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8 Ways to Motivate Middle School Students to Care About Their Grades

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8 Ways to Motivate Middle School Students to Care About Their Grades

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Fifteen years ago, I stepped into my classroom excited and full of energy. I couldn't wait to change lives and make a difference. Then several years in, I started to burn out. I felt frustrated that my students didn't seem to put in as much effort as I did, and I was exhausted.

Kids weren't turning in assignments. They were losing materials. Sometimes I was lucky if they showed up to class with a pencil. I soon realized that the kids weren't going to change if I didn't. I had to shift my focus.

Motivating middle school students to care about their grades involves a lot of shifting: shifting our focus, shifting our language, shifting the way we grade, and shifting our mindset. Here are some of my lessons learned.

1. Remind Students It's Not Grades That Matter

This might sound contradictory; however, the first step in motivating middle school students to care about their grades is to shift the focus away from grades altogether. By the middle school years, many students become somewhat desensitized to grades. They label themselves as a single grade and start to believe that movement isn't even possible. Why would students care about grades if they can't change or control their number?

When we are too focused on number grades, we lose sight of the important things happening in our classroom every day: learning. When we teach students to notice growth in their learning, we help them shift their focus and look beyond the numbers on a paper. Help your students focus on their learning and growth. The grades follow.

2. Instill a Growth Mindset

Growth mindset is all the rage and for good reason. Teaching students (and ourselves) to shift from a fixed mindset, where student intelligence cannot change, to a growth mindset, where students have control of their learning, can change a child's educational experience. Our students often come to us with labels-the smart kid, the failure. Labels are fixed. When we consistently reinforce a growth mindset in our classroom, we begin to drop labels.

A growth mindset encourages the belief that with hard work, students' grades will have movement. Growth mindset levels the playing field so all students and their teachers develop the understanding that with hard work, students will become better at the skill they are practicing.

3. Focus on Language

Word choice is powerful and important. We define our students through language, and they often define themselves this way too. In my classroom, we use words side by side with a five-point grading scale. The words are carefully chosen to show that students can move within the system with hard work. For instance, we use levels like mastery, grade appropriate, almost there, developing, or needs improvement. When we're motivating middle school students to care about their grades, students need to know and believe that they have the chance to grow. Our choice of language should reflect the opportunity for growth.

4. Make the Switch to Standards-Based Grading

I'm not exaggerating when I say that making the switch to standards-based grading has transformed my students' relationships with grades. My first year voyaging into the world of standards-based grading, I immediately noticed the shift: kids were no longer obsessed with their number grade. They started to truly care about learning. No longer was I measuring student's performance in my class based on behaviors or habits. I began to focus strictly on skills and standards. Most empowering was that students now had the freedom to retake, retest, and rewrite assignments. As a result, the quality of student work improved and their grades actually went up.

Focusing on very specific standards helped me to maintain grading too. Knowing exactly what I was looking for in a piece of writing or having a focus standard to measure on a test helped me simplify what can sometimes be a daunting task of grading and regrading work. Parent communication became easier as well. Overall, grading became specific, easily measurable, and meaningful.

5. Encourage Student-Led Record Keeping

If you're a middle school teacher, you certainly know this scenario: you hand back a stack of papers you spent your entire weekend grading and providing feedback on only to find half of the papers in the recycling bin by the end of the day. If we want students to care about their grades, we have to make sure that they actually process their grades and understand the significance of the numbers. A simple form at the front of a student's binder where they can physically copy down each grade you turn back to them and where they track their retake grades can easily do the trick. Several times per grading period, I instruct students to calculate their averages and translate them into words. Students' translated word grades give them meaning, direction, and purpose.

6. Keep Growth Portfolios

All of the educational jargon in the world is great, but the reality for students is that they need to see measurable growth to believe it. Growth portfolios are the perfect place for students to maintain physical evidence of their growth and learning. In my ELA 7 class, students maintain growth portfolios all school year. At the end of each quarter, students clean out their work so their binders reflect their individual growth and learning. Students complete a reflection describing the standards they have mastered and the standards they need more work on. At the end of the school year, students present their learning to the class using a document camera and their portfolio work in place of a traditional final exam. I can see concrete evidence of each student's achievement through their portfolios of work.

7. Use Rubrics

Grading must be transparent to students. I have found that one of the best tools for grading transparency is a good old fashioned rubric. On tests, I group questions by standard with a short, simple rubric after each question set. In my class, rubrics are handed out to students with each assignment. Before I assess with the rubric, students use them as a tool to revise and edit their work. They give themselves a grade and make revisions based on the rubric descriptions. Next, peers use the rubric to provide specific feedback to fellow students. Finally, I use the rubric as a method of providing final feedback to students. It is essential that rubrics are either student friendly or student created. If students cannot understand the rubric, they won't understand the grading of their work.

8. Build Positive Relationships

At the end of the day, motivating middle school students to care about their grades really depends on their trust for you. Students must know that we are invested. They will follow our commitment to their growth and learning. One of my favorite inspirational educators, Rita Pierson, once said, "Learning sometimes occurs because someone insists that you recognize the excellence in yourself."

If we can help students at all levels to recognize the excellence in themselves, think of what they could accomplish. If we can help the students who lose their packet, didn't finish their homework, are late to class, and never carry a pencil to recognize the excellence within, then we will too!

Motivating middle school students to care about their grades can seem like a daunting task. Our job is exhausting and using our own energy to energize students can be especially draining. However, with a few simple shifts over time, students can and will care about their grades and, more importantly, their learning.

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8 Ways to Get Middle School Students to Care About Their Grades - We Are Teachers

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Motivating middle school students to care about their grades can be draining, but it's more than possible. Here's how to inspire them to WANT to learn.

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3 Guiding Principals to Building Student Relationships

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3 Guiding Principals to Building Student Relationships

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Why is Building Relationships so Important in the Classroom

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Why is Building Relationships so Important in the Classroom

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Students' brains are hard at work every moment of the day, learning skills and connecting new information with old. Those same brains are also constantly processing information when it comes to their relationship with you, their teacher.

Positive student relationships are fundamental to success. When students feel supported, they're more likely to engage in learning and have better academic outcomes. Plus, when students have positive interactions with teachers, they have fewer behavioral problems. These relationships are more important - and more challenging - than ever in uncertain times, like during the coronavirus pandemic.

Neuroscience can help us understand what's happening in students' brains when they feel safe and understood. Here are four reasons why positive teacher-student relationships are important - and how you can build those relationships.

1. Positive relationships build motivation.

This creates a cycle. You provide positive feedback. The student's brain releases dopamine. The student feels good and is motivated to feel that way again. With this increased motivation, students spend more time and attention working on a skill. They build those skills. You give more praise - sparking the release of more dopamine. And the cycle starts all over again.

On the flip side, when students don't receive positive feedback, they're less likely to enter the positive cycle of motivation and learning.

How to do it: To build a positive relationship, you need to have more positive interactions than negative ones. More specifically, researchers recommend having five positive interactions for every one negative interaction. Positive interactions could include greeting students by name as they arrive, giving praise for working hard, or asking about a student's pet.

Students who learn and think differently often have more negative interactions than positive ones. For example, students with ADHD may receive constant reminders from teachers to be on time and stay on task.

