Chapter 4.1: Classroom Management Part One

IN PROGRESS - WILL BE EDITED

Classroom management is foundational to your teaching practice. The word “practice” is intentionally chosen because proficiency-based teaching is, in many ways, like a yoga practice or a meditation/prayer practice. It is more like an exercise in mindfulness and self-control than it is a set of nifty activities or “tricks”. In this chapter you will explore some foundations of this practice. It is strongly suggested that you return to them when needed later during the instructional sessions, which helps you effectively and efficiently move the new ideas presented here into your daily teaching practice.

The Importance of SLOW

Slow pacing is the absolute foundation of classroom management. We must mentally prepare ourselves to speak extremely slowly. Way more slowly than we want to. It should be painfully slow to us. It is worth it, in many ways, but especially in classroom management, because students who comfortably comprehend our speech are easier to manage.

It’s ultimately, like so much in managing others, a question of self-esteem. Students’ self-concept is a fragile thing, especially in a new language, which in a way is like building a brand-new identity, and so we want to speak slowly enough that we never lose any of them in a thicket of unintelligible sounds. We want to write or draw on the board, or place our hand or pointer physically upon a visual aid (or the projector screen displaying the visual) to support every utterance, and then walk over and point to the support before we say the word, each and every time we speak, and then take a moment, before we utter another word, to sweep the room with our eyes to check for the “light of comprehension” before moving on to another language chunk, which we will then support by, again, physically indicating the visual support, pausing, and sweeping the room again.

Slow speech is of the utmost importance for student comprehension, and student comprehension is essential for classroom management.

Students who do not understand what is going on in class are more apt to tune out and be disruptive. However, without a well-managed, attentive, calm class, it is virtually impossible to speak slowly enough to stay comprehensible.

It is a feedback loop: A calm, well-managed class feels patient and this allows us to relax into slow speech, without feeling pressured to go faster. See the images on the next page for a detailed look at how slow “SLOW” is.

Visual Scaffolding Is Key

Responding to students’ need for novelty does not mean re-inventing the wheel each and every day. Rather, it means having a reliable set of concrete, visually-appealing visual scaffolds at our disposal, so that we can select the visual aid that best fits the word(s) we need to support, thus keeping our students’ interest up without having to be a nonstop, energetic performer.

Some of us just aren’t built for the life of the theatre; it’s just not who we are as people. Even teachers who are those “natural performer” types have days, or even weeks or months, when their energy just isn’t up to giving a Daytime Emmy-winning performance in French class six times in a row, with a pounding headache and a restless night of fitful sleep in their gas tanks. Luckily, well-chosen, engaging, clear visual aids can support us when we aren’t feeling the theatricality.

The instructional and assessment materials that we have designed to support the Stepping Stones framework are designed to provide this kind of visual support. You can use them as a springboard for lessons that relieve this pressure to perform and allow you to focus on your skills at speaking slowly and comprehensibly, and placing your hand on the visual. Thus, you can focus on your language delivery while you teach, without the sense of nervousness that often arises from having to create the visual support out of thin air, in the moment, when your attention really needs to be on the students’ eyes, which can indicate so much about their comprehension (which, it bears repeating is the MOST ESSENTIAL foundation of classroom management).

The lesson descriptions will guide and coach you to use or create visual supports such as:

- a drawing or image somewhere in the classroom, perhaps created by a student artist - a quick stick figure or sketch that you draw on the board or projector, perhaps with label(s) to provide key words to support what you are saying - words you write when arriving at the board (generally you will write both the course language and also the English translation, or a visual when the class has no shared stronger language) - a chart or visual aid, perhaps from a culturally-authentic source like a magazine or website - a gesture that conveys the word’s meaning, perhaps a little gesture such as pointing to your eyes to indicate the word “looks” or pointing to your face and smiling real big to indicate “happy” and pointing to a big frown on your face to indicate “sad” - a piece of realia such as a piece of paper, a student’s shoe, a red marker, etc. - a quickly-drawn chart to collect students’ responses to a discussion question (for example, a chart in which you can list various sports/activities (perhaps with a quick sketch to clarify the meaning of the terms) down one side and tally students’ preferences on the other side, e.g. a list of students’ names to record who raised their hand when you asked, “Who loves soccer?” or tally marks (like III or IIII) to count the number of raised hands in response to the question) Visual aids are a way to ensure that students have as many kinds of input as we can possibly provide them so that they understand what we are saying. Many teachers erroneously assume that their students understand the message and continue talking without providing enough processing time or scaffolding students’ comprehension with visual supports.

