Lessons learned the hard way but learned well

Teachers learn classroom management largely by trial and error and by making a commitment to never give up on students.

I learned classroom management at the school of hard knocks. I call it my baptism by fire. I taught my first year in Moab, Utah, in 1985, before the area became a hotspot for outdoor adventurers. One would think, “sleepy Mormon town.” Not! The uranium mines had closed a few years before, and unemployment was at 33%. Everyone who could get out of town had gotten out of town. I started the year teaching middle school math and a reading class — having never taken a reading class. I didn’t have books for my math classes for the first six weeks of the semester. For a teacher who had majored in health science and minored in mathematics, I was somewhat disoriented and underprepared.

My best substitute teacher was the local marijuana dealer, or so my students told me. Her son was one of my students. I walked into class one day to find him straightening out a hanger with which he was preparing to hit a female student in the face. I pulled him off the girl and took him to the office. The principal removed him from my class for two weeks and placed him in the learning disabled classroom. After two weeks, he had the gall to ask me if he could put him back into my classroom — and after about a month the student did return.

Administrative support for classroom management issues, to say the least, was not a strong suit at the school. Once I sent a student to the office while the rest of the class attended an assembly. I had asked the student to change seats, and she had talked back and called me a bitch. Her punishment was to sit in the office rather than attend the assembly. After the assembly, someone in the office got on the school’s intercom system and thanked her for her help in the office. So much for punishment! I learned that I needed to take charge of my own classroom, handle problems in my own classroom, and rely on the principal only when intervention was truly necessary. When I let responsibility for classroom management go outside of the classroom, I could no longer control the situation.

Given proper instruction, motivation, and control, you’ll be surprised what students can do.

I also learned that teachers need to get to know students outside class, paying attention to and being aware of who they are and what they enjoy during their nonschool hours. At that time in Moab, getting to know students outside of class was easy. There was nothing to do so when a school event occurred everyone came. The middle school put on a production of “Oliver.” One of my students had the lead and insisted I call him Oliver. You wouldn’t believe how his work and participation in class improved when I complied and started calling him Oliver.

I also learned that we need to challenge students to get outside their comfort zone. The music teacher challenged students to sing a solo at one of the concerts before they graduated from middle school. At the spring concert, two of my students who had waited until the last concert of the year sang their solos. Everyone in town was there. These students were not musically gifted, but, wow, how powerful it was for them to stand up and sing in front of a packed audience and meet the challenge. They were empowered, and we were empowered by observing their strength.

Never give up

After only a year in Moab, I moved to Kansas where I eventually took over as a long-term substitute in an 8th-grade math class. My schedule included four hours of mathematics and two hours of German/computer science. I began during the final week of the third quarter of the school’s second semester. I didn’t know, speak, or read German, but fortunately my husband has 16 undergraduate credit hours in German. I created a list of words and learned them at home the night before and then taught them to students the next day. Thank heavens, it wasn’t a very advanced class.

The actual teacher for the class was retiring at the end of the year. Since he had lots of accumulated sick days, he decided to start his retirement early — in January. I was the fourth substitute in a row. Students were certain they had not only chased out the first teacher but every substitute since. Fortunately for them, after my experience in Moab, dealing with these kids was cake. These kids needed love, acceptance, and consistency.

Students tried anything to cheat on a test. Part of my routine as a teacher was to have a test at least every other Friday. These students challenged my ability to assess their own knowledge and skills, rather than their neighbor’s knowledge and skills so I made three versions of every test. The questions were the same, but I changed the order for each version, and then collated the tests, so students didn’t know which version they had received. One young man didn’t understand what had happened. He had all the right answers for the wrong test.

These kids taught me to never give in or give up. I stuck by them, put up with them, taught them, laughed with them, and loved them. At graduation, a number of them spoke of how appreciative they were that I had come and stayed, and had not let them chase me away. I learned that patience is key, and a little naughtiness doesn’t hurt.

A phone call and job

After completing a master’s degree, I took a job teaching at a middle school in Farmington, N.M. I took the job based on a telephone interview. Don’t ever take a job based on a telephone interview. When I got to Farmington and attended the first teacher meeting, I thought I’d accidentally signed up for boot camp. The principal was an ex-WAC (Women’s Army Corp) and building a collaborative community was not her strong suit. I had asked on the phone if the school was a middle school in name only or if it was truly a middle school. The principal told me that they were truly a middle school, and the entire faculty was supportive. When I got there, I learned the faculty was vehemently against the middle school concept and the top-down approach being taken to implement it. Teachers had even fought to vote down their own millage issue in a town of 60,000 people.

