go all right class we've had a chance to go over this together and to answer questions so class if there are no more questions would you all open your books to page 63 please and let's look at the practice set on the top of page 63. do you all have that now as you can see the practice problems are very much like the ones we've done together here at the board we have 20 minutes till the bell rings that's enough time to get problems one through six done as you're doing your problems i'll be coming around to see how you're doing if you're having difficulty however i want you to look at my example on the board work through the steps and try to figure it out on your own if however you're still having difficulty you may raise your hand and i'll be around to help you as soon as i can has anybody ever heard these words all right now i'm going to assign a role to you you're all now active participants in this workshop and the role i'm going to assign to you is typical student on a typical day acting in a typical fashion because you're so typical you get what i'm driving at here not weird not schizophrenic but just typical kids are you ready to be typical kids all right let's hit the transition on the fly and i'll be coming around to see how you're doing class now if anybody's having any difficulty i want you to look at my example on the board and work through the steps if however you're still having difficulty you may raise your hand and i'll be around to help you as soon as i can those words hardly leave my lips before what do i see what is there you are come on don't be shy show me what there she is okay let me ask the lady who was candid enough to do this are they the same kids every day let me ask you do you have any kids in your class who say can you help me with this you go over and you say to them what do you need help with and they say i don't understand how to do this and you say well what part don't you understand and they say all of it yes are they the same kids every day yes you know whose hand is going to be waving in your face before you even park your car so it probably doesn't have a lot to do with that lesson does it so now you start to help the kid who says i don't understand what to do here what part don't you understand so i start working with this child now we're having a little tutoring session right i'm trying to reteach part of the lesson because they don't understand it how long will i be there working with that child one on one i've only recorded this about ten thousand times with my stopwatch take a wild guess how long will you be working one-on-one with the student who says i don't understand what to do here all of it how long we be there give me a number five five five and somebody said the rest of their life but anyway yeah you guys are absolutely accurate because you live with it the ab the average length of the helping interaction is four and a half minutes four and a half minutes four and a half minutes of one-on-one with the kid who says i don't know how to do this yet they haven't tried yet so let me point out two things that are happening when i start working with this child what do you think happens in the rest of the classroom you got it how long does it take the noise level to come up all across the classroom five to ten seconds 15 seconds there's laughter and some kids out of their seat so how long does it take me to lose the classroom max minimum 10 seconds how long am i going to be here four and a half minutes so i keep losing the class now what's the teacher going to do to get the class back well let me tell you again nag nag nag class when i look up i expect to see ever heard those words class this is the second time i've had to talk to you you ever heard those words class i am sick and tired of looking up and saying you ever heard those words this is going bad to worse and i still have two more minutes here but that's not the worst thing that's going on it's stressful i admit here's the worst thing that's going on this kid is getting four and a half minutes of social reinforcement from the most powerful reinforcer in the classroom which is the teacher's body their tender loving concerned caring attention the kid is getting four and a half minutes of the best you have to give contingent upon doing what nothing why is it the same kids every day because you're building the problem the most widespread learning disability in education is learned helplessness there'll be a half a dozen of these kids in every classroom there is no other learning disability that is happening at a base rate of five to six per classroom nationwide if you counted it up as a mental illness you call it an a pandemic but instead we just keep trying to service these kids doing the best we can thinking we're doing the right thing and all the time we're reinforcing the very pattern that's working us to death and causing us to lose the class so now we get down to some serious questions of prevention raise your hand if in any methods course you ever took anybody ever brought up the following issue exactly how do you help a student who's stuck now i don't mean ask for help talk your i want to know a strategy what exactly is your agenda when you start talking to that kid what is your body language what are the first words that leave your mouth how do you do it raise your hand if you got five seconds of input on how exactly do you help a student who's stuck raise your hand anybody this is like ferris bueller's day off anyone anyone zero i'll tell you why because it's not even on the radar screen of teacher training it's not in the table of contents of any methods book it doesn't exist as a problem i have news for you it's a huge problem it's costing you most of your lost learning time most of your stress most of your nagging most of the kids who tune out in the middle of a lesson how do you help a student who's stuck because that kid for four and a half minutes of lost learning time is going to kill working the crowd everything we've talked about up until now is out the window because of that kid you

Channel: TEACHER TRAINING

Views: 6,693

Rating: 4.9470201 out of 5

Keywords: Classroom Management, Student Motivation, how to manage a classroom, how to discipline students, disciplining students, motivating students, successful teaching, teaching, classroom strategies, how to motivate students, first year teacher, starting to teach, strategies inside the classroom, best teaching strategies, best teacher training, training videos for teachers, harry wong classroom management, how to teach effective, effective teaching

Id: zfGttNFuaWw

Length: 53min 17sec (3197 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020