This doesn't mean that you should never provide students with corrective feedback and reminders. But make sure the positive interactions outweigh the negative ones. The more you get to know your students, the more you'll recognize when they need praise or encouragement, and when they're open to constructive feedback. You can keep a tally of how many reminders you give a student to complete an assignment. Try to find five times as many positive things to comment on and tally up as well.

2. Positive relationships create safe spaces for learning.

Think about how this applies to your own life. If you have a supportive principal who has established psychological safety in your school, you might be more likely to challenge yourself and try new ideas in your classroom. But if school leaders consistently give critical feedback, you might not feel psychologically safe enough to try something new. It's the same for students.

Building psychological safety is harder with some students than others. Think of the last time you saw a student seeming to overreact. This behavior may result from trauma or chronic stress in the student's life (such as having a learning or thinking difference or growing up as part of a marginalized group). This can cause them to feel threatened in situations that other students find harmless. The brain learns that the environment is not safe and remains on alert to potential danger.

For these students, when something is perceived as a threat, a region of the brain called the amygdala sets off an alarm. The amygdala is known for its role in detecting threats in the environment. Its job is to keep us safe and alive. Think of an animal that must decide whether to run or freeze when it sees a predator.

The amygdala triggers the release of cortisol (also called the stress hormone) and epinephrine (also called adrenaline). This sends extra energy throughout the body. The muscles tense up and the heartbeat quickens, preparing for fight or flight. When the threat detection system in the brain is highly activated, learning cannot happen. This is the opposite of psychological safety.

In students, this might look like:

Avoiding assignments

Putting their head down

Yelling or making negative comments

Walking out of the classroom or leaving a live video lesson

Acting out physically or aggressively

While building psychological safety may be even more difficult with these students, it is especially important for them. That's because oxytocin also helps keep the amygdala's threat detection system quiet. Over time, when students are surrounded by people they trust, their threat detection system is less likely to activate, and they're better able to learn.

For students who are at risk for a fight-or-flight reaction, your approach will need to differ slightly. Use strategies like when-then sentences so they can know exactly what positive outcome to expect when they complete a task, while giving students the power of choice. Expect that they may overreact sometimes, and provide the space and time needed to calm down. By remaining calm, you're not only reminding yourself to react to their behavior as a form of communication and respond appropriately. You're also building psychological safety and trust.

3. Positive relationships build new pathways for learning.

As you teach the new information, new neural pathways connect the old information with the new. If students don't understand the context or aren't able to link the new information to anything they currently know, they'll have a hard time understanding the lesson.

Ask students to share what they know about a topic. Every student has a different set of background knowledge. For example, if you know a student is a talented artist, you can leverage their knowledge of different kinds of paintbrushes to explain friction. Or you can make an analogy about the relationship between the characters in a student's favorite book and the domestic strife in the Civil War.

4. Positive relationships improve student behavior.

Neuroscience research has started to uncover why this imitation happens - and how it can be used to encourage positive behaviors. Studies have shown that when people observe an action being performed, it activates some of the same neural pathways that would be active if they actually performed the action. This is called the mirror-neuron system.

Essentially, our brains are practicing the action that we're seeing, even though our bodies don't move. Studies show that when people see an action first, they are able to perform the action more quickly than if they had not seen the action.

How to do it: Start by thinking through what behaviors and social skills you're modeling for your students. For example, you likely already model social skills like turn-taking, cooperation, and empathy on a daily basis. You can take it a step further and explain the behaviors you're modeling. The next time you're feeling frustrated, tell your students how you're feeling. Talk about how you deal with frustration, such as taking a few deep breaths.

For younger students, use pre-correcting and prompting as a classroom management strategy. It allows you to explicitly tell, show, and remind students how to approach tasks or situations.

Young children are even more likely than adults to imitate the behaviors they see. That's because they're still learning social skills and appropriate behavior. Plus, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that allows us to choose where to direct our attention and to regulate our behaviors and emotions) isn't fully developed until we're in our 20s. Childhood is a prime time to model behavior and social skills for students.

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Building Relationships With Students: What Brain Science Says

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Brain science tells us why positive student relationships can lead to their success.

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Enter names, spin wheel to pick a random winner. Customize look and feel, save and share wheels.

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Want students to succeed in math and reading? Nurture their curiosity and persistence.

Across 11 countries, those two skills are the most closely linked to better academic performance for both 10- and 15-year-olds, according to the first international survey of social-emotional skills. Rather than ranking countries' average social-emotional performance, the study analyzed the way social-emotional skills affected students' performance. Students in a wide array of educational systems and learning contexts still showed that the development of social skills ranging from trust and creativity to assertiveness could boost students' performance in core academic subjects.

"Some people still see this as opposing ends of the spectrum, you have the academic development and the social-emotional development. And some even think, well, if you focus too much on social-emotional skills, you take something away, [such as] mathematics academic time," said Andreas Schleicher, the director for education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which conducted the study. "Actually what our research shows is that they are two sides of the same coin, and actually quite closely connected."

The OECD, which administers the global Program for International Student Assessment, analyzed the social-emotional development of more than 3,000 students from large cities in 11 countries, including Houston in the United States, as well as Helsinki, Finland; Suzhou, China; and Moscow, Russia.

The group looked at five key areas:

Task performance (such as persistence, and self-control),

Emotional regulation (such as optimism and reaction to stress),

Collaboration (like empathy and trust),

Open-mindedness (such as tolerance, curiosity, and creativity), and

Engagement with others (such as assertiveness and sociability).

The OECD found curiosity and persistence were the strongest predictors of academic success in both math and reading for both children and teenagers, but other skills played important roles. For example, creativity was more closely connected with math progress than art progress for teenagers.

The study focused on urban students, as a "localized ecosystem" of students, parents, teachers, and education systems. "This is a whole society enterprise, and you can see how much the quality of relationships matter," he said.

Teenagers see lower SEL skills

One of the most surprising findings to the OECD was that across countries and socioeconomic backgrounds, 15-year-olds showed lower social-emotional skills than 10-year-olds did.

Surveys from students, teachers, and parents all showed lower social skills among teenagers, above and beyond normal adolescent self-consciousness. The skills gap was particularly large for things like optimism, trust, energy and sociability, and the OECD found girls had bigger drops than boys across most of the skills.

"Ask yourself, what are we doing as parents, as schools, as education systems to help young people through this difficult period of adolescence. This is a finding that I don't think many educators are aware of. It's something that I think we should take to heart, that there is a period in their lives where we should redouble our efforts," Schleicher said.

That is particularly crucial at a time when many teenagers have faced social isolation and anxiety from the ongoing pandemic. "We know that the experience of trauma impacts development and learning and a host of other outcomes," Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, a psychology chair of social and emotional learning at the University of Chicago. "I don't think we can really think about outcomes for young people without a trauma lens ... and how we as a society nurture and work to reduce the impact of trauma on young people."
Yet educators point out that social-emotional learning programs, which in the United States are often targeted to younger students, can be a poor fit for more world-weary adolescents.

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The SEL Skills That May Matter Most for Academic Success: Curiosity and Persistence

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Want students to succeed in math and reading? Nurture their curiosity and persistence. Across 11 countries, those two skills are the most closely linked to better academic performance for both 10- and 15-year-olds, according to the first international survey of social-emotional skills.

