Wow what useful and actionable advice! We need schools to “rebel” and start insisting on education standards again. A principal and a handful of teachers with some parent support could get the ball rolling. However it’s usually only the parents who complain publicly
Rules are the conditions of possibility for genuine creativity. The undermining of rules makes everything less fun. It is counterintuitive but true. Imagine playing a game where every player can do whatever they want. move their piece any number of jumps, refuse to lay down or pick up a card whenever they want, etc. etc. The game collapses, no one has any fun at all.
What happens when kids change the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make the game more to their liking without regard for the other children?
The game ends as the children leave because they no longer see the benefit of the game. The limiting factor of our schools is that there are no rules AND the kids are not free to seek out something that works better.
Utter disaster and totally reprehensible on the part of adults who should know better.
My charter school principal in Chicago tells us she is incapable of doing OSS because of the pressure from the network and the district itself to keep suspension rates to an extremely low level. Part of the charter renewal process looks at our school’s suspension rates. It’s really frustrating.
They think in “butts in seats” and I think in “precious instructional minutes used to maximize student outcomes”.
I bet scores are weighted more heavily than number of days of OSS assigned though. This speaks to her underlying belief that ALL the kids can’t be taught so she’s busy trying to save the ones who almost certainly refuse to be.
And why not call removal a Tier III intervention, I.e., the kid goes straight to an interventionist to help them with focused work time?
The bar for test scores is so low in Illinois that we are considered a “commendable school”
Commendable School
A school that has no underperforming student groups, a graduation rate greater than 67%, and whose performance is not in the top 10% of schools statewide.
I've been struggling with how to write this comment but I'll do my best. I'm a first year jr high history teacher at a charter school in CA. I feel like my degree and credential program did not teach me anything about how to actually teach. Coming out of a public high school (and the reality of the "Your Kids Aren't Learning. At All." series), I didn't learn very much in my subject area due to the problems you outline in your series about how students aren't learning anything. I also didn't learn very much in most of my college classes where the professors mostly would rather have been doing research.
In the credential program, we learned basically zero pedagogy (no how to teach note-taking, how to write tests, sample curricula, etc.) and literally zero classroom management. A lot of the pedagogy is focused on the student-centered, SEL crap that M. Eds with no classroom experience are pushing. At the time I was fully on board with screens and everything, but your arguments (and basic logic) have made it clear that this type of instruction incentivizes bad behavior and poor learning practices for students.
I am trying to implement the suggestions from this post, but it's late in the year so I will probably be more for next year. It would be really awesome to see more posts like this with actionable advice for classroom management and curriculum (like in your post about student reading). Some examples of what a week or unit in your class looked/looks like would be really helpful as well. Thank you for the help you've already provided
I’m sorry that I can’t do more but, as you may realize, I don’t have a masters in education or an Ed.D so I am not qualified to get paid to teach teachers how to teach effectively, though the MAs and EDDs are happy to let me kill myself undoing the consequences of their pants-on-head stupid policy decisions. 🤡☠️☠️☠️
Having said that, more help is coming. Hold tight.
Thank you for the quick response! Based on your posts so far I'm sure you'd be far more qualified than the overeducated clowns (mostly) who taught my credential courses. I'll check out the resource for sure!
“…[K]ids with ADHD whose quality of learning had been mostly ignored for 9 years of schooling.”
I’d venture to guess half of the “behavior kids” in the higher grades fall into this bucket (or have some other disability with years of unmet needs). I’m not a teacher, but a parent of a child who would certainly be problem child if I left her care and development to the school system. I hear what you’re saying, but a lot of these kids are the product of a neglectful system. Ignore their needs for years and then filter them out? We shouldn’t let so many of them become non-functional in the school system in the first place.
Sure, in a functioning system. But a kid who needs more than a minimal level of support will be ignored, eventually blamed, and filtered out. My kid is in 4th and but for us, she would have been lost by 1st grade. Behavior in the classroom is a problem. But I think schools bear a significant portion of the blame for letting things get so bad. I just think it’s tough to acknowledge that public k12 will always fail special education students and then effectively call for those failed kids to be removed in the end.
