During my career as a community organizer, we used to say that successful organizing was just another word for relationship-building.

I believe President Obama, a former community organizer, understands the importance of these kinds of relationships, too.

David Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times (who I generally think is pretty thoughtful), appears to agree with this assessment. In a column last week, he wrote:

The Obama approach would make it more likely that young Americans grow up in relationships with teaching adults. It would expand nurse visits to disorganized homes. It would improve early education. It would extend the school year.

So far, so good.

Then he continues:

Most important, it would increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with students) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).

Huh?

I’d sure like to know how in the world he expects to be able to fairly measure relationship-building and tie that into merit pay (Mathew Needleman recently wrote about merit pay in this blog).

A little later in the column, Brooks answers my question with what I consider to be faulty logic.  He claims that somehow test scores will be able to determine which teachers are effective at building relationships:

Today, tests can tell you which students are on track and which aren’t. They can tell you which teachers are bringing their students’ achievement up by two grades in a single year and which are bringing their students’ levels up by only half a grade.

I believe I have great relationships with my students.  And I believe that’s true with many other teachers at our inner-city school.  And, overall, I feel okay about the progress our students show on standardized tests (as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our school is one of the few high schools in the nation that has escaped Fourth Year Program Improvement)

If we took the route, though, that the school recently featured by The New York Times did and our classtime was focused on test prep — day in and day out — I wouldn’t be surprised if some student test scores would be higher…in the short term.  I suspect their desire to become life-long learners, their intellectual curiosity,  and their emotional and moral development might very well suffer, however.

“Rigor” does not have to mean “testing,” as Brooks writes in his column.

I’m not afraid of standardized testing — to paraphrase a saying, I believe it has a place, but also has to be kept in its place.    However, I would say — unequivocally — that testing does not help teachers develop relationships with students and nor does it accurately measure the quality of teacher relationships with students (though I do have to say that I suspect some students might try a little harder on a test that they believe is important to a teacher who they like and respect).

It’s unfortunate that Brooks took the idea of building relationships — an important and under-discussed element in teaching and learning — and used it to come up with a non-sequitur related to merit pay and testing (and then even tried to tie it into the voucher debate).

A few days ago I wrote about Jim Burke’s great blog post on Metaphors We Teach By. In it, he wrote:

We are the metaphors we choose. If you want to change your world, change your metaphor. Don Graves, master writing teacher and mentor to so many, said we should read students’ work like doctors not judges.

What’s your metaphor and how does it shape the way you think about and do your work?

I’ve finally decided that trying to be an “agitational pit bull” is a good metaphor for the teacher I try to be.  Let me explain…

I like to see myself as a “Pit Bull” because I try to be relentless in challenging my students — no one coasts.  I try to make sure that students are actively learning at all times.

I emphasize the phrase actively learning because I think some teachers might be relentless, too, but might  use the word working instead.  I suspect we all know teachers, or might be ones ourselves, who are relentless in pushing their students to get the work done, get that assignment finished, get that chapter read, get the curriculum covered.

That’s where the word “agitational” comes in.

During my pre-high school teacher career as a community organizer assisting low-income people to build power and make social change, we talked about the difference between being “irritating” and being “agitating.”

The “irritating” approach was one that tended to cause displeasure, annoyance, and frustration to the people we were trying to organize.  We viewed irritation as telling people what they should want to know along with telling them how they should learn it.

We would contrast this with an “agitational” approach, one that would, as various dictionaries define the word, “stir things up” and “arouse interest,” with the goal of “putting things into motion to produce changes.”

I am relentless in pushing, or prodding, my students to do their assignments.  In addition, though, I strive (though often fail) to be equally as relentless in probing.

When students are not focusing on the assignment, in addition to prodding them to do it, I try (though often fail) to be equally as relentless in asking agitational questions — what do you think is making it difficult for you to focus?  Think about when you have been able to focus well and what made the different?  What can I do to help you focus better?

