This is how a scholar listens

AP/Mike Derer via CAP

This is the fifth written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2, 3, 4). This reflection is on “executing effectively.”

Well-executed classroom management can look like fascism. Teaching her classroom how to get up from their desks, for lines, and leave the classroom, Ms. Deshpande does a good job recognizing model behavior and implementing consequences for students that do not follow directions. She even explains why the procedures are necessary: to stay safe and avoid tripping over furniture during the process and to maintain model behavior in front of other classes. The execution isn’t bad, and her attitude is authoritative. But her rationales don’t connect to the big goal for the classroom. She doesn’t connect the reason for the procedures to student learning.

It’s going to take some practice to get over that feeling that building classroom management procedures means playing the role of a taskmaster. I think I can avoid that by taking my cues from Mr. Meli’s clear efforts to connect all of this procedures to the goal that students work hard on getting smart. Shy away from the task of creating that structure and a classroom might end up more like Ms. Williams’s.

Hers is an eighth grade math class, and I will say that most of the pre-institute reading has had a pretty clear middle school focus. It would be helpful to get more suggestions on how to differentiate classroom management for teenagers and older middle schoolers like the ones in her class. Unfortunately, in this video, it seems like Ms. Williams hasn’t implemented the necessary procedures yet. The evidence unfolds in a comical bit of cinematography: a student requests a pencil, she slows her instruction to get him a new one from her desk, and then he moves close into the frame and past the camera to a sharpener, just out of sight. The noise of the sharpener drowns out the already difficult to hear dialogue. The student returns to his seat.

Chasing these examples with a long, well-edited video capturing Justin Meli’s classroom management techniques emphasizes several points in boldface type. A short clip of Meli in the classroom was the most gripping of the videos included with Amanda Ripley’s Atlantic article on effective teacher training, which I wrote about at the PopTech blog.

Here we have the same authority that Ms. Deshpande displayed, along with recognition for appropriate student behavior. But to this Mr. Meli adds clear thanks for students who raise their hand appropriately, showing them respect as equals in the classroom enterprise. He also encourages applause for groups of students who successfully followed procedures. He is firm when necessary, referring students who’ve completed their “do now” work to the instructions telling them what to work on next, all the while taking care of other classroom business.

But he also makes it very clear why they need the procedures. Teaching his third graders who to sit up straight, face forward, and fold their hands for “active listening position,” he explains the scientific reasoning behind the procedure. Studies show that in the position, students efficiently absorb the most information, he says. He then asks students to demonstrate it and tells them when they’re going to use it.

In a December classroom visit, I watched a teacher reward effective classroom behavior with a complicated ticket system, but I was so caught up in other questions about the class I forgot to ask how it worked. Mr. Meli explains his particular ticket system in this video, and it has an elegant simplicity that I imagine working well for elementary students.

In recognition of good performance, students get a ticket with their name dropped in the “super-duper” jar. When Mr. Meli needs a specific task requiring responsible execution taken care of—taking paperwork to the office, for instance—he will draw one name at random from the jar. The more tickets in the jar, the greater a chance any one student has of being picked. The wisdom is three-fold: incentivizing good behavior, taking care of administrative tasks, and creating a real-world example of how probability functions.

Mr. Meli also emphasizes the fact that students “choose” to break rules. First rule infraction is a warning. Second warning is a loss of learning time and a stint at the timeout desk where he or she is reminded of what they’ve done by copying an apology to the rest of the students. The system is simple and transparent, but more importantly it demonstrates his clear commitment to drawing vectors from every structure in his classroom to the goal of getting smart.

The teacher I observed in December phrased this a little differently, referring to her seventh graders students as “scholars,” and explaining that scholars listened carefully and worked diligently on the tasks before them. The vocabulary appealed to me immediately because it reemphasized in virtually every instruction she provided that every student can be a scholar, because a scholar is defined by actions, not anything innate. Scholarship is the result of malleable intelligence. It also connected to a clear goal that I feel viscerally about: the need to help students become critical thinkers, clear communicators, and powerful rhetoricians. The definition of scholarship that I know from graduate school and the professional world is after all one in which the content of your arguments is often eclipsed by their presentation. The students who learn both have the tools to succeed in college and beyond.