Right now, they're neither helped nor filtered out. Usually, they (a) quietly fail, (b) learn little but get pushed through, or (c) become a major source of distraction for the other students in the classroom because of their frustration/disaffection.
And I absolutely acknowledge that K12 will fail SpEd students pretty much across the board UNLESS a dedicated parent takes on a healthy chunk of their education at home.
This is so sad. Back when I was in middle school, corporal punishment was still legal. Every teacher had a regulation paddle, and the assistant principal was a former Marine drill sergeant. Much terror was instilled on crossing the line.
But the line was pretty far out. Class time was far less structured than what you describe. Lots of recess time. Students who finished their assignments early were allowed to play cards or checkers while the rest of the class worked. Very little note taking. Lots of doing assignments straight out of the textbook.
Hooray for so succinctly putting down the steps toward enjoying interacting with a well-behaved classroom. I’d like to support what you said and add one more element: the role of mismatched language-based expectations in causing student misbehavior.
As an educational constant training kindergarten teachers on using new language and learning-building centers, my learning curve on classroom management techniques was so steep it was almost vertical! To train teachers on using the centers, I planned the morning to cover the rationale and materials. Afternoons were to be devoted to creating mock classrooms for practice with some of the participants acting as teachers while the others took on the role of kindergarten students. The first few times I did this, mayhem reigned! Without exception, “students” threw materials, pushed one another, got up from centers to wander, yelled, and otherwise did everything but use the materials. The message these teachers were sending was, “I can barely control my class when I have them in a group. I am terrified of turning them loose at independent centers.” With the help of an early childhood expert, I added a center behavior management component to the training. Use of the strategies was amazingly effective. In one case, I intervened in a K classroom that was totally out of control, materials being thrown, children under tables, running, etc. Within 10 minutes, we had a calm class engaged at centers.
I absolutely agree with you about not giving extra attention to students demonstrating non-desired behavior, plus applying consequences quickly with a minimum of words. Attention of any kind reinforces behavior. What we as teachers attend to is what we will see more of.
Also, it’s so important to clearly state expected behavior. Our kindergarten teachers learned to start center time by clearly stating five rules. They also learned to move quickly from student to student at centers, having 5 to 10 second 1-to-1 interactions. They were coached to start by describing what the student was doing, (“You are tracing the letter ‘B’ with your marker.”) including positive comments on desired behavior. (“I saw you give Louisa a crayon. You are helping each other learn.”) A child demonstrating non-desired behavior was to be tapped on the shoulder, told quietly and respectfully, “Come with me,” led to a space in the classroom, asked to sit there, and told, “Sit here).” Then within 60 to 120 seconds, the teacher was to go to the child, say, “come with me,” return the child to the center, saying, “Next time, remember, (then state the broken rule).” No more verbal interaction!
The element I would like to add is making sure student misbehavior is not being caused because the student currently has lower-than-needed Oral Language Decontextualized Stages (OLDS). I present some examples plus solutions in a recent post on my Substack, Creating Eager Learners by Building Oral Language. Before you groan and say, “Oh please, not one more thing for overburdened teachers,” I suggest you give oral language a chance. You will find that it can make your job easier rather than more complex.
Again, thanks for a much-needed post, especially at this “spring fever” time of year.
Retired HS teacher here. This gave me flashbacks. You are right, and I probably wouldn't recognize the classrooms today, but I dealt with a few situations where I was left so unsupported that I gave admin an ultimatum. Fix this or I quit.
I usually had very little problems with discipline and my classes typically were calm and enjoyable. I taught art and photography.
But this was during a period where "inclusion" of all students was pushed. So I had my share of violent felons and mentally unstable kids. The support for preventing dangerous behavior was nonexistent. Once, I was lucky that the heavyweight wrestling senior was in the class because he was able to pull a seriously dangerous student off another as he was trying to kill him. The offense of the victim was he had reached past the aggressor to pick up a pencil and accidentally brushed his ear.