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Silent Short Film about perspective, assuming and respect

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Silent Short Film about perspective, assuming and respect

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Silent Film- purpose: think before you act

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Silent Film- purpose: think before you act

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Ways to Handle Impulsive Moments More Effectively

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Ways to Handle Impulsive Moments More Effectively

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Social Emotional Learning-SEL Kids: Like a Firecracker, Being Impulsive

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What is Impulsivity? | Impulse Control | For Kids

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PBIS: List of Replacement Behaviors for Impulsivity

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PBIS: List of Replacement Behaviors for Impulsivity

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PBISWorld.com Tier 1 Positive Behavior Interventions And Supports For impulsivity

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PBISWorld.com Tier 1 Positive Behavior Interventions And Supports specifically to target and address impulsivity

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Impulsive

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Motivational Speech: How to Eliminate Distractions for Yourself

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Motivational Speech: How to Eliminate Distractions for Yourself

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If You Want To Succeed You Must Shut Out The Distractions! Motivational Speech

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How cellphones can be very distracting and ways to manage it

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How cellphones can be very distracting and ways to manage it

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11 strategies to support impulsivity in the classroom

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11 strategies to support impulsivity in the classroom

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by BUSYTEACHER_admin 55,284 views

Teachers must be able to understand the nature of impulsivity in children in order to manage classroom situations properly.

The Nature of Impulsive Behavior

Children are naturally impulsive. Their cognitive abilities are still developing, so they cannot effectively control their impulses yet. They are not yet able to plan their actions and decide rationally. Because their view of the world is still centered on the self, they are usually not aware of the consequences of their impulsivity. They sometimes have no idea that it can affect other people in a negative way.

Impulsivity in young children can be a problem in the classroom. A child exhibiting impulsive behaviors class is a distraction to his classmates and to the teacher. Shouting, singing, not paying attention to the lesson, not cooperating in activities, fighting with classmates - these are some examples of what an impulsive student may do.

Impulsivity in children lessens as they grow older. But in special cases, impulsive behaviors do not go away, as in the cases of children with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or ADHD. In either case, a teacher can successfully manage an impulsive student in the classroom by keeping in mind that it is not always a deliberate act on the part of the student.

Ways to Manage Impulsive Behavior in Students

As a teacher, you first have to identify which students are prone to impulsivity. You are responsible for monitoring their behavior and intervening immediately when it occurs. Here are some ways in which you can manage the classroom when there are students who exhibit impulsive behavior. See what works for the child, and remember that what works for one may not work for another.

Do not shy away from using the internet as a source of guidance. There are many competent websites, like thefamilycrompass.com, that can help you manage your students. Professional advice is just a click away.

No child is ever a lost cause. With patience, understanding, and genuine concern, you can help your student channel energy into more positive behaviors.

I believe that with the right information and great tips from the professionals, you can effectively manage students' impulsive behaviors in the classroom.

About the author: Kaylee is a family and health writer. Visit thefamilycrompass.com to see more samples of her writing.

P.S. If you enjoyed this article, please help spread it by clicking one of those sharing buttons below. And if you are interested in more, you should follow our Facebook page where we share more about creative, non-boring ways to teach English.

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Dealing With Impulsive Behavior Inside the Classroom

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by BUSYTEACHER_admin 55,284 views Teachers must be able to understand the nature of impulsivity in children in order to manage classroom situations properly. Children are naturally impulsive. Their cognitive abilities are still developing, so they cannot effectively control their impulses yet. They are not yet able to plan their actions and decide rationally.

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Tiered Grade Level Posters & Explanations of Managing Impulsivity 

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Tiered Grade Level Posters & Explanations of Managing Impulsivity 

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As my students grow in impulse management, they will not only achieve more in my class, but also build valuable life skills. Strong impulse management leads to higher work efficiency and productivity. My mission is to prepare my students for college, careers, and choice-filled lives through urgent, rigorous, and joyful learning. Habits and mindsets of impulse management create an urgent learning environment. Fewer classroom disruptions mean we are able to learn more and cover material faster. Through the explicit teaching and reinforcement of managing impulsivity, my students are on track to complete the entire Algebra II curriculum two months before the end of the school year.

This year, I have made it a goal to give students space for at least ten minutes of silent, independent work each day. In addition, I asked colleagues to make observations of my teaching, as I work on not over-scaffolding new material. At the start of the school year, students struggled with independent work time, raising their hands for help seconds into practice time. In particular, students were afraid to persist through word problems on their own, and had a strong impulse to ask me for initial direction. However, as we have practiced managing impulsivity through explicit instruction and reinforcement, I noted my students' tremendous growth over the course of this year. In every class period, over 85% of students are managing their impulse to first ask for help, and are instead working urgently and with persistence throughout independent practice time. They use impulse management skills we modeled and practiced as a class, such as referring back to notes, setting up the problem, annotating text, and writing down questions. My students' impulse management has increased the breadth of their learning, since they are able to independently practice more problems in class and for homework.

Costa, A. L., & Kallick, B. (2000). Describing 16 Habits of Mind. Retrieved from http://www.habitsofmind.org/sites/default/files/16HOM2.pdf REFERENCES

Johnson, B., Rutledge, M., Poppe, M., & Vermont Consultants for Language and Learning. (2005). Appendix C: Pre- and post-assessments of Habits of Mind. In Habits of Mind: A curriculum for community high school of Vermont students (pp. 101-104). Retrieved from http://www.chsvt.org/wdp/Habits_of_Mind_Curriculum_VT_WDP.pdf ​

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As my students grow in impulse management, they will not only achieve more in my class, but also build valuable life skills. Strong impulse management leads to higher work efficiency and productivity. My mission is to prepare my students for college, careers, and choice-filled lives through urgent, rigorous, and joyful learning.

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Self-awareness is a vital skill for everyone, whether you're a student, a parent, or an educator.

Social and emotional learning starts with self-awareness and then continues to teach and build this skill throughout a student's journey.

The Positive Action program teaches self-awareness in unit 1, then continues to highlight it as an underlying philosophy throughout all of our material.

What is Self-Awareness?

Social-emotional self-awareness means having the ability to understand your thoughts, emotions, and values, as well as knowing how those factors influence your behavior. Added to this understanding is the capacity to open-mindedly and realistically assess your strengths and weaknesses while maintaining your confidence, drive, and desire to grow.

The World Health Organization recognizes self-awareness as one of ten life skills that promote well-being across all cultures. The other skills include:

Critical thinking

Creative thinking

Responsible decision-making

Problem-solving

Effective communication

Interpersonal relationships

Coping with stress

Coping with emotions

To be self-aware is to follow the first Delphic maxim of ancient Greece: "know thyself."

Teaching Self-Awareness

Learning to be self-aware isn't easy, even for adults, which can make teaching self-awareness to students daunting.

Some teachers might also wonder when redirecting students, "Is this self-awareness or self-efficacy?" Teaching self-efficacy is, in a way, part of teaching self-awareness in the classroom.

To be self-aware, you must be able to:

1. Identify your emotions. Your students need to be able to identify their feelings. Learning the difference between frustration and anger will help students navigate their emotions. By recognizing the link between their feelings, thoughts, and actions, they can then address these feelings and react to them appropriately.