Visual scaffolding gives kids confidence. And confidence breeds engagement and motivation, which are the bedrocks of an academically-focused, well-managed learning environment.

Giving the students the processing time that they need, physically placing our hand on a visual aid, or showing a gesture or facial expression, or writing out the words, as shown in the images of me teaching on the page above, make the meaning of your speech concrete, and also has the additional benefit of slowing you down.

As shown in the images from my class, you can “milk” the silences that are generated in the time that it takes you to place your hand upon the visual aid, show the gesture(s), or sketch or write on the board. We can not let the silences make us want to fill them. Each second of silence is a gift to our students, as they process and get comfortable taking in the new language.

Leadership Begins in Our Bodies

To manage our class, we must employ leadership that is calm yet assertive. This kind of leadership begins in our bodies. By training our bodies we become more powerful instructional leaders.

When we pause to create or place our hand upon a visual scaffold, we can focus on our breathing. This reduces our cortisol levels and helps the silence not feel awkward to us. The pauses do not feel awkward to our students, who are basking in these silences, savoring the extra processing time.

When our students are able to trust that they will consistently be able to SEE what we are saying as they hear it, they reap the benefits of a significantlylowered affective filter (in other words, their “level of discomfort/unease”), as the new language and information has a chance to go “kathunk” in their minds before we hit their brains with a totally new string of sounds.

When we learn to take time to breathe, we are also giving ourselves a little moment to think, to select the particular strategy that will best scaffold the upcoming word(s) in our next utterance. It keeps us calm.

A simple example is the sentence “She sells sea shells.” Assuming that you are working with a beginning class early in the year, you might scaffold the word “she” by simply walking to the actor and doing a Vanna White move to indicate “she”, in a celebratory kind of way, as if to convey “ta-da, there she is.”

Now the first word is clear to our students, without our having to write on the board. Then, moving on to the verb “sells”, we can pause and breathe and think how to scaffold the meaning of “sells”.

We might choose to walk silently to the board, write “sells” in both languages, and then put our hand on the word in the course language, and then say the word aloud in the course language, pausing afterward to

Scanning the class to the right take a deep, calming breath and scan the room with our eyes to check for engagement and comprehension.

Another option that might present itself to us in the moment of choosing how to represent the word “sells” could be to use a gesture to show the meaning the word.

Or, especially in classes where there is no stronger shared language, we might write the word in the course language and make a quick sketch and/or teach a gesture to establish the meaning, as shown below.

This is the art of teaching. We have to decide in each moment of instruction which words need visual support and which do not, as well as how to visually represent them for the students. These moments of thinking and selecting help us to slow down the rate of our speech, which is a true gift to our students.

After we say the word “sells” and establish its meaning through whatever means we selected, we then move on to the final chunk of words in the sentence, “sea shells”. Again, we pause, grateful for a chance to breathe and think about how we will scaffold the next sounds that come out of our mouths. We might choose to sketch a seashell on the board and point to it. We might choose to write L1 and L2 on the board. We might have a drawing of a seashell that our class artists made, that we can point to. We might have known in advance that seashells would be important in this lesson and have brought in a real-life seashell (also called “realia”) which we can use as a visual support.

In this moment of silence, as we are preparing or displaying the visual support, we breathe and then say the word “sea shells,” and then pause and take another nice deep breath to see how the new words and information “landed” in our students’ minds, by checking in with their eyes, which are truly windows into their minds.

As the year goes on, our students grow stronger and stronger and we see that our classes need less and less visual scaffolding with each passing month. At some point, our students - to their great surprise and delight - move with us into an exponentially different place of understanding the language, and we can begin speaking in much longer strings of words.

It truly is an amazing thing when this happens. However, without the foundation of months and months of slow and comprehensible instruction, our students will never reach this point. In fact, many students will check out

Scanning the class to the left

Scanning the class to the right

Scanning the class to the left

completely if they feel a sense of overwhelm because we have not disciplined ourselves to speak slowly and use copious visual supports.

Exercises for Increasing Your Personal Power

Much of leading children happens in the nonverbal realm of body language and self-talk. Leadership is like an “aura” that is conveyed by our slow, calm, controlled movements, mindful breathing, and mental state that we project through our “energy.” In order to cultivate the calm, centered energy that allows you to breathe, pause, and move with calm intention to smoothly and precisely place your hand on the visual aid that you have selected or created to support your students’ comprehension, you need to lead with your energy, with your personal power.

In the next section you will find some practical exercises that you can start to work on prior to the start of the school year to develop your self-talk and confidence, so that you can more easily project this “energy” as you teach.