This violent student went on to murder someone after graduation. He didn't belong in a regular classroom.
Principal had a handicapped daughter, so he was 100% against removing this kid from my class. All of us were in danger. It took me telling him I was out unless he stepped up. His solution was to assign a "aide" (guard) to watch him, not remove him from my class.
This is the way! Equitable grading, where everyone passes with a C at 50% (and for the really high achievers, a D with 20%), is part of the equation as well.
Let's call that what it is: FRAUD. If you told parents, "Your kid got a D. This means he knows 1/5th of what he should have left the class knowing," parents would rightfully be furious.
A kid that only "got" 20% of the material (and that's being generous because grade inflation is real so that 2o% is probably inflated too) could rightly say they learned basically nothing, in which case the juice is not worth the squeeze, especially if it means the kid will be promoted to a class where he doesn't know enough to succeed the following year.
Absolutely right. Bad actors should be removed from the classroom immediately. Non-actors — those who don’t participate in class, they just stare at their phones or walk the halls —should also be removed. And it should be easy for the teachers to do this, no mountain of paperwork or approvals necessary.
Of course, here’s the problem. What do we do with the bad actors and non-actors, both in the near- and long-term?
I disagree about the non-actors. You can motivate them. You just have to stop lying about grades. I wrote an article about that on X. I'll probably post it here soon. If you want to see what I mean, here's the link: https://x.com/educatedandfree/status/1890405104085582217
Restorative justice has not been as helpful as people thought it would be to help kids become disciplined students.
Wow what useful and actionable advice! We need schools to “rebel” and start insisting on education standards again. A principal and a handful of teachers with some parent support could get the ball rolling. However it’s usually only the parents who complain publicly
100% agree. Been seeing this for 24 years.
Rules are the conditions of possibility for genuine creativity. The undermining of rules makes everything less fun. It is counterintuitive but true. Imagine playing a game where every player can do whatever they want. move their piece any number of jumps, refuse to lay down or pick up a card whenever they want, etc. etc. The game collapses, no one has any fun at all.
What happens when kids change the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make the game more to their liking without regard for the other children?
The game ends as the children leave because they no longer see the benefit of the game. The limiting factor of our schools is that there are no rules AND the kids are not free to seek out something that works better.
Utter disaster and totally reprehensible on the part of adults who should know better.
My charter school principal in Chicago tells us she is incapable of doing OSS because of the pressure from the network and the district itself to keep suspension rates to an extremely low level. Part of the charter renewal process looks at our school’s suspension rates. It’s really frustrating.
They think in “butts in seats” and I think in “precious instructional minutes used to maximize student outcomes”.
I bet scores are weighted more heavily than number of days of OSS assigned though. This speaks to her underlying belief that ALL the kids can’t be taught so she’s busy trying to save the ones who almost certainly refuse to be.
And why not call removal a Tier III intervention, I.e., the kid goes straight to an interventionist to help them with focused work time?
Two can play this game.
The bar for test scores is so low in Illinois that we are considered a “commendable school”
Commendable School
A school that has no underperforming student groups, a graduation rate greater than 67%, and whose performance is not in the top 10% of schools statewide.
Here is what goes into that rating
Academic Indicators75%
1. English Language Arts Proficiency: 7.5%
2. Math Proficiency: 7.5%
3. Science Proficiency: 5%
4. Graduation (composite 4-, 5-, and 6-year graduation rate): 50%
5. English Learner Progress to Proficiency: 5%
School Quality & Student Success Indicators - 25%
6. Chronic Absenteeism: 10%
7. Climate Survey: 6.67%
8. 9th-Graders on Track to Graduate: 8.33%
Only 20% of our summative is test scores. 50% is grad rate.
I've been struggling with how to write this comment but I'll do my best. I'm a first year jr high history teacher at a charter school in CA. I feel like my degree and credential program did not teach me anything about how to actually teach. Coming out of a public high school (and the reality of the "Your Kids Aren't Learning. At All." series), I didn't learn very much in my subject area due to the problems you outline in your series about how students aren't learning anything. I also didn't learn very much in most of my college classes where the professors mostly would rather have been doing research.