When a student is consistently having difficulty getting started doing an assignment, in addition to prodding him to do it, I try to ask similarly probing questions and/or offer agitational suggestions — think about times when you have been able to get started well on doing something — what helpful you then?  Start by writing one sentence — don’t worry about the rest of the essay…

When a student who has had difficulties in the past, but then has had a good day, I’ll ask him/her to reflect on how he/she is feeling now and to think about what made the difference.

And it’s not uncommon for their classwork on the official assignment to get somewhat shortchanged because of what a student might need to do to get answers to those questions — they might need to take a walk around the school, or put their head down for awhile, or go to the quiet school library for a few minutes.

If we give in to the temptation to relentlessly prod (and it’s not uncommon for me to do that, too),  I think we do a disservice to our students by not helping them develop their ability to reflect and become more self-aware.

Yes, I know, we are all under pressure to cover the curriculum and have our students perform well on standardized tests.  I’ve got to say, though, student test results from my classes and from the classes of my colleagues who I would also characterize as “agitational pit bulls” generally turn-out pretty well.

In The Metamorphosis by Kafka, it seemed to me that one of the reasons Gregor turned into a cockroach was because he felt he always had to get the work done and there was no time for self-reflection.

I know this post is about teaching metaphors, but, in terms of student and learning metaphors or similes, I’d like my students to stay away from being like Kafka’s cockroach…

Here is an example of that vagueness:

“The best possible thing we can do for low-income students is to fight for their basic human rights, such as equitable access to fully-equipped schools, healthcare, safe and affordable housing, and the sorts of things their wealthier peers take for granted.”– Paul Gorski

I’ve decided to do a series on poverty. The posts will start with theory, look at an anecdote from my or another teachers experience, and last, will finish with approaches that can be used in those situations. While the “solutions” may not always work, but they are more helpful than talking about how lacking poor parents are, or saying the answer is to fight poverty. This first post will be on the overall theories of poverty, next up will be on choice, and the third will be on parents and communities…

“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money. “– George Carlin in brain droppings

George Carlin has a point, and that’s not just my opinion by the opinion of an interesting economist, Charles Karelis that I ran across here at Economist’s View: Is Poverty Caused by Irrational Behavior?

Karelis’ view is actually the opposite of the title, in that he finds that poverty causes people not be rational actors (and make rational choices), because they have too many problems simultaneously to give attention to any one of those problems (like say, their kid’s education).

If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we’re far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before…

In recent decades, experts and policy makers all along the ideological spectrum have worried that the more aid the government gives the poor, the less likely they are to work to provide for themselves. … It was this concern that drove the Clinton administration’s welfare reform efforts. But, according to Karelis, that argument is exactly backward. Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. …

Those problems become stressors (lack of money, violence, etc.) that lead to brain damage that we see in some of these reports, Study: Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains – USATODAY.com, Poverty may impair growth of brain : News-Record.com : Greensboro, North Carolina I remember seeing a post somewhere after these news reports coming out, saying, yeah we know this is true, now what do we do? Karelis says we need to quit being afraid to fix the problems of the poor directly, but there is something else that Karelis talks about that I think can be extremely helpful and a foot in the door for teachers dealing with this.

Karelis discusses the economic theory of marginal utility with regards to this behavior. It’s similar to an idea in behavior science called the affective filter, and specifically having what’s called a HIGH affective filter.
When families are stressed out, they can’t always hear what you are offering, or accept help. You have to lower that filter to work with them. You all have been very patient while I outlined my theory, so here is where I show how this can work in a school…

My principal is on a mission (he’s that kind of guy). He wants to build relationships with some of our most “difficult” families. He spends a lot of time talking to them, and more importantly listening to them and their concerns. I facilitate our site SST meetings where students having problems are discussed with their parents. He is trying to implement this long term relationship building plan. I was resistant at first because my background working in a behavior school led me to trying to develop discipline and behavior plans that were not parent dependent. The problem with my approach is that kids who are acting out will keep pressing things until you have to involve their parent, so then your alternative becomes suspending them, which doesn’t resolve the long term problem. I think his approach will probably be better for this. In a sense I’ve been doing a lot of this stuff over time as I’ve sat on the student study team.

