Teacher Tech: The Bad Boy:What Say to Parents

Jeremy was bad.  He stole a pencil box from Margaret, broke it, refused to apologize and denied everything despite being caught in the act.  Furthermore, he started cussing at me when I confronted him with the evidence.

After I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere with him, I called home. His dad answered.  I told Jeremy’s father what happened and asked him to have a talk with his angry son.

The following day, Jeremy came to school with facial bruising.  He told me he fell off his bike then started crying.  I think his dad hit him.  

Now who's bad?  His dad?  Or is it me?  After calling Child Services to report suspected abuse, they said they would put Jeremy on their watch list, but there was not enough information to pursue the matter any farther.

A week later, Jeremy stole and broke something from another student’s desk.  It was my second year of teaching, and I didn’t know what to do.  I didn't want to be the bad guy.

If I called home, Jeremy might get beaten.  If I didn’t, his parents would not be aware of problems Jeremy was having at school. 

I discussed it with Jeremy.  Without admitting his father abused him, he asked if I could call his mom at her work instead.  When I got his mother on the phone I explained to her that Jeremy was punished at a school and didn’t need any further disciplining.  What her son needed, I explained, was a chance to say his piece at home and then receive advice for future situations.  He needs to know that their family doesn’t approve of stealing, but that they love their son – not his actions.

It was a tough year for Jeremy.  His fragile family eventually broke up, and he moved away.  However, I learned that whenever I called a parent to report misbehavior, I would begin the call with an explanation that the child had already been punished, so the parents didn’t need to do any more.  I told them they were free to offer guidance to their wayward child.  It's not a perfect solution, but it's not bad.

Policy: Teach For America

There was a time when underfunded urban school districts needed teachers.  Partly as a response to this need, Teach For America (TFA) was established by Wendy Kopp in 1989 to fill those vacancies.  By selecting high-performing college graduates and giving them 5 weeks of training, many of these openings were filled with America’s best and brightest.

A poorly performing economy and tax cuts have put thousands of fully trained teachers out of work.  Our country is awash in unemployed teachers: mostly recent college graduates.  One might think TFA would wither away when its teachers are competing with fully trained, credentialed teachers.  Not so.

TFA has become the poster-child of the current high-stakes testing strategy towards improving education.  In the past 18 months, TFA has received over $200 million dollars from the US Department of Education, the ultra-conservative Walton Family Foundation and several other sources.  When a district hires a graduate of the 5-week training program, the district pays the TFA teacher a starting salary, and TFA gets $5,000.  TFA is not withering.

TFA claims that its teachers are superior to traditionally trained teachers. However, the nation’s top educational researchers challenge these claims.  All this has created a loud din that has drowned out the real needs of the country’s poorest students: to be elevated from poverty.

If the topic of conversation is to be which system, TFA or college credential programs, produces the best teachers, perhaps we should look abroad.  In countries where students are out-performing US children, the teaching profession is an honored and respected career choice.  Teachers typically have masters degrees and rarely leave the profession.  Here, 50% of teachers leave the profession within the first 5 years.

Maybe we should ask ourselves if TFA improves the teaching profession and brings more honor to teachers, or if it does the opposite?

Teacher Tech: 5 Must-Do Activities for the First Week of School

1.            Relationships.

The relationships you build on the first week will make it much easier to work through behavior and academic problems later on.  It’s especially critical to  start out well with your most difficult students whether it’s the shy girl who can’t write to the behaviorally-challenged undiagnosed ADHD boy.

One of the most effective methods to build relationships include doing an interest survey.  (See Secret Scroll below) Once you know that your main behavior problem likes his hamster and Nike shoes, you can bring that up with him every day as a neutral and safe topic.  If you know about an especially difficult student, call home on the first day to say something nice about that student and ask for suggestions to make the year go well.  This will make future calls easier. 

Establish a habit of having something for your students to do when they first enter the class, so you can greet them by name each day.

2.             Routines

It turns out that teaching your students how to do everything from sharpening their pencil, to lining up for lunch, to turning in a paper to the correct place, will save hours and hours of instructional time though the school year.  Sometimes it’s helpful to ask a student or students to demonstrate a new routine before asking the class to do it.  Spend time to point out models and praise students who follow the routine.  If you realize a routine is not quite right, change the name of it and re-teach it.  For example, “Now it’s the second week of school, and this is when we turn in our papers the Mountain Way.   We put our papers in the top basket.”