In the credential program, we learned basically zero pedagogy (no how to teach note-taking, how to write tests, sample curricula, etc.) and literally zero classroom management. A lot of the pedagogy is focused on the student-centered, SEL crap that M. Eds with no classroom experience are pushing. At the time I was fully on board with screens and everything, but your arguments (and basic logic) have made it clear that this type of instruction incentivizes bad behavior and poor learning practices for students.
I am trying to implement the suggestions from this post, but it's late in the year so I will probably be more for next year. It would be really awesome to see more posts like this with actionable advice for classroom management and curriculum (like in your post about student reading). Some examples of what a week or unit in your class looked/looks like would be really helpful as well. Thank you for the help you've already provided
I’m sorry that I can’t do more but, as you may realize, I don’t have a masters in education or an Ed.D so I am not qualified to get paid to teach teachers how to teach effectively, though the MAs and EDDs are happy to let me kill myself undoing the consequences of their pants-on-head stupid policy decisions. 🤡☠️☠️☠️
Having said that, more help is coming. Hold tight.
In the meantime, Mr. Gregory has your back. Read this. It was worth more than all my teacher training and all the PD I was subjected to. https://archive.org/details/sevenlawsteachi01greggoog/page/n60/mode/2up
Thank you for the quick response! Based on your posts so far I'm sure you'd be far more qualified than the overeducated clowns (mostly) who taught my credential courses. I'll check out the resource for sure!
“…[K]ids with ADHD whose quality of learning had been mostly ignored for 9 years of schooling.”
I’d venture to guess half of the “behavior kids” in the higher grades fall into this bucket (or have some other disability with years of unmet needs). I’m not a teacher, but a parent of a child who would certainly be problem child if I left her care and development to the school system. I hear what you’re saying, but a lot of these kids are the product of a neglectful system. Ignore their needs for years and then filter them out? We shouldn’t let so many of them become non-functional in the school system in the first place.
Often it’s behavior that triggers needed academic intervention. If you ignore behavior, you also ignore a kid in desperate need of targeted help.
Sure, in a functioning system. But a kid who needs more than a minimal level of support will be ignored, eventually blamed, and filtered out. My kid is in 4th and but for us, she would have been lost by 1st grade. Behavior in the classroom is a problem. But I think schools bear a significant portion of the blame for letting things get so bad. I just think it’s tough to acknowledge that public k12 will always fail special education students and then effectively call for those failed kids to be removed in the end.
Right now, they're neither helped nor filtered out. Usually, they (a) quietly fail, (b) learn little but get pushed through, or (c) become a major source of distraction for the other students in the classroom because of their frustration/disaffection.
And I absolutely acknowledge that K12 will fail SpEd students pretty much across the board UNLESS a dedicated parent takes on a healthy chunk of their education at home.
https://open.substack.com/pub/educatedandfree/p/k-12-will-always-fail-special-education?r=b8lae&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
This is so sad. Back when I was in middle school, corporal punishment was still legal. Every teacher had a regulation paddle, and the assistant principal was a former Marine drill sergeant. Much terror was instilled on crossing the line.
But the line was pretty far out. Class time was far less structured than what you describe. Lots of recess time. Students who finished their assignments early were allowed to play cards or checkers while the rest of the class worked. Very little note taking. Lots of doing assignments straight out of the textbook.
Learning happened, even with over 30 kids/class.
Hooray for so succinctly putting down the steps toward enjoying interacting with a well-behaved classroom. I’d like to support what you said and add one more element: the role of mismatched language-based expectations in causing student misbehavior.