2. See yourself honestly. Teaching your students to look at themselves honestly can help them respond to compliments, feedback, and criticism openly and earnestly. This sense of self will teach them to see and acknowledge both the positive and negative things in their nature.

3. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses. Your students' ability to see themselves, acknowledge their shortcomings, and embrace their strengths is a great confidence booster. Knowing that it's okay to admit they're wrong or don't understand something sets them up for growth. Acknowledging aptitude also builds confidence.

4. Work toward growth. All of these skills lead students to self-efficacy. They understand that self-work and growth are positive activities that result in healthy, happy people with a drive to achieve.

5 Activities and Strategies for Teaching Students to Be Self-Aware

Here are some ideas for how to develop self-awareness in students.

1. Positive Awareness. Have students write a list of the things they like about themselves. If they need a nudge, suggest something like "I am cheerful," or "I am creative." Encourage older students to dig a little deeper. Students should put this list in a place where they'll often see it to reinforce the positives they see in themselves.

2. Discuss the Thoughts-Actions-Feelings Circle. Unique to Positive Action, the thoughts-actions-feelings circle is integral to our social and emotional curriculum. It depicts how thoughts lead to actions and actions to feelings, which lead once again to thoughts. Describe situations your students might find themselves in. Discuss how those situations might make them feel, how and what they might think, and how they might act based on those thoughts and feelings.

3. Keep an Emotion Journal. As students learn to identify and label their feelings, ask them to keep an emotion journal. For younger students, this may mean pasting emoji faces, while for older students, it might be a digital journal. Taking the time for a daily "emotional assessment" allows your students to understand and explore their emotions.

4. Establish and Work Toward Goals. Meeting self-awareness goals and objectives gives students successes to celebrate, fortifying their belief in themselves. Ask students to set realistic goals and write down steps they can take to meet those goals. You might even consider making a class goal for students to strive for as the year progresses.

5. Use Your Strengths. Help students to identify their strengths. The act of identifying things that your students are good at reinforces a positive self-image. Working to improve their strengths builds confidence, setting them up for success.

The Importance of a Healthy Self-Awareness

Having a healthy self-awareness promotes emotional wellness and self-esteem. It provides students insight into who they are, why they react as they do, and gives them a direction for self-improvement. Self-awareness for students is crucial for success. Self-aware people have a fundamental belief in their ability to achieve a goal, and this trait helps students thrive in everything they do.

When Does a Child Become Self-Aware?

Children can become aware younger than you might think. Typically after the age of five, they'll begin identifying their emotions. Until then, they don't understand what they're feeling, or that other people have feelings separate from their own.

Recognizing their emotions and the emotions of others is the first step to becoming self-aware.

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Teaching Self-Awareness to Students: 5 Effective Activities

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Discover how to teach self-awareness to children using different evidence-based activities and strategies.

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Teaching Conflict Resolution Skills in 6 Easy Steps

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Resolving conflicts in 6 steps. Teaching elementary school students to resolve conflicts can improve their social-emotional understanding and help your classroom management.

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Teaching Conflict Resolution in the Classroom

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Teaching Conflict Resolution in the Classroom

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“Conflict Resolution” Lesson for Middle & High School-plus Google Slides version

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What can I use this product for?Perfect classroom lesson for School Counselors, Life Skills Teachers, Freshmen Academy Teachers, Health Teachers, or any educator wanting to promote conflict resolution skills. Includes a link to a Google Slides version for distance learning that is ready to go with..…

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This freebie pack provides students with social challenges opportunities to problem solve about fighting with friends. Students will have concrete examples to think about their actions and the actions of others and reason about finding solutions. Scenarios are geared toward middle and high school students.

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Social Skills Problem Solving: Fighting with Friends

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This freebie pack provides students with social challenges opportunities to problem solve about fighting with friends. Students will have concrete examples to think about their actions and the actions of others and reason about finding solutions. Scenarios are geared toward middle and high school st...

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Problem Solving & Social Skills Task Cards

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Problem Solving & Social Skills Task Cards

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Many students have difficulty with social situations, problem solving, and perspective taking. This product addresses all of these issues in a FREE set of 16 task cards. These cards can help build awareness of social skill development in different situations that occur

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Regular Education Teachers
Psychologists

Laminate the cards, cut them out and use them in a variety of ways You can use these cards in:
Small groups
Individually
Class discussions
Role Playing
Social Skills Learning

These cards can be used with elementary, middle and high school students.

Included in this product are the task cards and discussion question strips. When using the task cards, the students can answer the questions verbally or have them use a dry erase marker to select an answer. Use the discussion question strips to stimulate discussion in groups or pairs..

You will use these cards over and over again every year getting your students prepared for the Thanksgiving holiday.

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Problem Solving and Social Skills Task Cards: Thanksgiving {FREE}

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Many students have difficulty with social situations, problem solving, and perspective taking. This product addresses all of these issues in a FREE set of 16 task cards. These cards can help build awareness of social skill development in different situations that occur These Problem Solving and...

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20 Must Teach Routines and Procedures to Teach in Middle School

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20 Must Teach Routines and Procedures to Teach in Middle School

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With almost 30 years in the middle and high school classroom between the Maneuvering the Middle team, we have many thoughts on the routines and procedures necessary to run a successful classroom.

This list is not exhaustive but will hopefully provide you with a place to start. One recommendation is to think backwards. Start by thinking about how you want your classroom to look and feel when the students are working and you are teaching. Ask yourself, "What did I have to teach my students in order to reach this ideal state?"

I have outlined some essential middle school routines to teach to your students. Some, I have seen effective teachers implement as well as ones that worked wonders in my own classroom. (Sometimes routines are born out of necessity)

Daily Routines

1. How to enter your classroom

This fell into the - surely I don't have to teach students this - category. Turns out, I did. It is better to be proactive than reactive as a teacher or you will have students who take advantage of the ambiguity. I used these posters to guide my students. "Take the most direct route to your seat" was a game-changer for me.

2. Warm up/BELL RINGER

Where do students get the warm up? When should they start on it? Are they allowed to talk during this time?

3. Sharpen pencils

When students need to sharpen their pencils, they raise their hand and make the letter P in sign language, so I can simply nod or tell them to wait. That is one procedure that has worked for me. Students know that they must always ask permission which eliminates any rude interruptions while I am teaching. Some teachers have a trading system so that the pencil is never sharpened during class.

4. "I don't have a pencil"

There is no combination of words strung together that I despise more than these (except perhaps "I don't get it"). Seriously, can someone solve this problem for me? My sister and I joked about buying these for every table in my classroom. What is so hilarious, is that I frequently go to meetings where I have to ask to borrow a pen. #teacherfail

5. Hand Signals

When students raise their hands, you are subjecting yourself to Pandora's box when you call on them. By using hand signals, you are placing a filter on some of this 'spam.' I have a hand signal for needing a tissue, asking to go to the restroom, asking a question, answering a question, and sharing a comment. This will save you so much energy. While working with my small group, I would stop what I was doing to walk across the classroom to address a raised hand, only to be asked to go to the restroom. Stop the madness! Use hand signals!

You can get Hand Signals and so much more in our Classroom Poster Pack.

Check out the When are students allowed to use the restroom in your class? Do they have a certain number of times they are allowed to go in six-weeks? How do you track that? brilliant procedure Noelle used in her classroom.