3.            Assessment

Most rookies do not realize that they are assessing their students every day.  It’s pretty easy to find out who gets work done, who loses things and who can pay attention to stories.  Use a roll sheet to jot down notes and observations.  This will come in handy during parent conferences and report-card time.

You don’t need to do technical, published assessment to get a general idea of how your students perform.  During Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), you can ask each student to read to you for 2 minutes from a student-selected text.  This should give you enough information to know what your students are capable of as a class to know where to go next.  Be sure to take notes about these meetings.

4.            Attention
You can teach your students not to pay attention.  This is especially true of high ability and ELL students.   If you don’t grab the attention of your highest ability students right away, they will learn to tune you out since they will unconsciously decide they don’t need you.  I have two tried-and-true ways to do this.

            a.            Don’t tell your students anything they already know.  For example, instead of saying something like, “In our class we have three ways of using math to decide what’s average.”  Instead say, “ Who can tell me a way to use math to decide what’s average.”

            b.            For Storytime, pick a book that is age-appropriate for your students, but on the upper end of readability.  Have extra copies of the book available for students to read along or read ahead.  Also, have other books by that same author or on the same topic for students to read during their SSR time.


Why mention ELL in the same breath as your gifted?  They share the same problem: establishing a habit of not paying attention.  Often these ELL students are quiet and compliant so they don’t demand extra attention, but it’s vital to get them engaged right off. 

The best way to do this is to pair them with a buddy who is constantly checking for understanding.  Change these buddies frequently to reduce impact on the rest of your class.

5.            Last Day of School Preparation

During the first week, you can set up a powerful and effective last day of school.  Decide what activities on that last day would help your students feel proud of their progress and feel confident for the next year.  One thing I like to do is the Secret Scroll.  This is actually an interest inventory of what the student likes and dislikes.  You can include questions on this about your students’ concerns and hopes for the year.  Some students do not know what their favorite color is, so I tell them it’s ok to leave some of the questions blank.

I tell the class it’s secret because it’s not shared with other students.  Do not imply that you won’t share the information with parents or law enforcement, because you might become a liar if students reveal abuse.

If you can start out the year well, it will give you much more room to make mistakes and still be an effective teacher.

Procedure: Instant Reader's Theater

When you read this procedure, ask yourself these questions:

1. Will my lowest ability readers be successful?

2. Will my highest ability readers be engaged?

3.  If my goal is to have my students read 3,000 words a day, will this help achieve this goal?

4.  While students are reading aloud, can I circulate with a clip board taking notes on fluency or other assessment activites?

Readers Theater in Threes

Objective

Students read a literature selection orally three times to gain fluency and comprehension.  Since they each have different parts to read, they must follow along while their peers are reading in order to contribute.

Materials

NOTE:  You do not need specialized materials for this procedure.  That's why I call it Instant Reader's Theater.

•   section of text for students to read.  This text should have at least three “voices”.  For example, words spoken by male characters, words spoken by female characters, and the rest of the text (narrator’s words)

Procedure

After the teacher reads a chapter from the class novel or text while students follow in their own, students are told to read the selection silently to prepare for Readers Theater.  High readers are told that re-reading the selection is optional.  They can read something else.  Low readers read this with a partner or the teacher.

Students are then grouped into triads.  This works best if you avoid putting more than one low student in each group.  Students are assigned parts to read aloud.  High students start with the narrator’s words since this part is nearly always the most difficult.  Low students are given the part with the fewest words for the first run through.  The groups begin reading at a signal.  They continue reading while the teacher checks in with each group.  At a signal, the groups rotate parts.  Arrange this so the lowest readers do not have the narrators’ part until after they’ve heard it read by the other group members.

The teacher roams through the groups helping out and making narrative comments on an assessment clipboard. 

A motivational follow-up could be that three students are chosen to read the selection for the class gathered on the rug, or recorded for the class web site.

Policy: High Stakes Testing and Blindness

The Himba tribe in Namibia have only one word for the colors blue and green: zuzu. Some researchers, notably Jules Davidoff of University of London, claim tribal members cannot distinguish between color swatches of blue and green.