When parents have a kid with a behavior problem, I share my son’s horrible first grade year. This lets them feel like they are talking to someone who is a mother, and not a teacher who is judging them. With my son having ASD (autism), and the school nurse having two adopted kids on ADD meds, we have a lot of the behavior issues that come up covered. This is not easy. I will share that the hardest thing I have to do is see parents wrestling with a child who may have a language disorder (and the possibility of an autism diagnosis). Those parents always seem to end up in tears, and I feel that because I’ve been there. I never cry with them, but I try to convey to them that I’ve felt that pain. This all helps lower their affective filter. I also try to give them things they can do that are possible, and probable, like behavior plans, etc. I give tips on how to structure those so they are effective, and are not a complete pain in the butt. I tell them it can be hard, but I tell them it’s possible.

Does this work every time? No, but it works better than sitting in a circle around the parent saying, this is what you need to do. Does this address Paul Gorski’s points about addressing the underlying problems of poverty, no, but it is a precondition to doing that which I’ll cover in my last post. So readers, what do you do to lower the affective filter of parents?

When I was taking my ELD methodologies class I had a really great husband and wife team from SFUSD teaching. They were well known, and did some travel and lecturing. One trip was to Korea to speak to EFL educators. The husband was taught the phonemes for the Korean alphabet by some Korean educators, and picked it up so well that he could “read” ads on the bus to the amusement of the Seoul natives. He had NO idea what he was saying, but it was a great party trick. That’s because he wasn’t reading, he was merely decoding. Those are not the same task, a mistake made by many people, and some educators.

As I started working in classrooms during my observations while taking classes, I noticed that I had students who were native speakers who couldn’t decode worth a darn, but if I read the story, and asked for a recounting, they knew it. On the other hand, I had language learners, who could give me a flawless reading of grade level text, but when asked what they had just read, had no idea at all. I have also run across EOs (English only speakers) that can’t do either, or like the ELLs (English Language Learners) decode without comprehension.

California solved the licensing problem by basically not training teachers (in state colleges/universities) for any other type of license except one that includes an endorsement to teach language learners English. There has been a multi-year (heck it’s been a decade) effort to get teachers with older credentials endorsed to teach language learners. Opponents claim, that all you need with language learners is “good teaching methods” and I agree with that, because I don’t think what Holly did was good teaching for EO students. I think the methods taught for ELD will be helpful should you have Special Education, or students who just think and learn differently (with IDEA, more of those students are in regular ed classrooms).
My own sense is that Holly and other teachers like her would probably benefit from taking some ELD methods classes not just to prevent them from doing instructional malpractice on language learners, but to make them better teachers for all their students.

I was having a brief discussion on Skype today with Scott McLeod where I shared some things that are going down at my school site, and he ended up asking me a hard, but good questions about it. Here is the background…

Next year, my school site will be getting “help” from outsiders. There is displeasure with our test scores (although as I pointed out to Scott, results from this Spring’s tests will not be in until August, and the last Benchmark scores may not be in yet, and do not always match the state test scores). I told him I was working with three great administrators this year: an assistant principal, a school principal, and a retired principal who runs the SES tutoring program that I am the site coordinator for.

First up, the SES tutoring. This is tutoring mandated by NCLB for schools in successive years of program improvement. Scott asked if the tutoring was helping kids test scores. I said I wasn’t sure because they aren’t in yet, but the admin had run a program at a school that exited program improvement last year. I imagine the question came up because of this article, Mandated Tutoring Not Helping Md., Va. Scores – washingtonpost.com, which points out many of the problems that SES programs can suffer from. My own experience prior to this with SES was NOT good. The money is great, for example the pay rate is $50 an hour for tutoring in my district, and in the program I help run we have very small groups (our break-even is at about 2 or 3 students so groups are only 4-6 students and some smaller — I worked one-on-one with one kid at the end of the year). Previous experience with a district/site run program had 15-20 students in groups. THAT is not tutoring, that’s an extended school day. That $50 does not come without strings. You have to fill out paperwork with standards based goals to try to ensure that student are being remediated in a way that will increase their test scores, and not just randomly. I also like that this particular program encourages tutors to not just have the kids doing release questions, and sitting and getting. So one teacher had students moving around and doing kinesthetic stuff. I will be sharing a project from another where students made a movie showing graphing of functions at NECC Unplugged/EduBloggerCon.