7. Dismissal procedures
When can students start packing up? Do students just leave when the bell rings? What are they responsible for cleaning up? Do they need to stack chairs?
8. Technology

Learning with technology is a privilege. When you threaten to take away the iPad or computer, make sure to follow through. Have a packet of work copied and ready to hand out to students who are choosing to be off task or treat the technology with disrespect. Another procedure to consider is how the technology gets distributed and put away. Remote learning has created more of a need for technology routines and procedures. Watch for that post - coming soon!

9. Cell phones

My school has a strict policy that if you have your cell phone out or if it goes off, teachers collect them and parents have to come pick them up. Most schools are not like that though. While phones can be tools, they can also serve as a distraction. Be specific about what phones are used for in your classroom, and stick to it. You could try this or try this. Or check out Pocket Points - an app that rewards students for staying off their phone.

10. Calculators

There are many procedures that must be taught regarding this equipment especially if they belong to the school. I found that having calculators on the wall and students picking one up on the way in seemed to work pretty well. Make sure that you have a routine in place when calculators stop working or run out of batteries.

11. Passing in papers

Do students make a pile at their table? Do students get up and turn in the assignment to a tray? What about tests? If you have individual desks, do students pass the paper up, back, or across?

12. Attention getter

When you get students' attention, what are they supposed to do? Get silent? Stop moving? Look at you? They probably need to do all of these things, so be prepared to practice this with your students several times. Make sure that you wait for 100% compliance before making your announcement or giving direction. Many teachers love using this wireless doorbell.

Weekly Procedures

13. Trade and grade papers

After realizing that I only use 'trade and grade' on assignments that weren't actually going to be a grade, I stopped. I allowed students to grade their own assignment to get feedback and ask questions easily. If the assignment was going to be a grade, I would use Google Forms or a bubble sheet.

14. When someone enters

Do your students talk to office aides or other teachers when they enter your classroom? Yep! Mine too. Teach them that only the teacher addresses guests and if they have something they must add, they have to put up the hand signal for comment or question.

15. General group procedures

How do students get into groups? What is the expectation of the group members? Do you have roles? My students sit at tables, so they naturally have a group to work with. When I had desks in pairs, we addressed how to move the desks, where to move them, and what the expectations were of each role. I personally reserved roles for larger assignments/projects.

`16. Small group procedures

Check out this post for some of the routines I practice for small groups.

17. Supply procedures

Routines in place - what to do when my glue stick runs out? What if I need to sharpen my colored pencil? Who picks up trash? I use table bins with just enough supplies to keep things manageable, and I have a student organize them at the end of each day. The table bins are only out on tables when we are using glue, colored pencils, or scissors, so students aren't tempted to play with the materials.

Less Frequent Procedures

18. Emergency Procedures

Most schools are different, but one routine has remained the same during every emergency procedure, students are silent. This is a hard one to execute if your entire school or grade level isn't consistent. I explained to students that teachers need to be able to hear instructions or take attendance and silence helps that move along faster.

19. Band aid/nurse/I have a headache

To get a bandaid in my class, you have to be bleeding, and I keep bandaids in my room so that no class time is missed. . For headaches, I ask them to take some deep breaths and drink some water. I rarely allow students to go to the nurse because then it will never stop. Get into the habit of sympathizing with your student and telling them that they are strong enough to tough it out. Then walk away. Exceptions: vomiting and blood.

20. Quiz and test procedures

This is a procedure that you do not have to teach the first few days of school, but you need to teach the first few times you give a test or quiz, so make sure to allow enough time for that. Teach how you want students to turn in their tests, what they need to do after they have finished, and how to treat testing folders (if you use them).

Need more routines and procedures?

Editor's Note: We have been publishing content for the Maneuvering the Middle blog for over 6 years! This post was originally published in June of 2016 and has been revamped for accuracy and relevancy.

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Must Teach Middle School Routines and Procedures

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20 middle school routines and procedures to keep your students on the right track and out of trouble. Set your classroom up for success!

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K-12 Procedures that should be Taught to Head Off Behavior Problems

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K-12 Procedures that should be Taught to Head Off Behavior Problems

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16 Quick Lessons to Teach Habits of Mind in the Classroom

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16 Quick Lessons to Teach Habits of Mind in the Classroom

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In outcomes-based learning environments, we generally see three elements in play: 1) learning objectives or targets are created from given standards; 2) instruction of some kind is given; and then 3) learning results are assessed. These assessments offer data to inform the revision of further planned instruction. Rinse and repeat.

But lost in this clinical sequence are the Habits of Mind that (often predictably) lead to success or failure in the mastery of given standards. In fact, it is not in the standards or assessments, but rather these personal habits where success or failure-in academic terms-actually begin. Below are all 16 Habits of Mind, each with a tip, strategy or resource to understand and begin implementation in your classroom.

See also What Are The Habits Of Mind?

The habits themselves aren't new at all, and significant work has already been done in the areas of these 'thinking habits.' However, in a 21st-century learning environment - one often inundated with information, stimulation, and connectivity - there may be a newfound context for their application.

And a renewed urgency for their integration.

The Habits of Mind (by Art Costa and Bena Kallick) don't simply represent fragments of practice to 'add on' to what you already do, but rather new ways to think about how people learn.

16 Strategies For Integrating The Habits Of Mind In The Classroom

1. Persisting

Have students identify characteristics of persistence shown by individuals in well-known events, or imagine what might have occurred if more or less persistence was shown in a given scenario.

2. Managing Impulsivity

Model the use of patience in the classroom, including wait time during discussion, or using helpful sentence stems that reflect intentional choice (such as "After reviewing all of the possible solutions . . . ").

3. Listening to Others with Understanding and Empathy

Identify the most common 'listening set-asides' in conversation so that students can begin to recognize common 'errors' that occur in everyday communication. These errors might include comparing, judging, placating, or giving advice instead of really listening and understanding a message.

4. Thinking Flexibly

Use RAFT assignments (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) where students must consider a situation, letter, speech or poem from a perspective other than their own, or that of the original speakers.

Ask students to map out their own thinking processes. This can be done simply at first, e.g., diagramming the relationship between a want and a need, a gesture and a need to gesture. Then make it increasingly complex - mapping out how characters from books or thinkers in history might have arrived at certain starting or stopping points in thought.

6. Striving for Accuracy and Precision

Use 'three before me,' a strategy that insists on any important assignment being checked by at least three other people before being handed in.

7. Questioning and Posing Problems

Create a 'parking lot' area in the classroom - stocked with post-it notes - where students can post questions that may not fit into the pace or format of a given class. Then highlight the better questions periodically, or use them as jumping-off points for discussion or even lesson planning.

8. Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations

Use question stems like "What do you remember about . . . ?", "When have you ever seen anything like this?" or "Tell me what you know about . . . " Whether you consider this activating schema, prior knowledge, or simply getting students more comfortable and in tune with what they already know, it can be a huge boost to the learning process.

9. Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision

Remind students to avoid the vagueness and abstraction - and imprecision - of terms like always, never, all, everybody, teachers, celebrities, technology, they, we, should and must. Post these kinds of words or phrases where students can be reminded of them - and know to avoid them. And hopefully know why they should avoid them.

10. Gathering Data Through All Senses

Playfully allow students to 'cite' sources from sensory data in addition to traditional textual sources. Also consider including the compelling use of such data in a rubric for formal assessment.

