ANN
BIANCHETTI
Diary #13
How
We All Survive Heck Month
I've been thinking about classroom management lately. My students, particularly my eighth graders, have been, well, very active! I know it has to do with the holiday season and our recital preparations. Our school days are quite hectic with rehearsals and performances cutting into the regular schedule.
All of us, students and teachers know that in "Heck Month" (December) we all must be a little more flexible, a little more spontaneous, and a little more patient with one another. Such are the travails, we say dramatically, of a performing arts school that has received some renown in our state. In my quest to be "more patient" I've been scouring through my management tools. Every education student has, at some point, been told to purchase and memorize Harry Wong's book The First Days of School. It's a bible for teachers that literally walks them, step by step, through classroom management: how to have kids sharpen pencils, how to get a class's attention, and how to have a well-managed classroom with zero disruptions. Besides Wong's book, what can social studies teachers do to create a classroom management plan that enhances and reinforces the democratic education we spend a year learning about? There is the tried and true "make a class constitution and have everybody sign it" method, but does that really work? A civics teacher friend of mine quips to her students, "We learn about democracy in here; we don't practice it."Students are often not the best ones to come up with class rules. Sometimes they are too lenient, and sometimes they propose the most draconian measures for offenders. Besides, I've been thinking, it's unfair of me to place the burden on my students for classroom management. When I heard myself ask my eighth grade after a particularly rough morning, "What can we do together to make this classroom a better place?", I felt like I was betraying them.
They were looking to me for structure, for guidance, for safety and here I was asking them, basically, "What should I do? I can't figure out a way to run this class." Middle schoolers have enough changes going on in their lives that I wanted my classroom to provide some structure and sameness to their day.
Order is my responsibility
The fact is, it's my responsibility to make my classroom a safe, orderly place (most of the time) for learning to occur. Students must be protected from violence. Rules must be taught and consequences applied. Can I do this while weaving it into the curriculum rather than making it separate from it?
Social studies educator Daniel Perlstein writes, "Once educators conceptualize school safety as a curricular issue rather than a disciplinary one, they can bring a plethora of well-established approaches to dealing with it." I agree. When students are learning to live together, conflict and resolutions (discipline) must not be separate from the "real academic lesson." When teachers stop class and send disruptive students to the principal or implement consequences separate from the class as a whole, it sends the message that conflict is the exception, not the rule in life, that disruptions are not normal. It deprives the students of the chance to learn coping and resolution skills of their own. In essence, it creates a false picture of the real world where, inevitably, conflicts occur all the time and must be dealt with.Everyone has a right to learn
To help my
students deal with real world conflict, I spend some time with them, both
at the beginning of the year and when need arises, engaging them in "circle
talks" where we sit in a circle and hash out conflicts among the students,
and among students and other teachers. This is a time for the students'
voices to be heard, a time for them to learn how to resolve their own
problems rather than a teacher solving it for them. I model listening
skills and refrain (as hard as it is sometimes!) from giving advice or
solving the problem for them. The students also role- play difficult situations.
Over the past few years some wonderfully democratic gems have emerged.
For instance, there's our classroom mantra: "Everyone has a right to learn."
This was a phrase developed by the students in one of our circle talks.
We discussed the rights of students and the rights of teachers. We practiced
saying, "I have a right not to be hit," and "I have a right to be spoken
to fairly."
Social studies and conflict resolution
The students have also learned how to resolve conflicts. They have gained the perspective that it's not about getting the teacher to punish one student or getting revenge, but about solving the problem so we all can live together for the 40 or so minutes we have each class.
The teaching of history and civics offers many examples of resolving conflict. Any teaching of history will bring up conflict: Indian removal, reform movements, slavery, industry v. agriculture, working class v. the rich, states v. federal, etc. Conflict and change are the very meat of history. The theory of a democracy as an attempt to create a place where people learn to live together is demonstrated consistently in history. One way to relate history and conflict resolution is to draw connections to conflicts in the students' lives. In turn, the students learn how to manage their personal conflicts by reading about how people in history have done so. Difficult concepts like the ratification debate over state power vs. federal power become tangible when students can relate it to a personal conflict such as a students' power (state) vs. his/her parents' power (federal). One example from my class comes from a lesson on the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. Before we began any of the lessons on Rome, I had my students write a journal response to this prompt: "Think of a time in your life when you had a lot of power or knew another student who did. What did you or the student do with his/her power? Did they do good things such as a popular kid standing up for an outcast? Did you or they abuse their power by teasing the outcast? Imagine a situation where a student had a lot of power socially and was doing good things and bad things. What would you do if you were in that situation?" When we related power struggles — and the ability of powerful people to act wrongly — to something each student had experienced, they were more able to understand Julius Caesar's situation and that of his murderers. Throughout our month-long lesson, students often referred back to their "powerful student" scenarios. "Ms. B., so when the senators wanted to kill Julius it's because they thought he was, like, taking too much, you know, like he thought he was all that and better than them and they were jealous, and they thought he was ruining Rome, doing a bad thing. That's like when someone in school acts all perfect and thinks they better than everyone, no one likes that!" If you read between the coded middle school slang, this student demonstrated a beginning mastery of the situation facing Julius Caesar and the senators.Relating historical conflict to real world conflict also draws students in; it provides a link between them and dead historical figures. It also provides the life lesson that conflict is a part of life, not an aberration. Students are able to see how people in the past solved problems through a process. They learn that not all people got what they wanted every time.
Perhaps by
combining classroom management issues with lessons from history, I can
weather the Heck month of December.
