Eliminate Grey

Don't say "respect all materials!" What does that mean? No one knows. Say "taped, bilingual rubrics may be read, but not touched." Say "Chromebooks should be open for the duration of the activity, and no group should spend more than three minutes without someone's hand touching the keyboard." This is how you eliminate grey. This is how you allow students to make "keyboard type-y fingers in the air to alert you to a disengaged miscreant without a single spoken word.

If you hope to defer to students in any capacity, expectations in your classroom have to be black and white. In a middle school or elementary school, that might be as simple as defining that work time includes a book open on a desk, a pen in a hand, and eyes on either the book or the note sheet. It might mean enforcing a “one sentence off task per five minutes of work” expectation. Allowing kids one sentence wins style points, because you’re not that mean teacher down the hall who always goes “Shusssssssh” and her face crumples up all funny so students try to make her “Shussssssssh” for as long as possible. Their record is four seconds -- or is it her record? The point is, expectations like these are easy for students to follow, easy for students to enforce, and difficult for students to break without looking silly in front of their peers. An anecdote will help:
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​Football Player Enforcement: Get Students on your Side:

​James sauntered into science class and stepped on the back of Keyshla’s new Converse All Stars. She turned, frowned, punched him in the shoulder, and rolled her eyes at him. It wasn’t even a flirty punch. She actually hated him. After grabbing her materials from the front table, she made her way to her lab station and looked imploringly at Shawn, who had watched James step on her sneaker in each of the last three classes. She sat down to work on her lab, and Mr. Coriolus had a student read off the “Lab Safety Expectations” list:
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1. From “Go” to “Stop” you speak only to your lab partner.
2. Once the first Bunsen Burner lights, you remain under three feet away from your lab station until the last Bunsen Burner flame is extinguished.
3. Always behave in a way that helps your classmates learn.
   
   

To ensure no hijinks or shenanigans, Mr. Coriolus says go, and lights his bunsen burner immediately to signal the start of the rules. Most students commence to work, chat with their lab partner, flirt with the cheerleader across the way, and somewhere in the midst of adolescence, manage to learn something. 

It only takes a moment or two for James to abandon his lab partner and pursue his favorite past time -- Keyshla baiting. James throws a wadded paper. Keyshla ignores. James whispers “Keeeeeeeyshla. Keeeeeeyshla. Keeeeeeyshla.” Keyshla ignores. Shawn notices. James throws a pen cap at Keyshla. As Mr. Coriolus bends over to decipher a student’s chicken-scratch writing, James saunters over, brushes his hand along Keyshla’s neck, ruffling her hair, and bends to pick up his pen cap. Shawn coughs once.

​Mr. Coriolus looks up, and notices James breaking the simple three-foot rule. He gives James ‘the eye’ and stupidly does not enforce a consequence right then and there. James is now on Mr. Coriolus’s radar, and as such gets away with progressively less as period goes on.

Effective management needs to fit together like a puzzle. Students cannot be allowed to manage each other's behavior. That's a recipe for disaster. Students must be equipped to help you manage other students' behavior. It's a specific, but important distinction.

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Teacher Takeaway:

Brad. You must be tired or something. That was the most anti-climactic anecdote ever. I expected a football player phalanx blasting James into oblivion! I expected a dark corner of exclusion into which James was frog-marched using only a word. What is this garbage? Are you losing your touch?

​This anecdote shares a very important facet of classroom management. For a classroom to run effectively, EVERYONE must be involved in managing the classroom. That being said, students, even good students, will not likely tell on one another. Therefore, you need to offer good students (let’s be honest, most students are good students most of the time) a structured way to both measure the behavioral success of their classmates, and to alert you to the behavioral failings of their classmates without their classmates knowing it.

To accomplish such a structure, you must eliminate grey. Shawn’s cough worked because he knew to watch for James to break a clear expectation: the three-foot rule. Without a clear rule, if James was just generally annoying the whole lab in a class of general rules, Shawn would have had no recourse. Or, worse, Shawn’s recourse would have been a verbal or physical confrontation, argument, and ensuing explosion to defend Keyshla’s honor.

I’d rather my students know to cough at the right time than have them drop their gloves and square off for a bout of mortal combat or get labeled a tattle-tale. Grey expectations create grey behavior. Grey behavior creates lackadaisical enforcement. Lackadaisical enforcement of lackadaisical behavior leads to arguments and explosions centered on the inconsistencies that exist in the grey matter between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Keep your classroom black and white. By drawing a simple line in the proverbial, behavioral sand, you can ensure that students know how to succeed in your classroom. In creating a black and white classroom free of arguments, it helps to stay out of your own way. A smooth classroom requires that both teachers and students stay out of the way of the learning, and too often, teachers forget that their behavior might be just as distracting as the students’.