Next, because our administrators have have done a fantastic job of building partnerships in the community, we have a ton of tutors from a local church, a local high school, a local community college, and AmeriCorps members. Just looking at these efforts casually, these resources have not always been used to the best effect and I’m part of an effort to rationalize this whole process so that the activities are clearly tied to a remediation goal, and communicated to tutors effectively (and vice-versa).

But how do you know scientifically if the tutoring has made the difference? That was the conundrum when RAND did a study on class-size reduction in primary grades in California (twenty-to-one). Basically, so many things were changing in teaching in the state simultaneously due to wholesale education reform, that to pick out one thing that made test scores go up was impossible. It was part of a larger whole. Still, we don’t even know how things are going, until August when scores come in.

This still begs the question, have our scores gone up, down, or flat, and if it’s the two later, what should we be doing about it? I’m in a funny place with regards to this. I’m not teaching one class, and I’m not assigned to a core subject (although I certainly teach them), BUT I’m in a central position working on the SES tutoring, and being on the site SST (Student Study Team, might be Child Study Team or some other acronym where you are). Maybe we are failing, but having someone come on campus and tell us what we’re doing wrong, when we have many active processes to analyze our practice, and improve how we do things (ex., we have a recently formed teacher run Site Improvement Committee) feels like a hindrance. Some things I’m doing now to analyze our tutoring/instruction goals and how they are communicated to the myriad different outsiders who come to our campus to help will probably make a huge difference, but that will be next year, not two months ago when students were tested.

I appreciate Scott’s call for accountability, but the frustration I have is that the school I left did get out of Program Improvement, but in a way that Scott would not approve of. They taught to the test. This year, in their first year out of PI, I’ve heard they have volunteered to testing of first graders. Their test scores improved, but…

Are we doing a bad job? Well, there have been some heated (but professional) discussions on my campus this year. There are some changes in grade-level assignment (and some hard self-assessment that led to this), but is this just about teaching? Eduwonkette has been writing a lot about this, and a new post this week provides a nice summation about the achievement gap and the origins of it which can pre-date entry into school:

Now, this is discussing black/white gaps, but I’ve got to think that being a language learner (~40+% of our school’s students) would add more to the challenges to overcome. In my newspaper this week comes this information about another huge part of our school population, SE Asian refugees:

photo: puzzle pieces

My school started this program several years ago in order to keep our GT students from leaving to attend a center program at another school. The GT classes include students who qualify for the center program, the highest level of services, as well as students who qualify for school-based GT services and young scholars (talented students from underrepresented populations who show great potential). As a result, there is still a wide range of abilities and needs among my students.

That said, I have found that teaching this class has been eye opening for me. I believe that prior to this experience I held high expectations for my students and pushed them academically. And yet, these students have shown me how much more they are capable of doing.

In schools like mine, with lots of students living in poverty, lots of students who are learning English, lots of students who do not have much support at home, it is easy to focus on those students who are struggling and the effort to help them reach grade level expectations. It is easy to focus on the weaknesses and miss the strengths. Sadly, I think the emphasis on standardized testing has only increased this trend.

Teaching the GT class has shown me opportunities I missed with my students in the past. I have been willing to take risks with these two groups that intimidated me before. I have given them more freedom as learners and have been amazed. They have stretched themselves and pushed me as a teacher.

For years now I have been frustrated by hearing comments like, “My kids couldn’t possibly do that,” or “That’s way beyond my students.” Our students can’t do anything we don’t allow them the opportunity to try. We’ll never know how talented they might be if we continue to focus on what they can’t do.