11. Creating, Imagining and Innovating

Offer persistent sources of inspiring thought, design, art or multimedia through writing prompts, discussion points or simply as a daily class closure. This models not only creativity, but also expertise, and is readily available on YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.

12. Responding with Wonderment and Awe

Don't just allow opportunities for student choice in topics, formats or learning pathways - insist on it. Refuse to move the class forward until they are bringing their own passions into the learning experience.

13. Taking Responsible Risks

Create an environment where failure is analyzed, not punished.

14. Finding Humor

Point out humor where it is not immediately apparent, especially in stories and examples from your own life. This can help establish the 'relativity' of 'things,' which supports more accurate analysis. Humor makes everything better.

15. Thinking Interdependently

Using digital and social media imposes at least a topical need for interdependence from the beginning. The more thinking is published and shared, the more opportunity there will be for cognitive interdependence, though even opportunities don't guarantee that it will happen.

16. Learning Continuously

Intermittently revisit old ideas, writing, and projects to identify areas for development, improvement, or revision. This is especially natural in digital domains, where content is more fluid - updated, shared, hyperlinked, curated, reformatted into more or less visual terms, then shared again.

I know that these are just the tip of the iceberg and that there are many approaches one can take. Which of these Habits of Mind needs the most support for your students? How do you integrate these habits into your classroom?
This post was originally written by Terry Heick for edutopia.org

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Integrating The Habits Of Mind In The Classroom

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In outcomes-based learning environments, we generally see three elements in play: 1) learning objectives or targets are created from given standards; 2) instruction of some kind is given; and then 3) learning results are assessed. These assessments offer data to inform the revision of further planned instruction. Rinse and repeat.

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Editable 7 Habits Poster for the Classroom

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Editable 7 Habits Poster for the Classroom

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Thanks, Kaylyn

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Listen to my interview with Michael Linsin ( transcript):

Sponsored by Write About and Peergrade
In my first few years of teaching, student talking was like popcorn.
I gave the class instructions for some kind of work; let's say journal writing. And for a few seconds, they did it. Things were quiet. Then, like that first kernel of popcorn, one student said she didn't know what to write, so I walked over to her desk to help her. While we talked, two more raised their hands-two more pops-and said they were stuck, too. I signaled to them that I'd be over in a minute, but in the meantime, someone else was closing his journal, finished already. Another pop. The two who were stuck asked him what he wrote about.

The room needs to stay quiet so we can concentrate, I told them.

Someone else had a question. Another pop. I squatted by her desk, and behind me, a conversation started between two others. Pop pop. Another journal closed while a different hand went up.

Okay people, I said, this time louder. Let's keep it down. And with rascally smiles, they turned back to their journals to pretend to write some more. At this point, it had turned into a game.

Someone needed to sharpen their pencil. Pop. Someone else decided to race them over to the sharpener. Pop. In a matter of seconds, the whole room had erupted, a huge hysterical bowl of popcorn, exploding all around me, and I couldn't find my way out.

And then I yelled.

If this sounds anything like you, you're not alone. I hear it from teachers all the time. One of the things they don't teach us in our education courses is just how freaking much students talk, and how hard it can be to quiet them down in order to get anything accomplished.

To find solutions to this problem, I went to Michael Linsin, the creator of Smart Classroom Management and my go-to person for all classroom management needs. Last year, he taught us how to set up a clear, simple classroom management plan. Now he's going to help us understand the causes of excessive talking, what you should be able to realistically expect from students, and how you can fix the problem.

First, two quick caveats.

One: I believe students need to talk. People need to talk. So if you're shooting for a classroom environment where students sit silently and do rote seat work all day long, where they never have an opportunity to talk to their peers, where they never get out of their seats, and where the work is not engaging, you are going to have problems.

Two: A big part of good classroom management is building good relationships with your students. If you haven't taken the time to get to know them as individuals, if you mispronounce their names, if you regularly use sarcasm or make them feel stupid for asking questions, then they aren't going to want to behave well for you. And that's a different problem.

So this post is based on the assumption that you're planning engaging lessons and you have a decent relationship with your students. Without those two, these solutions might kind of work, but you're still probably not going to love your job.

Why It's Happening

Before you can solve this problem, you have to understand its cause. According to Linsin, excessive talking-talking that occurs during independent work time or direct instruction-happens for two reasons.

Reason 1: They don't believe you mean it.

Despite the fact that you specifically tell students not to talk, deep down they don't believe you mean it. "Or they don't care," Linsin says.

"At some point," he explains, "Your authority has faded. If you're able to teach to a quiet classroom in the beginning of the year and now you're not able to, or if it happened right off the bat, then somehow at some point, the students' respect for you and for the process, for the classroom, and your authority has faded."

So even if they hear you, even if they understand that you want quiet at a certain time, they don't believe anything negative will happen if they ignore your request. If they come to you with this behavior, it's likely that it has just been part of their conditioning.

"Because so many teachers struggle with this problem," Linsin explains, "many after a while kind of throw up their hands and just decide they're going to talk over students, they're going to do their best to keep things as quiet as possible during independent work time, so the students come to you (from) classrooms where the teacher asked them to be quiet but doesn't really follow up on it."

Reason 2: They don't understand what "no talking" means.

This one is going to be harder for teachers to believe, but bear with us here: "No talking" may not mean exactly the same thing in different contexts, and if your students are talking more than you want them to, there's a good chance you're working with different definitions.

"When they come to your classroom," Linsin explains, "and they've had teacher after teacher say the same thing, yet continue to allow it to happen in the classroom, then students think, Well, he or she just means we need to kind of keep our voices down, or We're mostly quiet, but if we have important things to say to a neighbor, then we're allowed to do that. And so they're confused as to what the definition of 'quiet' really is."

In many cases, Linsin notes, the problem is likely being caused by a combination of both of these reasons. But notice that neither reason is a blanket statement about students being disrespectful. This is why I like Linsin's approach: He puts control for classroom management in the teacher's hands, rather than placing blame on the student. That's not to say that you won't have disrespectful students, but shifting the blame to them means you have no power over the situation. Blaming the students simply isn't a useful way to address the problem.

"When students are not doing something that you've previously taught them how to do," Linsin says, "whether it's talking or entering the classroom, and they don't do it well, even though the students are responsible for their behavior, when most of the class is not doing what you ask, it's on you. It's about you. There's some disconnect there, there's something they're not understanding."

What You Should Be Able to Expect

Some teachers might wonder whether it's reasonable to expect students to be quiet at all, especially if they are younger. Linsin says yes without hesitation. "You should absolutely expect, no matter where you're teaching or what grade level, that the students are able to sit quietly while you're giving instruction or directions, and they should be able to sit quietly and work during independent work times."

Should there also be times when talking is permitted? "Absolutely," Linsin says. "It's really important to give students an opportunity to express themselves, to get up and move around, to work in groups and pairs and discuss. Classrooms should be vibrant and interesting, exciting places, and so I'm all for getting students up and moving and having fun. Those things just make classroom management stronger, and they free you to ask anything of your students, including silence."

The Solution

If you came here looking for a few tricks to end excessive talking, the bad news is that you won't find anything clever or earth-shattering. The good news is that the solution is pretty simple, and it requires no behavior charts, tokens, or Jolly Ranchers.

