WWDD?

Monday, May 25, 2015

There are some questions I am asked every semester by my students.

Of course, sometimes it is because they know I will launch into an entertaining tangent. Mostly, however, it is because they are genuinely confused by the chasm between what they *know* and what they *see* when they are working in classrooms with students and cooperative teachers. 

Our program in teacher ed sits in a unique place. The students will recieve a license to teach Birth-5th grade.  This means that, unlike most of their other elementary ed peers, they get a firm and thorough grounding in developmentally appropriate practice.  My students KNOW what should be happening in a DAP classroom. They understand developmental arcs of cognition.

Many of the questions have to do with why children are being taught in the manner in which they see in local classrooms. We talk about curricular mandates that don't make sense when you look at the brain development of a 6 year old. We talk about the pressure on 5 year olds who may not have fine motor development locked down.  I talk about how they need to be smarter than the curriculum guides they are handed and told to administer in order to comply with "Fidelity of Implementation"
regardless of if the children understand the concepts in the first place.

From the standpoint of child development, most of PK4- 4th grade curriculum is a shit show - aligned downwards from what a child should know when they graduate high school.  But that is a different blog post. 

The thing we talk about most, outside of bad curriculum, is behavior management. 

Now some of my students are going to comply with bad policy and practice. They are nice people who do as they are told. If the principal says "Do this", they are going to do it. They might not entirely like it, but they will do it. 

In other students I see the spark. The reflective spark. The "why?" that makes up a majority of my professional life. Why do we do what we do? Is it helpful? Is it harming? Is it my agenda? Am I sharing power with my students? Am I being rigid? Do I believe that children are thinking, active agents of their own learning who will lead me to their cognition if I pay attention?

These questions all boil down to this - "Do I know the students in my classroom and am I modulating my responses/actions/plans to what *they* need?" Not a mythical student who should be at any point in a curricular plan, but the humans in front of me.

For most teachers, they find a plan and stick to it. It is a human instinct. You find something that works once and you cling to it for dear life. If you disciplined one child a certain way and they responded in a way that pleased you, then Voila! There is your discipline plan for life!

Sigh. If only it was that easy. Cripes, some people make money off of selling behavior management kits, or books, or ridiculous behavior management curriculum based off of behavioristic models ( like Pavlov's dogs or Skinner's pigeons). 

The truth is that there is no magic bullet for a teacher when it comes to behavior management. The other truth is that if a teacher isn't good a behavior management then it becomes very difficult to see any learning happen in the classroom.

So, what do my students see most? Rigid rule following that is applied evenly and without consideration for the situation or the person.  

This can look like: Forget your homework once - lose recess.
Forget your homework twice - lose a week of recess. And so on.  

The teachers who believe that these strategies work believe that the transparency of the rule of law will act as a deterrent. 

Some teachers obsess over things like silence and walking in a very straight line down a hall. They fight with children over every perceived wrong in order to maintain control. They make up rules that you must walk to the slide on the right side of the playground and exit on the left hand side of the playground. They believe that one tiny inch of perceived power given over to children will equate to a Lord of the Flies scenario.

In their classrooms, they are the absolute power. The children are there to comply. Any non compliance, even minor, is a threat to their authority and will be crushed.

Now, some children do all right in these classrooms. They aren't generally children who have self regulation issues. They put their heads down and survive. 

The teachers who employ these methods...well, I don't think they like or respect children very much.

If I am honest, I have to believe that these teachers live in a sort of fear. A fear that the children will over take them and then what!?  I also find that they are rarely honest - with the children or with themselves. The reasons they give to children for why the rules are there? Invariably false or exaggerated reasons. 

Guess what? Children know when they are being lied to. They know that walking up the slide or swinging on their bellies will not lead to the collapse of human society. They know because they have done it hundreds of times and nothing has happened.  The adult in these cases becomes some bizarre harbinger of doom that never arrives. Sure, it could. A giant piece of metal could fall from the space station and kill me too, but I am not living my life in fear of that happening. 

At this very basic level, children are taught to disregard the adults. "Don't listen to them, they know nothing" is the whispered echo of the rule.  The adults get shriller. The children listen less until they have cocooned themselves inside against world in which it is clearly Adults Vs Children.

Then, a different sort of teacher comes into their life.  That teacher is a Dawn. 
She operates very differently. 


Part Two to Come



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