Making the transition from discipline to instruction

Hello everyone,

There is a large, fuzzy line of demarcation between techniques to manage behavior and techniques to improve instruction. Some days, it seems you can hardly teach because the students behave so badly, and other days, the students behave badly because you haven't planned your lesson well. There are periods during the school year when the majority of your attention is focused on getting order in the classroom, but what do you do when you have order? Sometimes your students are disorderly because it is in their nature to rebel, but sometimes they are disorderly because the lesson is either too hard or too easy.

The truth is, you cannot wait to teach until you are satisfied that the students will not rebel at all, nor should you dumb down your curriculum because your students are reluctant to be challenged. (I have known teachers who found a silly, useless activity that kept the students quiet, but the students never learned anything except how to do quiet activities that required no thought. Avoid busy work for its own sake. I confess, I write this partly out of personal animosity for busy work. My own teachers suffered from my repeated rebellion--rebellion that I am proud of to this day--whenever they insisted on my doing work only to keep me busy and quiet. I could tell stories . . .)

As you are gaining control over the classes, you need to give them a steady stream of meaningful activity that teaches them to the standards or above. (The standards to me are a minimum, not the opposite.) You may have to break the activities into shorter segments to accommodate shorter attention spans, but you should avoid things that are meant to just keep them quiet. (In the warmups, you certainly want something easy enough for them to be quietly engaged while you take roll and manage the classroom paperwork, but if you give meaningless busywork just to keep them quiet, you must expect an eventual rebellion.)

How do you know whether the work is too hard and needs more scaffolding, or not hard enough and needs to be strengthened?

The students' behavior will give clues. If they finish rapidly and mess around, the work was probably too easy. If they don't start at all but mess around, the work was probably too difficult. If they complain the work is too easy or too hard, they are probably telling the truth. If you have to tutor every one of them individually, the work is too hard.

And what do you do if the work is too easy? You skim or skip over what they already know. There's no need to reteach it, though a light review won't hurt. You might give a preliminary test to find out what they know or don't know, then skip what they know (or review it lightly). Start just before the point they are really having trouble, and let that be your curricular jumping off point.

What do you do if the work is too hard? That should be the subject of a series of emails, I suppose, but I can keep it short here if I speak generally and metaphorically. Here's the metaphor: You are entrusted to give a full, nutritious meal. You should give emphasis to calories rich in nutrition, and avoid empty calories. Very little dessert; no junk food. If you are feeding some dense, chewy protein to someone with underdeveloped teeth, you cut it up into bite-size chunks or puree it. Make it taste as good as you can make it taste, but make it edible for immature appetites if necessary, and don't let it slide just because they don't like it. Skipping the vegetables for tastier fare may make you a temporary hero, but it will stunt their growth later on.

Jeff Combe