Thursday, November 8, 2012

Is Classroom Management a Dirty Word?

On Ben Slavic's Professional Learning Community there has been an ongoing debate about how to obtain optimal learning conditions in class, that is students who are listening attentively and not blurting things out in their native language.

The members of Ben's community have developed a rubric called jGR (jenn's great Rubric) for grading how well a student participates in the interactive communication going on in the class.  It has been tried by many members of the community and the reports are favorable, but today jenn reported that she is having difficulties with it, finding that having to refer to it constantly drains away her positive energy in class.  She said, "This topic - consequence vs punishment- has been eating me up for a month.

I'm just finishing Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards and it seemed to me that he had quite a bit to contribute to the discussion.  Kohn says that consequence vs punishment is a false debate. At least if I’m understanding him. He has a chapter called “The consequences of consequences” in Punished by Rewards that was quite an eye-opener to me. He says, “if a child tips her chair back too far, she will fall over. That is a ‘natural consequence’ — and the fact that it qualifies for that label offers no argument for letting it happen; caring adults go out of their way to prevent many such consequences from occurring.”

Then he says something which seems pretty relevant. “Some teachers and parents seem to think that consequences are acceptable as long as children have been clearly warned about what will happen if they misbehave. These warnings allow adults to pride themselves on their fairness — and to shrug off complaints — since adequate notice was given before the punishment was imposed. ….. But what is actually promoted by this arrangement? A list of specific rules and consequences establishes a confrontational tone; the message is not that members of a community will work together and try to help someone who stumbles, but that anyone who violates a pre-established edict is in trouble.”
I haven’t yet finished the book, but Kohn is in favor of treating students and even small children as beings who should have a voice in what happens; indeed he argues that the only way to teach them to become responsible, caring adults is to give them that voice. He sees everything else as “control strategies.”
I don’t see jGR as a control strategy. I see it as a definition of the behavior that can help students to master a language. Perhaps we need to be careful of how we present it to students. We might say that several of our friends and colleagues have tried it and it seems very effective in helping students to get the maximum benefit out of their classes. Then we could go through the different levels, explaining why other teachers thought these elements were important and ask students for their opinion. We might ask them to elaborate on the descriptions, whenever possible taking their ideas into account. I think that for jGR to be effective, students have to buy in, and for them to do that they have to have a chance to input. Each class might negotiate a slightly different version of jGR. 
The fact that students need to be listening attentively in order to acquire a language and that blurting out makes it impossible for others to listen attentively is not negotiable, but students should be given a chance to discuss how this can be achieved in their class. Simply seeing that the teacher is honestly interested in their viewpoint can help them adhere to and respect her viewpoint.
I think this is what Kohn has to offer us. He quotes Thomas Gordon who said, “The critical question is not WHETHER limits and rules are needed in families and schools, but rather WHO sets them: the adults alone or the adults and kids — together?”