When older deaf people were first taught the American Sign Language, there existed no word for simultaneous.  As a result, this group of people consistently failed a graphic test that any typical first grader would pass.  The test results were so startling, that several researchers wanted to rerun all these assessments.  In the interim, many of the subjects had been exposed to a younger deaf population, who had acquired the word for simultaneous.  Those subjects passed the test.

What does this have to do with teaching?

It might mean that if people are not exposed to an idea, they are unable to perceive it on their own.   If ideas like blue and simultaneous do not exist for people who have never been taught them, then what does it mean when our curriculum shrinks due to the pressures of high stakes testing?

Schools are under enormous pressure to produce higher and higher reading and math scores.  Teachers are being told by their administrators to skip teaching writing, social studies, geography, art, science, civics, foreign languages and other non-tested subjects, in order to boost the teaching time for the tested subjects. 

Some of this loss might be mitigated with a rich and diverse reading curriculum, but most schools are demanding teachers stick with skill-based reading programs where the subject being taught is actually a technical analysis of reading—not literature.  As a result, students in lower grades read one story a week and spend the rest of their instructional time studying skills like hard and soft g.

What does this mean for a nation that has led the world in scientific and literary innovation?  Are we rising a generation of children who will not have the tools to continue to break new ground or solve the complex problems that they will face?

By basing teacher salaries, principals’ jobs and even the existence of schools on student test scores, our policy makers are causing a collapse of our formally rich curriculum and simultaneously hobbling our children’s minds.  These policy makers just can’t see what they are doing.

Teacher Tech: The ADHD Stategies

Chris always showed remorse when he caused a problem.  And he caused a lot of problems.  That first day of school he looked up at me, pale eyes full of self-doubt, and asked me if he did OK on his first paper.  He hadn't.  Chris wasn’t timid or stupid, he just expected to disappoint the people he loved.  Chris was ADHD.

Despite Chris’s heart of gold, he could not control his attention problems or hyperactivity.  As a result, he entered my fifth grade fully expecting to be a bad boy, yet yearning to please.

After the first day, I realized I had made more behavior corrections for Chris than all other students combined.  By the end of the first week, he probably had many times the behavior corrections of all my other students.  This wasn’t sustainable, either for Chris or for me.

Talking with other teachers and reading up on the subject, I came up with five strategies to make sure Chris and I had a great year.

I’m going to talk about one of the strategies in this blog post and the other four in a future blog entry.

Strategy One: 5:1

My goal became to give Chris five positive affirmations for every correction he received. This strategy would become the most important and effective of anything Chris and I did to make his fifth grade year a good one. 

Since Chris was nearly powerless to control his impulsivity, I had to become creative to make sure he was constantly successful in other areas and try to figure out ways to lower the number of behavior corrections.  I also spent a great deal of time watching Chris to catch him being good.  It’s a powerful thing when a teacher is looking for positive in a student.

Put yourself in Chris’s place for a moment.  How would you feel if, in the course of a day,  your supervisor told you dozens of times that you were making mistakes, being rude or not paying attention?  It would wear on you, right?  Some teachers might be crushed with just one critical comment.  What could I do to make sure Chris received lots of affirmations? 

As often as Chris would interrupt someone, it would have been easy to think he didn’t care about others’ feelings.  In fact, the opposite was true.  When I made him the “super buddy” of Greg, the handicapped student, who came in for certain activities, Chris showed a degree of empathy and tenderness that brought confidence to both himself and Greg.  I could use time-helping-in-Greg’s-class as a reward for Chris.

I also put Chris in charge of our classroom fish tank.   I trained him in the secret arts of tank maintenance and fish care.  He became the fish boss, rising in social rank among his less-knowledgeable peers.  Keeping the feeding and maintenance schedule might have also made Chris more aware of dates and times.  Like many ADHD sufferers, Chris was horribly disorganized.  Also, fish bosses must  be out of their seat to check on the fish, so I didn't need to tell him to go back to his seat so often. 

Chris and I came up with codes for me to tell him he was doing well or if he needed to knock it off.  If I touched his paper, book or desk, it that meant I liked what I was seeing.  If I shook my head at him, he knew to stop doing something.  If I needed a student to model something, I tried to find was to use Chris as a demonstrator or helper.  This got him out of his seat and often out of trouble.

Finding out that he was a valued member of the class gave Chris a new confidence.  His classmates saw him as the loveable clown he had been in previous grades, but also as a successful and respected class member.  With his classmates providing some of the positive encounters for Chris, it boosted him even more.