I don’t want to suggest that we should ignore their needs. It is important that we continue to work as hard as possible to help all our students reach, and possibly exceed, grade level benchmarks. But the fact that they are performing below grade level in one or more areas shouldn’t mean that we restrict their access to higher level thinking activities, technology, collaboration, and other activities or tools we would want our own children to have.

Bill writes about Carl Chew, the teacher in Washington state who recently was suspended for two weeks for refusing to give his students a standardized test. In his blog, The Tempered Radical, Bill makes a number of very good points questioning Mr. Chew’s decision. I won’t repeat a lot of what Bill says (his post is definitely worth reading), and agree with much of it.

I don’t believe, though, that his final comment that “teachers like Chew show disregard for the values of the communities that they serve” is either fair or accurate.

I’m a veteran of civil disobedience from my seven years in the Catholic Worker Movement prior to my community organizing career (which both preceded my move into public school teaching five years ago).  I can say from experience that what is often called “prophetic witness” or “speaking truth to power” is a key part of our democratic history. I’d certainly include Mr. Chew’s action in that tradition.

At the same time, I think civil disobedience (as I’ve described educational technology) has a place, but also has to be kept in its place.

I think performing civil disobedience outside of the context of a strategic campaign is indeed often, to use the words in Bill’s post, “arrogant” and “egocentric.”  At the risk of sounding too harsh, I think it’s much easier to refuse to give a standardized test then to do the day-to-day and face-to-face organizing of listening and agitating people to develop an effective campaign for more accurate and just student assessments.

From my knowledge and experience, historically, civil disobedience has only been effective in making social change when done as a specific tactic in a well-organized and thought-out campaign where many people have been involved in its planning (nothing I’ve read about Mr. Chew’s actions indicate it was in his case, but, of course, it is possible that I don’t have all the information).

Which is not to say that there have also been important times in history, and there will be additional important moments, when individuals just feel that it’s critical to their own conscience just to say “no.”

Do I think Mr. Chew’s actions were or will be effective in making any sort of change in how students are assessed anywhere?  No.  Do I think they were probably arrogant and egocentric? Yes.

Do I think his action showed disregard for his communities’ values?  Definitely not.  In fact,   I’d say they might have been an extraordinarily accurate representation of the best values in our community traditions.

Part One: Differentiate This! Why?
was published in Creating Lifelong Learners

OK, we agree (or most of us do anyway) that we need to tailor our instruction to the students in our classroom.

We cannot teach effectively by planning lessons in isolation without considering the interaction between what we’ve planned and the students in our room, without being truly present in the classroom to assess students’ reactions and understanding, and to appeal to diverse learning styles as we begin to observe them in our students.

How Do We Differentiate?

One misconception about differentiation is that a teacher must come up with an entirely different curriculum for each student or type of student in a classroom. That would be great but it’s not possible. In fact the very thought of it is overwhelming and it’s the reason that many teachers do not attempt to differentiate because they think it’s too much work.

The number one way we can begin to differentiate our lessons is to stop relying on worksheets for so much of our instruction. Not everything that involves a photocopy is necessarily bad but it is a lot harder to differentiate instruction by giving every student the same paper and having everyone fill in the same blanks. (And giving different levels of students different levels of worksheets isn’t much better).

Let’s replace some of our worksheets with activities that all students can participate in at whatever level they’re at. Some examples:

• Writer’s Workshop
  A time of day in which all students write on topics of their own choosing while the teacher conferences with students and guides them in their writing, discussing individual student needs.
• Discussion and persuasion
  Rather than having students answer yes or no questions, have students formulate ideas, communicate those ideas, and justify them by talking to peers.
• Inquiry and research
  Every student is curious if we allow them to be. Let them form their own questions and research their own answers. We guide them on this journey but they choose the journey.
• Project based learning
  Let’s have students brainstorm and concentrate on problem solving of real world issues and hands on learning.
• Create
  The highest level of Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Have students create a play, a movie, a song, a poem, a painting, anything to demonstrate content knowledge or to communicate their own dreams and wishes.

