Preventive Medicine: Keeping Students on Task
ByWhen you give an assignment from the front of the room, take a walk through the room to make sure everyone is on task.
If you just sit in the front, and you have students who are discipline problems, then you are going to end up putting out the fire afterwards or telling a student afterwards to get on task. Over and over.
You can prevent this by first going around the room to insure everyone is committed to the assignment. This means not just that their book is open and paper out, but that they have already begun to concentrate–look for non-verbal cues that a student is not going to stay on task. Stand by that student until they have begun and their non-verbal cues tell you they are committed to the work.
If you know ahead of time which student(s) these are likely to be, all the better. Stand by them until they are seriously on task. There is a BIG difference between just walking by to go through the motions and making sure there is commitment to the work on the part of every student.
There is active and passive classroom discipline. Make it a rule that students have to be on task–it is not good enough that they are not disruptive (passive). They must be actively engaged in what the class is doing or they are subject to a consequence.
Careful how you handle ‘I don’t know how to do it’ comments.
I always recommend teachers read not just words but overall communication–does the student really not know how to do it, or are they just procrastinating? If the latter, I will either just stand there silently or repeat the direction to get on task.
If the student really needs help, and has been paying attention, then obviously give it to them.
The advent of social promotion has multiplied discipline troubles for teachers because so many students are often in class bored with work far beyond their grasp. This creates a ‘Flow’ problem (see the book ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), which is beyond the scope of the discussion here.
In my book Classroom Discipline 101 I discuss how Flow affects your classroom management in detail. The gist of it is that if students find work doable and meaningful they will almost always do it.
Make sure you circulate the room until everyone is on task (not just quiet, but committed to the assignment) to set yourself up for success.
Here’s to happy teaching,
Craig Seganti
You can give the students something they know for sure how to do to test if they really can’t do it or not. If they still complain you know they are just complaining.
Social promotion puts teachers in this quandary constantly of having different level students grouped together. Put me on the golf course with Tiger Woods and see if I catch up to his level, or just bring him down…
There is no easy answer here. Individualize as much as possible (an unfair request to a teacher unless you get paid for private tutoring as well) and try to find materials that keep everyone engaged.
Usually it is too high level work that bores unruly students, so give them something really easy to build confidence, and take it from there. Use your intuition to separate true inquisitiveness from manipulation..the one will convert to the other quickly if students sense you are too eager to please!
Hope this helps. There is a lot more to be written on the subject but I will develop it another time.
Hi Craig
I have just read your book and many of the elements are ones that I have subconsciously stumbled upon in the 12 yrs or so of teaching high school students (12 – 17 yo in Australia). Having work that is doable and meaningful has become a bug bear because of the range of abilities in students in the classroom. What may be meaningful in one student is not in another. 2 questions? How do we address most of the students’ notion of ‘meaningful’? When a student says ‘I don’t know how to do it’, I actually can’t tell in some cases if it is real. Any ideas on what to look for?