The exercises outlined below can assist you in responding calmly to students when they do not comply with your expectations. They will help you maintain the ability of other students to focus as well as your own ability to provide calm, slow language for the class. They will help you maintain your calm in the face of stressors. Calm, confident leadership is the key to classroom management. And our mindset and sense of confidence and personal power are the foundations of this calm leadership.

It is strongly recommended that you begin working with these exercises as soon as possible, ideally before the start of the next school year, to develop your personal power and self-esteem as a leader for your students.

You might want to set a series of reminders on your phone, or leave post-it notes around your home or work space, so that you remember to make these practices a habit, ideally a daily habit. It is especially valuable to begin these practices before the start of the school year, so that you have time to strengthen your teaching persona, like sending your teacher self to the gym to grow stronger muscles before the big event -- the first day of school.

Power Posing

You can begin to rewire your brain to send positive messages about yourself as a leader. One way to do that is to take two to five minutes periodically throughout the day to assume a “power pose”. This practice, popularized through a TED Talk by Amy Cuddy, is a way to trick your brain into manufacturing more “leadership chemicals” and increasing your feelings of personal power.

Simply find a place where you can have some privacy, and get into a posture that takes up a lot of space. Plant your feet far apart on the floor, puff out your chest in a proud stance, and raise your hands wide above your

head or plant them confidently on your hips, elbows spread wide. Take a few deep breaths in this posture, and then hold it for a few minutes. This posture has been shown to increase achievement and confidence, and is a practice that chimpanzees also perform. Cuddy says, “Our bodies change our minds.” This posture, performed regularly, will rewire your brain.

Cultivating Positive Self-Talk

Another practice you can start right now is to begin retraining your brain for positive self-talk. By repeating positive statements about ourselves, we lay down new neural pathways that eventually make it easier for our brains to think such valuable and empowering thoughts on their own accord. This can transform our self-talk to support our leadership and self-confidence.

Try repeating one or two of the statements below 50 to 200 times per day, or even more. The more, the better! Saying these statements silently to yourself is fine, but it is best to say them aloud. The more confidently and assertively you can say them, the more effect they will take. Say them like they are already true, and allow yourself to feel the positive emotions that you would feel if they were true, and they will take effect faster. Combining your emotions with words, over and over, is a powerful way to teach yourself new habits. This is something that is sorely needed in our beleaguered profession these days, where the morale of the entire teaching corps in America is at an all-time low.

You might not feel that you agree with these statements when you begin saying them. You might feel silly. That is a sign that you need to repeat them all the more. Go ahead, try a few positive statements for a few weeks. What do you have to lose?

1. My energy effortlessly and easily leads my class. 2. I am calm and centered in my classroom. 3. I am a natural leader. When I speak, people listen. 4. I take a deep breath before I speak or react. 5. When I teach, I feel calm, happy, and supported. 6. I am a strong leader whom my students trust to guide them. 7. Asserting my leadership is an opportunity for me to grow. I’m happy when I have a chance to be strong for my students. 8. I am respected and happy and centered in my teaching.

In addition to these general words of affirmation, practice your self-talk for when you will be stopping instruction to indicate to the class the rule that was broken. You can practice these steps so that they become second nature to you and are available to deploy, without too much mental dithering, whenever your instruction is interrupted, even by the smallest whisper.

1. Visualize that you are instructing the class and a small disruption happens. Perhaps a student has turned away from the class discussion or has begun whispering to a neighbor, or is fooling around with their pencil case, or is up out of their seat without permission. Notice that. Allow yourself to feel a small jolt of that “I’ve been disrespected” feeling, that tiny moment of slight unease or even a little feeling of panic.

Picture yourself teaching and noticing a little disruption. It is important to be on the lookout for even minor disruptions. If you instantly respond to the minor ones, the major ones will be much, much less numerous. You might want to repeat the following positive statement to yourself a few times, summoning a happy, proud feeling as you do so: “When I notice small disruptions, I minimize the big ones.”

2. Take a deep, calming, centering breath, a really big one that feels cleansing. The purpose is to release stress and help yourself to get out of the fight-or-flight response that is natural to feel when conflict arises. As you breathe, say to yourself, “I am able to show the class how strong I am” or perhaps, “Thank you for this opportunity to develop my leadership.”

3. Practice walking very slowly and calmly, as if you are in no hurry at all, over to the classroom rules poster. Put your hand under the rule (usually #1 or #2) that the student(s) just broke.

4. Take another deep, calming, centering breath, a really big one that feels cleansing. As you breathe, say to yourself again, “I am happy that I am able to show the class how strong I am” or perhaps, “Thank you for this opportunity to develop my leadership.”