As an educational constant training kindergarten teachers on using new language and learning-building centers, my learning curve on classroom management techniques was so steep it was almost vertical! To train teachers on using the centers, I planned the morning to cover the rationale and materials. Afternoons were to be devoted to creating mock classrooms for practice with some of the participants acting as teachers while the others took on the role of kindergarten students. The first few times I did this, mayhem reigned! Without exception, “students” threw materials, pushed one another, got up from centers to wander, yelled, and otherwise did everything but use the materials. The message these teachers were sending was, “I can barely control my class when I have them in a group. I am terrified of turning them loose at independent centers.” With the help of an early childhood expert, I added a center behavior management component to the training. Use of the strategies was amazingly effective. In one case, I intervened in a K classroom that was totally out of control, materials being thrown, children under tables, running, etc. Within 10 minutes, we had a calm class engaged at centers.
I absolutely agree with you about not giving extra attention to students demonstrating non-desired behavior, plus applying consequences quickly with a minimum of words. Attention of any kind reinforces behavior. What we as teachers attend to is what we will see more of.
Also, it’s so important to clearly state expected behavior. Our kindergarten teachers learned to start center time by clearly stating five rules. They also learned to move quickly from student to student at centers, having 5 to 10 second 1-to-1 interactions. They were coached to start by describing what the student was doing, (“You are tracing the letter ‘B’ with your marker.”) including positive comments on desired behavior. (“I saw you give Louisa a crayon. You are helping each other learn.”) A child demonstrating non-desired behavior was to be tapped on the shoulder, told quietly and respectfully, “Come with me,” led to a space in the classroom, asked to sit there, and told, “Sit here).” Then within 60 to 120 seconds, the teacher was to go to the child, say, “come with me,” return the child to the center, saying, “Next time, remember, (then state the broken rule).” No more verbal interaction!
The element I would like to add is making sure student misbehavior is not being caused because the student currently has lower-than-needed Oral Language Decontextualized Stages (OLDS). I present some examples plus solutions in a recent post on my Substack, Creating Eager Learners by Building Oral Language. Before you groan and say, “Oh please, not one more thing for overburdened teachers,” I suggest you give oral language a chance. You will find that it can make your job easier rather than more complex.
Again, thanks for a much-needed post, especially at this “spring fever” time of year.
Retired HS teacher here. This gave me flashbacks. You are right, and I probably wouldn't recognize the classrooms today, but I dealt with a few situations where I was left so unsupported that I gave admin an ultimatum. Fix this or I quit.
I usually had very little problems with discipline and my classes typically were calm and enjoyable. I taught art and photography.
But this was during a period where "inclusion" of all students was pushed. So I had my share of violent felons and mentally unstable kids. The support for preventing dangerous behavior was nonexistent. Once, I was lucky that the heavyweight wrestling senior was in the class because he was able to pull a seriously dangerous student off another as he was trying to kill him. The offense of the victim was he had reached past the aggressor to pick up a pencil and accidentally brushed his ear.
This violent student went on to murder someone after graduation. He didn't belong in a regular classroom.
Principal had a handicapped daughter, so he was 100% against removing this kid from my class. All of us were in danger. It took me telling him I was out unless he stepped up. His solution was to assign a "aide" (guard) to watch him, not remove him from my class.
This is the way! Equitable grading, where everyone passes with a C at 50% (and for the really high achievers, a D with 20%), is part of the equation as well.
Let's call that what it is: FRAUD. If you told parents, "Your kid got a D. This means he knows 1/5th of what he should have left the class knowing," parents would rightfully be furious.
A kid that only "got" 20% of the material (and that's being generous because grade inflation is real so that 2o% is probably inflated too) could rightly say they learned basically nothing, in which case the juice is not worth the squeeze, especially if it means the kid will be promoted to a class where he doesn't know enough to succeed the following year.
Absolutely right. Bad actors should be removed from the classroom immediately. Non-actors — those who don’t participate in class, they just stare at their phones or walk the halls —should also be removed. And it should be easy for the teachers to do this, no mountain of paperwork or approvals necessary.
Of course, here’s the problem. What do we do with the bad actors and non-actors, both in the near- and long-term?
I disagree about the non-actors. You can motivate them. You just have to stop lying about grades. I wrote an article about that on X. I'll probably post it here soon. If you want to see what I mean, here's the link: https://x.com/educatedandfree/status/1890405104085582217