Step 1: Define expectations in explicit detail.

"The fix," Linsin says, "is to define, in detail, exactly what you want during independent work time and when you're teaching a directed lesson."

If you believe you've already done this, and it hasn't worked, the issue is probably lack of detail in your explanation. Linsin says you need to go far deeper than what most teachers probably do.

"So you may bring a desk or a table up in front of your classroom, sit down, and pretend to be a student. You may have other students acting as models also. Show students how you expect them to behave while you're giving instruction, and then how you expect them to behave when they're doing independent work."

"It's also important to include what not to do," he adds. "So you'll model those exact behaviors that you're seeing, those exact talking behaviors, whether it's side-talking or standing up and whispering to someone, or whatever your classroom looks like. Even if it's chaotic, whatever that chaos looks like exactly, you want the students to be able to see themselves in your modeling and what isn't okay."

Step 2: Have students practice.

Once you've modeled the desired behavior, have students practice it, just like you'd have them practice any skill you're teaching.

Linsin gives an example of what this might look like. You'd start by saying, "'I'm going to give you 60 seconds, and I want you to show me what good listening looks like, and no talking. So let's pretend I'm standing and giving you a lesson. I want to know what that looks like.' And then you'll stand and maybe you'll cross your arms and put your hand under your chin, and you'll watch them."

Keep this instruction light, he says. Keep it fun. "You'll stare at them and you'll walk around the room, and you'll watch one of them, and you'll nod your head and say, 'Mmhmm, okay, that looks good. Mmhmm. Chin up a little higher!' It's okay to have fun with it. None of this is a punishment. It's just good teaching. Whether you're teaching how to find a topic sentence or how you want your students to line up before recess, it's all teaching. So it's okay to have fun with it. It's okay for them to laugh at some of the things you say or to see themselves in the behaviors, which they love, by the way, especially if you exaggerate it and have some fun with it."

The Sign Strategy: Students are often put in an awkward position when a classmate tries to talk to them during these quiet times. They want to follow your guidelines, but they also don't want to be rude to a classmate. Agree on some kind of physical sign they can give each other at these times. "It can be a scissors or peace sign or whatever's culturally acceptable wherever you teach. And all they do is just hold the sign up, and the sign means, 'I'm really sorry, but I have to listen to the lesson,' or 'I'm really sorry, but I have to do my work.' And you can tell them that if they give the sign and that student who sees the sign turns and gets back to work, you will not enforce a consequence, because they're showing responsible behavior."

Step 3: Teach the consequences.

"Walk them through the exact steps that would happen if they turn and talk to a neighbor, for example," Linsin says. "The exact steps a misbehaving student would take from your initial warning to contacting parents or whatever your consequences look like."

In order to do this, you have to know what your consequences are. Spend some time making sure you're clear on that. If you need help, read our post on creating a classroom management plan.

Step 4: Do it for real.

Once students have been taught your expectations and have practiced exactly what they look like, it's time to apply it in a real lesson. "Have a directed lesson ready," Linsin advises, "to have them prove to you they can do it in practice."

If you've taught the expectations in detail, students should do a good job, but if they don't, you need to enforce your consequences exactly as you described. "You almost hope during that first wonderful lesson, that one student maybe turns, and so the class can see that you're holding them accountable."

If enforcing your consequences is difficult for you-and for many teachers, it will be-read Linsin's post on why teachers struggle to consistently enforce consequences.

Step 5: Continue to define expectations in small chunks.

This last step is crucial. From this point forward, keep telling students what is expected of them before every switch in classroom activity. When you are about to do group work, let students know that talking within the group is okay. If you then switch to independent work, remind them that absolute quiet will be expected. Briefly describe what that will look like, even spelling out what not to do if that fits the activity.

Taking time to do this might seem unnecessary, but being clear ahead of time will prevent problems. "Anytime you can give a reminder before misbehavior," Linsin says, "it's a good thing. Anytime you give a reminder after you see misbehavior, it's a bad thing. You should be holding students accountable, but be preemptive whenever you can."

Learn More from Michael Linsin
The Happy Teacher Habits
(Links to this book are Amazon Affiliate links, which means I get a small commission on purchases you make through my links at no additional cost to you.)

There's more where this came from.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to my members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Come on in!!

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What they don't teach us in education courses is just how freaking much students talk, and how hard it can be to quiet them down. Help is on the way.

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Thanks, Kaylyn

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So you teach this great lesson. Your students are really into it. They're listening and participating. Their eyes are bright and inquisitive. They pass all your checks for understanding with flying colors.

But as soon as you finish and give the signal for them to practice what they've learned independently, only a few get right to work.

Some students look around the room, unsure of how to begin. Some sit poised, pencil at the ready, but unmoving. Others don't think twice. As if on cue, their hands go up in the air. Other than a predictable few, most of your students seem unable or unwilling to dig into their work.

You set them up for success, take them right to the edge of learning . . . but there they stand, frozen.

So you do what you have to do. You bustle around the room from one student to the next, reteaching what you taught to the entire class just minutes before. You remind. You review. You cajole, exhort, and praise the slightest headway.

You do for them what you know they can do for themselves. It's exhausting, but you do it lesson after lesson and day after day because it's the only way you know how to get them to the finish line. It's the only way you know how to transfer their learning from concept to knowledge.

Yet still, progress is slow. While you're working with one student, several others sit idly by, just waiting for you. And because they're unfocused, behavior, too, suffers. It's a stressful way to teach, but what are you to do? If you don't help them, little or nothing will get done.

Well, not so fast.

Their problem, you see, isn't their inability. It's not motivation, at least not directly. If they can pass your checks for understanding, then you've provided everything they need to work independently. The problem is learned helplessness.

Many students have become so accustomed to receiving one-on-one support that they can no longer do for themselves. They've lost the spark of initiative. They've lost the pride of self-reliance. They've lost the thrill of the challenge, the perseverance of the will, and the self-starter quality they need to grow and mature as students.

Independence is a gift you give your students by gently withholding help for that which you know they can do themselves. You prepare them for success with spot-on instruction, to be sure. But then you fade into the background.

Now, you can't just turn your back and stop helping cold turkey. Improving independence is something you must ease into through kindly encouragement. You'll still respond to hands in the air. You'll still approach your students. But instead of kneeling down to help, you'll offer words of reassurance.

" You can do it. I believe in you."

" You don't need my help. I promise. Trust yourself."

" I have confidence in you."

" Don't think so much. Just begin. You can do this."

Asthe days and weeks go by and you fade further into the background, you'll notice far fewer hands in the air and far fewer students in genuine need of support. Their work will become more self-assured and competent. Learning, motivation, and independence will increase tenfold.

This doesn't mean that you'll never help individual students. As both you and they grow accustomed to true independent work, you'll be able to recognize when a student really does need assistance. But even then, you'll only offer enough help to get them moving.

Independent practice is critical to learning, and giving too much help is often more problematic than not giving enough. In time, your students will develop tenacious independence. Instead of glancing around the room lost and perplexed, they'll be empowered to attack their work with confidence.

After finishing up a lesson, you'll become a ghostly presence, neither ignoring nor helping, but just watching for signs of struggle, for signs a student is in need of a soft reminder or word of encouragement.