Please leave your own ideas on how to differentiate below and stay tuned for Differentiate This! Part Three: When? back at Creating Lifelong Learners

First, Graham Wegner’s comment at Bud the Teacher’s blog talks about the edublogosphere as a series of intersecting circles, where you have some overlap, and connections, but no “center” (sorry Graham if I misread your comment, but that was my take-away). This is how I see the intersections in these articles. Now let me elaborate…

When Worlds Don’t Collide | In Practice

where Doug Noon talks about a report on blogging and literacy instruction of High School students in AP classes.

There are two points he makes, the first is about the limits of this case study both because it’s about a “successful model” (Doug is like me, he learns from failure analysis), and high-end students in getting a high end education.

Next, he discuss the incongruity of reading a study of blogging in a traditional print journal format (no hyperlinks, the author having to translate “WTF”, etc.)

Right about the time he posted this, I read eduwonkette: AERA continued: The Teachings of Russ Whitehurst which had Whitehurst discussing the divide between education researchers who want to study things “scientifically” but don’t seem concerned about real world applications, and policy makers who can’t understand why researchers can’t give them a straight answer (i.e. exact policy objectives) from their research. The two are talking past each other, and that’s similar to the feeling discontinuity that Doug felt reading a print journal article about a plugged-in approach to education. Doug feels that this will be resolved when “credentialing” authorities like research journals cease to be the gatekeepers, as more free flowing information bypasses them, much like policy makers like to bypass researchers, and look for more inviting ideas about how to make schools work based in one-off, “case study” narratives (where is Jamie Escalante when you need him?).

So then in eduwonkette: Why Do Journalists Love Shaky Science on Race? the author(ess) tears to shreds, the often cited notion that lower black academic performance is due to blacks not wanting to “act white”. Tucked in there is what she thinks would make a difference:

We could invoke the standard explanation that journalists don’t understand research, but there is plenty of research (bad and good) on structural causes of achievement gaps (i.e. boring stuff like prenatal care) that receives much less coverage…Culture is much easier to write about than structure – the reasons why black kids show up to kindergarten .4-.6 standard deviations behind white kids don’t translate into a chatty crowd-pleasing story about why school isn’t cool

Basically, they are showing up behind from the very start, before they might have developed much of a notion about what “acting white” and “acting black” might mean.

I thought about the readiness issue (and what eduwonkette thinks it’s caused by) as I read through, That Time of Year…Kindergarten Roundup | In Practice by Michaele Sommerville, where she gave a really nice checklist of information/skills she looks for in new students. I have no idea if you could calculate a standard deviation of students from her list, but it took it from the ephemeral (if heated) discussion of research, to the practical practice of how to judge readiness, so you can address your students’ needs, which brought it back full circle to Whitehurst and the gap between research and practice, and the readiness of the children of haves and have-nots.

If our children need to make connections to learn, then maybe, so do we.

And I did — five new students that week.  Five new students who seemed to be facing some challenges.

Our classroom culture was much more fragile than I had thought.  It didn’t take long for things to deteriorate.  And I quickly turned-into more of a threatening and punishing teacher.  I wasn’t happy, and most of the students obviously weren’t happy, either.   Some learning, though not as much as before, was taking place, but there didn’t seem to be much joy in it for anybody.  And there were frequent student behavior issues.

One option would have been to just grit my teeth and bear it for a few more months — then it would be over.  That would have been doable, especially since my other classes were going fine.

Another option would be to try to turn things around.

I chose the second one.   Here are nine actions I took to turn my class back into a community of learners:

BEGAN REGULAR STUDENT REFLECTIVE ACTIVITIES:  We began doing short activities which included reading, writing, and sharing on topics like:

Are You A Positive Or Negative Person?

Are You A Good Or Ugly Listener?

