As the year progresses, have students reinforce and explain the rules strategically, and sit back and bask in their authentic explanations:

Teachers don’t usually make outlandish rules from magical lands. Even the worst, most critical, poorest written rules enforced in a classroom are probably realistically pretty reasonable. By December, stop explaining the rules to your students. Trust me, they stopped listening to your explanations in October, so really, what's the point? Instead, enlist your students to explain the rules to each other. In those awkward five minutes after a fire drill, or awkward two periods of a half day, or awkward fifteen minutes left after your lesson crashes and burns, have students explain what kind of environment allows them to learn best. Have students explain what they want to do with their lives, and how they’ll be expected to behave. Students' words will always carry more weight than your words ever could.
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These students have known each other since kindergarten. They play basketball together. They play videogames together. They talk about their crushes and attractive classmates together. Whose voice do you honestly believe holds more weight when it comes to their behavioral decision making? Yours, or theirs?

If you have to remove a student from class, at the end of that class, have students explain why his or her behavior had harmed the learning environment. Brainstorm ways that you, as a learning community, can help keep poor Distracting Derek to remain in the classroom, and out of detention. Give kids the power to explain, understand, and take ownership of your rules. When you send a student out, don’t mock him after he leaves the classroom, enlist your class to help that student assimilate tomorrow as if nothing had happened. You'll find that in empowering your class with strategies to help Derek, that they've developed strategies to help themselves as well.

Here’s where this blog is different than a research-based dissertation: the above strategy DOESN’T work 99% of the time. Any strategy in this book won’t work 99% of the time in isolation. If, at the middle school level, a student behaves poorly enough that she got kicked out of a classroom, very little will help her, and change will be a SLOW process earned over months of a thousand effective, small decisions that each build 1% of trust in a great trust deficit reinforced by everyone else the student can remember during the only decade she's been alive. She’s probably beyond your saving and will spend most of her time in suspension, or maybe she was simply having a bad day and tomorrow will be better regardless of what you do, or don’t enforce.
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The only entirely management-free classroom you can ever expect is the one without students in it. As lovely and quiet as that may be, the successful classroom manager prepares to train the middle 90% of the class to passively assist the top and bottom 5% to toe the line.

​Even if you never change the problem student’s behavior, you still won though, because by strictly enforcing rules for even the best and the worst kids, you help that middle 90% of kids behave better. This won’t work for every student. It won’t work for every class. It won’t work every year. It won’t work for every teacher. It doesn’t work every day. Sometimes, some people will still misbehave even if you follow every strategy in this blog. The worst students might still be the worst. The best students might still resent that you don’t let them get away with murder because they’re well-dressed and smart. None of that matters though, because following these not so research based methods will help you teach that middle group to control their own behavior, which will make dealing with the top and bottom far easier. Speaking of the top and the bottom of the class, our next post will examine how to manage and cure the disengagement that occurs when you can’t differentiate infinitely and when in the real world, intrinsic motivation isn’t something you can create outside the 1% of students that have it intrinsically.
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