Your job is to provide world-class, high-interest lessons and all the instruction and support your students need to succeed.

But then they take it from there.

Note: I was interviewed this week by Patty Palmer of Deep Space Sparkle. If you're an art teacher or are interested in some amazing art lesson ideas, I highly recommend her website. To read the interview, click here.

Also, if you haven't done so already, please join us. It's free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.

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A Gentle But Powerful Way To Increase Learning, Motivation, And Independence - Smart Classroom Management

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So you teach this great lesson. Your students are really into it. They're listening and participating. Their eyes are bright and inquisitive. They pass all your checks for understanding with flying colors. But as soon as you finish and give the signal for them to practice what they've learned independently, only a few get right ...

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Compassion-Based Strategies for Managing Classroom Behavior

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Compassion-Based Strategies for Managing Classroom Behavior

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There's a saying some educators use: "The best classroom management strategy is an engaging lesson plan." That may be true, but there are often a few students who act out in class no matter how well the teacher prepares. Dearborn says when she started using compassion to help her students behave in school-appropriate ways, she had far more success. She often found that punishments embarrassed students and caused them to resent her deeply, damaging their relationship.
7 COMPASSIONATE BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES Tone, Volume and Posture
Dearborn empathizes with students who feel shame when they are called out in front of the entire class. Whenever possible, she tries to discipline privately, but classrooms are hardly private, so she often uses a combination of tone, volume and posture to get students on task.

First she adopts a calm and serious tone in her voice. Then, she squares her body to the student. She says this kind of communication can usually do the trick, but there are other steps if needed. For kids who might have oppositional defiant disorder or be emotionally disturbed, Dearborn advises a side posture with averted eyes so as not to trigger a violent response.
Avoid Standoffs
Dearborn said that in moments of escalation with students, often the best strategy is to offer a few alternative choices to the behavior a child is showing and then walk away. Sometimes a small nudge is enough to redirect behavior, and teens especially may not follow the teacher's direction if she hovers. Dearborn calls this "drive-by discipline."

"Say the kid's name superfast and then move on," she said. "Sometimes it's the right thing to do. It startles her, and then I move on before she can bait me into an argument."
Look for the Subtext: I Don't Care
When kids are acting in a confrontational, dismissive or volatile way, Dearborn suggests looking for the deeper message the student is communicating, whether they know it or not. She imagines an invisible subtitle running in front of the student that communicates what she really needs. When things get tense, "everything out of their voice and their face and their body, that is just interference getting in the way of me reading the invisible subtitles," Dearborn said. She has had to practice ignoring the loud anger and hostility in order to look for the invisible subtitle.

"If you're assuming the best about the kid, that they want to learn appropriate behavior, they want to be positively connected to you, but they somehow can't, there's something in the way. What can you imagine the invisible subtitle is for 'I don't care?' " Dearborn asked a crowd of educators at the Learning and the Brain conference.

"For me, the invisible subtitle for 'I don't care' is, Mrs. Dearborn, I really, really care, but I can't tell you that. Do care?"

Reading the "subtitles," as she calls them, has helped Dearborn to stop perceiving misbehavior as disrespect. That doesn't make her a pushover, she said. It makes her an advocate for the student.

"So now when kids say, 'I don't care' to me, I say, 'That's OK because I care, and I can care for the both of us right now, so let's do this.' "

Approaching the student with the assumption that they want to behave appropriately changes the communication dynamic.

"I'm not doing it because I'm frustrated and now I want to punish them. And even though the words and the consequences I'm giving might be the same in either case, it is the quality of interaction that shifts, and kids pick up on quality and our unspoken intention more than anything else in a disciplinary interaction."

The subtext could also be simpler. Maybe a student is talking in class, and when the teacher calls her out on it, she denies talking. "For me, the subtitle for 'I wasn't talking' is, 'Mrs. Dearborn, I was totally talking. You know I was talking. I know I was talking. Everybody in the room knows that I was talking. But I'm embarrassed that you called me out about it right now, so if you walk away, I'll stop.' "

Dearborn says to accept the student's answer and move on.
The Gentle Press: Head Down on the Desk
High school students often put their heads down in class either sleeping or refusing to participate. A teacher might tell say, "sit up" or "no sleeping in class," but to Dearborn, those approaches don't demonstrate care. Instead, she tried to express compassion, saying: "It's OK to be tired, but you can't sleep in class. Can you sit up and work on the assignment?"

If that gentle reminder doesn't work, Dearborn knows a more private conversation is necessary. She would spend a few minutes with the student in the hallway. Sometimes a walk outside is enough to wake the student up, but other times it's a chance to reaffirm an offer to help or learn about deeper issues that are going on.

"This is called the gentle press - when you gently press forward at a student until either they're in the academic work or you're in a relationship-building moment," Dearborn said. "Sometimes this doesn't end in academic work. Sometimes the gentle press ends in relationship-building."

She recounted a past experience with one of her students who had his head down. When they stepped outside class, the student burst into tears and said his brother had been deployed by the military.

"He's not going to access the academics today. He's in emotional crisis and we have to have some space for that." she said. "If I had just gone by him and said, 'sit up, no sleeping in class,' what would that have expressed to him? "
Choice, Timeline, Walk Away
Dearborn said that when people come to her workshops, they arrive with hopes of an exotic new solution that will solve everything. But changing behavior comes down to hard work. And to help students learn appropriate classroom behavior, she presents a series of choices that are connected to consequences, not punishments. Students can be given choices, including ones that lead to undesired consequences.

"The sooner we can get our students to internalize this truth - that their choices matter, that they are in charge of whether they receive the sweet or bitter fruit based on how they choose in any given situation - the sooner they internalize that concept, the better off they're going to be."

Giving students space to make their own choices means that sometimes they'll choose to act in ways teachers wish they wouldn't. But even in those moments, incidents that could lead to an office referral, students are testing whether their teacher cares enough to hold her accountable.

"[The student] understands I can go to the wall without abandoning or abusing, without lashing out," Dearborn said. "And she for whatever reason needs to learn that lesson, apparently. So I can be that person. It's not how I want it to go, but if we need to go here a couple of times so she can learn who we are together, that's OK with me."

It's counterintuitive, but Dearborn said it would be easier for the student if she lashes out at them because then the student can blame her for how the interaction ends. That way, the student doesn't have to confront her own actions.

"But if I just maintain choices, leave them with her, with kind eyes, in the end, even if she ends up out of the room, she understands at some level, maybe not consciously and right then, later, that could have gone differently," Dearborn said.
Visual Cues
When kids don't follow through with a teacher's verbal command, it might not be because they're being defiant. Sometimes they're not listening because of attention issues, learning differences or auditory processing issues. They could also be English language learners or they're fatigued by a teacher talking too much.

"Because they're hearing my voice too much, they're tuning me out," Dearborn said. "If I don't have another way to communicate with them I'm losing half of them half the time."

This is where she can communicate expected behavior with an image . She has had kids line up, for example, in what they thought was a straight line. When she showed them a photo of how they were actually lined up, they did it again.

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Compassion-Based Strategies for Managing Classroom Behavior | KQED

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By addressing student behavior with compassion -- even when they're acting out -- teachers can find productive ways to get kids on task or engage in relationship-building.

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How to Regain Control of Any Class - Michael Linsin