Who Are Some People You Respect And How Do You Think They Act When Things Don’t Go Exactly The Way They Want?

Do You Think Intelligence Is Fixed, Or Can It Grow With Effort?

Each student would then write about how they saw themselves in the context of that particular topic, and if they were happy with themselves.  If not, how did they think they could change?

I shared research on the qualities of a successful learner, and students evaluated themselves and wrote what they would like to do better.

Each student began writing a goal on Monday that they had for the week, and would reflect each Friday if they had been successful in reaching their goal.

BEGAN DAILY EVALUATIONS: We discussed what would be important elements of a good classroom — respect for the teacher and other students, doing assignments, accomplishing their weekly goals,  etc.  I developed a half-page sheet listing them, and students began grading themselves on each criteria along with giving themselves an overall grade.  There’s a space for me to list what grade I believe they have earned, as well.  It takes them one minute to complete it at the end of class, and it takes me about two minutes in total to review and respond to them all.  I have yet to give a student a lower grade than they gave themselves and, in fact, have often given them higher ones.  I return the sheets at the beginning of class the next day.

STOPPED WRITING STUDENT NAMES ON THE BOARD: For the first time in my teaching career, I had begun writing names of misbehaving students on the whiteboard indicating that they would either be losing a break or have to stay and miss part of their lunch.   From the day I stopped doing that (after making it clear that, instead, it would be reflected on the daily grading sheet) , there hasn’t been a single repetition of the kind of behavior that had prompted me before to assign that punishment.

STOPPED CALLING HOME WHEN THERE WERE BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS: Instead of calling parents of a student who was not behaving well, I began telling students who were behaving inappropriately that I wasn’t going to call home that day.  Instead, I began telling them I was going to call their home in a week, that I wanted to just say good things about them, and they had a week to show me they could be the kind of student I knew they could be.

CHANGED THE CLASS SEATING ARRANGEMENT: The day I began this new strategy, I not only changed student seats to minimize some challenges, I changed the entire seating arrangement.  That helped students, and me, to see and remember that it was a “new day.”

EVERYBODY BEGAN WITH AN “A” AGAIN: The second semester was only a few weeks old when I began these new strategies and, since everyone always begins with an “A” grade in my class, it was easy for me to tell some of the challenging and struggling students that we were going to forget what had happened up to then and they were going to get a new start, too.   Since that moment, the vast majority of these students have done better work than I had ever seen before.

ARRANGED “SECRET” SIGNS WITH STUDENTS TO STOP: I had private conversations with a few of my more challenging students and we discussed that I didn’t expect perfect behavior, but that I wanted to reach an agreement of a “sign” I could give them that would signify that my patience was just about at its end.  And after receiving that sign, they felt that they could commit to stopping their inappropriate behavior.  Some students, for example, wanted me to tap their desk.

GAVE CERTAIN STUDENTS PERMISSION TO LEAVE THE ROOM, WITHOUT ASKING ME, IF THEY FELT THEY WERE GOING TO “BLOW”:  They would have to just stay outside the door, but just knowing they had that power has appeared to make a huge difference, and no one has exercised it.   Obviously, if a student did that, I would immediately following him/her out, but they wouldn’t get into trouble for leaving.  In fact, they would gain praise from me instead.

FOCUSED ON SMILING MORE AND SHOWING MORE PATIENCE: I am very intentional about smiling more in class (though I don’t think I ever have been a big “frowner”) and demonstrating more patience.  When students are reading the book of their choice during our “Practice Reading” time, and a student wants to put his/her head down for awhile, for example,  instead of operating from the assumption the student is being lazy, I’ll ask him/her if they rest for five minutes can I count on them to read after that.
I certainly did a number of these things before, but I let behavior issues lead me into a downward spiral of threats and punishment.

The difference in class is like night and day now.  There are regressions — it’s clear that pair work is the maximum for collaborative activities for right now, and they’re not quite ready for groups of three yet.  But there is no question that there is a sense of fun and joy in the learning that’s happening on our classroom again.