Don't Give them Time to Misbehave

I once believed that it was best to give students directions in the beginning of the period, and then stay out of their way for the rest of the period. This resulted in the successful students succeeding at the same level that they’ve always succeeded. It also resulted in struggling students spending entire weeks staring at empty essay prompts with three words written on them. One of their three words was invariably spelled wrong, and despite constant prompts and a blatant red squiggly underline provided by Google, the students refused to even right click, and ‘accept changes’ to make their writing better. 

Students misbehaved more when I taught like this, because it was easy to ‘finish’ quickly with a low-quality product that offered troublemakers the time they needed to make trouble. I no longer afford them such opportunities.

Instead of front loading directions like this, it works much better for classroom management to follow the cycle below:

1. Give a single direction
2. Students work for a short 5-6 minute period
3. Share academic and behavioral examples and nonexamples from student work time
4. Students revise/reflect on first direction based on teacher feedback.
5. Give a second, more difficult direction​​​

​By teaching in this way, high level students can get more feedback, can reflect and revise to create higher quality final products, and lower students can get the structure and feedback they need to create a final product that meets the requirements. Most importantly in the confines of this book, when students never have more than six minutes of time to themselves, they can never really get into too much trouble.

**There is no research to prove that my cycle works. 30-year veteran teachers, your cycle may look different, and may work perfectly. Don’t hate me. I’d love to hear how your cycle works, I plan on teaching real students for the next three decades and accept that there’s always something to learn..