Classroom management done well provides the signposts that give students direction and enable them to reach their destination as learners and human beings.

I taught 8th-grade math in Farmington and was always amazed at what my students forgot when they crossed the hall. I’d spend weeks teaching metrics, and they’d cross the hall to the science classroom, and, lo and behold, they’d never heard of metrics. They weren’t transferring what they’d learned in my class to science. They couldn’t understand that something that they had learned in math would be used in science. I learned that I needed to teach students how to recognize when and where they could apply what I was teaching. I also learned that I needed to collaborate with my fellow teachers and help students understand how what they learned in my classroom related to what they learned in other content areas and in other classrooms.

When the science teacher across the hall told me, “once a C student always a C student,” I knew something had to be done. Students can do or become anything that they want to become. A grade is only a moment in time. Given motivation, desire, interest, and appropriate instruction, a C student can become much more. When I taught in Kansas, I implemented a unique grading system where the only grades I gave were A, B, and F. To earn a B, students needed to complete every assignment in each unit for the 8th-grade general math curriculum and receive a minimum of 80% on the unit test. To earn an A, students needed to work above the 8th-grade curriculum, completing work in prealgebra. After I sent home newsletters at the beginning of the school year, a parent contacted me concerned that his son was only a C student and would never be able to earn above a C in my class. I assured him that if it didn’t work for his son I would make it right but asked him to give me a chance, and we would see what his son could really do. His son surprised at least one of us, earning an A in my class. Given proper instruction, motivation, and control, you’ll be surprised what students can do.

I learned that if students are engaged, my classroom management issues are greatly reduced. If we design instruction that engages students and involves them in hands-on, interactive instruction, we will address 80% of our classroom management issues. I learned that students didn’t always understand what I meant when I said, “be quiet” or “be respectful.” I need to take time to teach students about my expectations and what I mean by those expectations. If I told you “be organized,” you would each picture something different as to what being organized entails. If you looked at my office you probably would not think, “Now there is an organized woman.” Just check with my students. I have students post assignments online just so they won’t get lost on my desk. Yet I think I’m very organized. When it’s on my desk, I can generally find something I need fairly quickly. When I file it, however, I tend to lose it. I keep current projects on my desk and try not to file away things until the project is done. Unfortunately, that pile tends to get a bit deep at times.

The point is, students don’t necessarily know what we mean when we provide our rules and our expectations. We tend to assume that everyone knows what we mean when we say something or give a directive. But communication is a two-way street. In the communication model, between the sender and receiver, there is a lot of noise. While we may know what we’re saying, the meaning sometimes gets lost in the noise between us. People don’t always understand what we mean, especially students. Last spring, I told my students, “In this class we are going to write a lesson plan on steroids.” Now, I was thinking of a beefed-up lesson plan with lots of detail. My students interpreted, probably what you interpreted, “Why are we writing lesson plans on steroid use?”

Teachers must take time to teach students the behaviors they expect students to use. Teachers must reinforce the behaviors and support students who use them. Teachers can’t just assume that students know what’s expected. We must make our expectations transparent and evident to students, and do all that we can to reinforce those behaviors. We need to be realistic; try to limit your expectations to three or four items.

Growing up takes time

I learned my favorite classroom management trick from that marijuana-selling substitute teacher in Moab. No, it did not involve marijuana. When she taught, she brought a stopwatch to class. Whenever students were off task, she began timing, letting them know that whatever was on the watch at the end of class would be taken from their passing time between classes. Teachers really can’t take away that passing time, since in most schools it’s down to less than five minutes, but teachers can build extra time into the class schedule that is labeled student time. The last five minutes of any class was time where they could wind down, talk, and enjoy the social opportunity. During class, when students are off-task, I simply remind them, “I’m timing.” The time on the stopwatch at the end of class is then deducted from their time, since they wasted “my time.”

All teachers have their baptisms by fire. Classroom management is really something teachers learn day-by-day, year-to-year, through their experiences in the classroom. Poor classroom management is one of the largest roadblocks to student and school success. But classroom management done well provides the signposts that give students direction and enable them to reach their destination as learners and human beings.

Classroom management is one of the most important skills teachers can acquire. If students are not with you, attending to what you’re teaching, then you’re not teaching. You’re only babysitting. Each day, I learn something new about teaching and — even at the college level — about classroom management. As I teach future teachers, I share more stories, hoping that they will learn from my experience rather than from the school of hard knocks. I do know, however, that managing a classroom is a lifelong skill that we acquire as lifelong learners.

CITATION: Dirksen, D.J. (2014). Lessons learned the hard way but learned well. Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (2), 41-43.