Chris and I had our good days and bad.  Sometimes, he seemed to need 10 positives for every correction, other times, he got along great with the 5:1 ratio.  Overall, he and I developed a close working relationship built on trust and respect based on the 5:1 plan.  There were four other strategies that helped Chris and me to have a great year, one which came from a completely unexpected source.

Teacher Tech: 5 Ways to Build a Relationship With A Disruptive Student

I’ll never forget Slade.  He walked into a room ready to fight and tried hard to figure out what the teacher wanted so he could do the opposite.  For years I would listen to his teachers tell stories about his behavior problems in class.  Then, in fifth grade, he appeared on my attendance sheet.

We got though the year with no suspensions from what he did in class.  He was suspended based on incidents in the cafeteria, on the bus and on the playground, but he and I made it through the year.

Part of the reason he was so successful in my class was a sense of trust we built up between us.  If you have a student who is difficult to manage, I suggest you will find it worthwhile to build a relationship with that student by using or adapting these five techniques.

1.            Notice something.  On the first day of class, Slade walked in with new shoes.  I asked him about them.  I wanted to know where he got them and joked that he might want to loan them to me some time.  It became a running joke that his obviously smaller shoes might fit on my big feet.  I shared this joke with no other students; it was just for Slade and me. 

Boys like to discuss objects, so with Slade, I picked shoes.  Girls like to discuss relationships, so if Slade were a girl, I’d discuss a pet, family member, former teacher or fictional character to talk about.  Look for opportunities to lightly chat about non-threatening issues with your Slade.

2.            Point out success.  This takes vigilance.   You need to watch your own Slade like a hawk to catch him being good.  When passing out papers, Slade would take first what he wanted then dump the rest on someone else’s desk.  Then one day I put a stack of papers on his desk, and he passed them out nicely.  I came up behind him and whispered to him that I noticed he was passing out papers nicely, and that I was proud of his growth.  Slade did not like public praise, so the whisper also let him know I didn’t want to embarrass him.  Also, he tended to repeat the good behaviors I pointed out.

3.            Do an interest inventory.  Early in the year, I had my students tell me what they liked, how they spent their time, and what their wishes were for fifth grade.  Ostensibly this was for a graphing unit, but I pulled Slade’s paper aside and photocopied it.  I could refer to one of his favorite shows, sports or songs when using an example for the class.  He, of course, was interested and tended to participate more in the discussions.  It gave me more chances to offer whispered praise and use him as an expert.

I found out Slade like cats, so I often drew a cat on his papers: no one else got a cat drawing.

4.            Be consistent.   The rule in music class was no pencil sharpening when the teacher was talking.  When sweet Emily left her seat to sharpen, the music teacher told her nicely to go back to her seat.  When Slade tried it, he got a detention.  This set Slade off in a tantrum about how the teacher liked Emily better.  If the teacher had said something like, “Emily, are you forgetting we can’t sharpen right now?  That’s strike one.”  Then when Slade tried it, “Slade, are you forgetting again you can’t sharpen right now.  That’s your third strike.”  Slade would better understand why he got a different consequence than Emily.

Consistency, even if it means consequences for Slade, gave him a sense of comfort.  He knew the rules and understood they will always be the same.  In Slade’s chaotic home life, he had very little stability, so he liked knowing where the boundaries were.  He still tested the limits whenever he felt insecure.

5.            Develop non-verbal signals.  I would tell Slade that if I showed him the bathroom pass, he was to take a cool-down walk to the bathroom and get a drink.  This signal was only for Slade and as far as I know, he told none of his buddies about it.  It gave everyone in the class a three-minute break from whatever Slade was doing.

Non-verbal signals did not count as a behavior correction in Slade’s mind, probably because he figured no one else in the class knew he was being corrected.

There are lots of ways to form a relationship with students, but the most fragile students need extra attention that causes minimal impact to the class.

Not long ago, I was working late in my classroom when Slade rode up on his bike and pounded on the window.  I opened it to see a teenaged-Slade smiling there.  “Yo, Mr. Hansen.  Still have Jolly Ranchers hidden in your desk?  It’s why I came here.”

I asked him if his favorite was still the purple color, and as he unwrapped the candy, he told me that I was the only teacher who never suspended him.