5. Practice sweeping the room with your eyes, in an inclusive, neutral way, not focusing on the students who disrupted, and forcing yourself to have a smile in your eyes, and a small smile lifting the corners of your mouth. This might be fake. It is OK. Our bodies do not know a fake smile from a real one. Faking smiling releases feel-good chemicals and calms us when we need it most.

6. After sweeping the room, picture yourself giving a friendly little wink, nod, or extra smile to the disruptive students.

7. Visualize yourself going right back to your instruction, as if nothing had happened.

8. Visualize saying just ONE more sentence, noticing another minor infraction, and repeating the process over again. Do this a few times and you’ll see why all the positive self-talk and calming breaths are needed. Sometimes I like to say to myself, as I point to the rules for the thirtyeighth time that hour and breathe, “I’m grateful I get paid to take deep breaths.”

You can also begin practicing your “Queen Victoria Stare.” This is what Dr. Fred Jones, a well-known and beloved classroom management expert, calls the posture we need to assume when confronting an individual student about their behavior.

This is a step above the “point to the rules” routine you practiced above, and its use and importance will be explained more later in this chapter. Using the Queen Victoria Stare is a powerful, silent, “don’t-mess-with-me” and “getwith-the-program” message to students, and it is one of the most important tools we have in developing our personal power as teachers.

Like so many worthy goals in teaching, and in life, we can’t be afraid to do it simply because it makes us uncomfortable.

Alexander Bassano, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6640482

Here are the steps to practice:

1. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. In a classroom setting, they will be facing the student whom you are disciplining. 2. Turn your torso to face in the direction of your feet. 3. Relax your shoulders, arms by your side. Do not put hands on hips or cross them in front of you, as those are confrontational postures. 4. Take a deep, calming, centering breath, in and out through your nose, deep into your lungs. 5. Relax your jaw, consciously releasing any tension there. 6. Take another deep, calming, centering breath, in and out through your nose, deep into your lungs. 7. Put the expression on your face of “I have seen this a million times and it has never worked, and it is going to stop now.” This is not a confrontational look, but rather a withering look of extreme boredom and confidence that you will reign supreme in your classroom. See the picture of the Queen Herself if you need a role model. 8. Think to yourself (you might want to repeat this to yourself as an affirmation ten to twenty times as you hold this posture), “When confronted by disrespect, I breathe and respond with calm silence.” 9. Visualize yourself holding this calm posture, facing the student silently, until they stop saying “What did I do?” or “What?” or “What are you looking at?” or any of the other possible responses a rude child might offer you. Visualize yourself waiting until they are following your rules, telling yourself that you will follow up with them later in private, and then resuming your instruction, as if nothing had happened.

The above skills might feel silly to practice. Practice them anyway. Practicing them moves them into muscle memory in the moments they are needed. If you have not taken the time to move them into muscle memory, they will not be available to you when you need them.

The moments when we most need to access these skills are the times when we are least likely to have the mental energy to ponder our next move. Practice these skills now, own them, teach them to your body, and you will thank yourself later in the all-too-frequent emotionally charged moments of responding to challenging behavior.

Nuts and Bolts of Classroom Management

Strong messages about our leadership must happen from the very first minute of the first day of class and be embedded in our instruction to the point where ensuring compliance with the Classroom Rules - described in this section - takes precedence over all other concerns.

As we engage our students in Small Talk (aka Calendar Talk) and Card Talk (or Slide Talk), two common beginning-of-the-year activities, we constantly refer to the Classroom Rules. Thus, we constantly train our students in what is required of them in a proficiency-based classroom, not by telling them what we want but by showing them.

It is strongly suggested that you do not provide students with a long discussion of the Classroom Rules on the first day of class. Students zone out, especially on the first day, when presented with yet another list of Do’s and Don’t’s. It is generally best to just begin teaching and use the rules whenever they are needed.

When little disruptions happen, as they inevitably will, simply walk to the rules and place your hand under the rule that has just been violated, and wait in silence, sweeping the room with your eyes, without saying a single thing. Not even a sigh of exasperation, not even a “Johnny!” to call a wandering student’s attention to the rules. Just standing, with your hand firmly planted under the rule, breathing calmly and deeply, and displaying your best Queen Victoria stare.

Without displaying impatience or worry, even if you are feeling them inside, simply wait for students to get curious about why you have stopped instruction, cast their eyes about, and take note of the rule that you are calmly and silently indicating to them with your hand. See the images below for a detailed explanation of how I talk myself through a trip over to the good ole Rules Poster.