The final section of our book led Mrs. Hoover and I to some
great conversations about classroom management. The topic of Chapter 12 was
“the ability to ignore”. Mrs. Hoover emphasized how important it is to ignore
minor errors. This does not mean that you are ignoring your students by any
means, but you are able to differentiate between giving students attention that
they need
and attention that they want. On the opposite end of the spectrum, high
achievers need to be handled in their own way as well. High achievers, just
like the best teachers, are much harder on themselves than anyone else will be.
Mrs. Hoover said these can be both her most challenging students and best
students. Sometimes they are students who go above and beyond on every project
or they might be more concerned with other classes than their agriculture
class. She said it takes time to help the latter student realize that her class
is just as important has their math class.
Another topic we talked about were school assemblies. “When
the best teachers take their students to an assembly, what do they do? They sit
by their students – and not just any students, but the students who are most
likely to disrupt.” We discussed that many teachers have negative attitudes
toward all-school assemblies, because they feel they could be doing something
more productive. Mrs. Hoover described one time when she was at an assembly and
she looked around and she was the only teacher there. She said while she could
have been prepping for a class as other teachers skipped out to do, supervising
school assemblies was part of the job. We also discussed how you can use the
principal of sitting next to the worst students in your classrooms. You can
always rearrange and adjust your classroom for the better. If you keep doing
the same thing and getting the same results, you need to change, not the
students. If the same people always pair up for partner work and don’t get work
done, the teacher can make the decision to change that in the future – i.e.
“randomly” selecting partners, or simply saying you must work with someone you
haven’t worked with before. The goal of this is to help the students perform
better. The best teachers always keep
the students’ interests in mind when making decisions in their classroom.
We also talked about how to handle belligerent parents. When
a parent is arguing with you, they are in their prime. They don’t mind arguing
and they want you to argue with them. When a parent is upset with their child’s
performance, it is much better to let them know what the expectations are and
what assignments need completed instead of arguing with the “why”. You don’t
need to elaborate that Jimmy missed 3 days of classes this week, disrupted
class, and was on his phone multiple times. That type of parent wants to argue
with you about the “why”. Instead you can stop the argument before it starts by
focusing on tasks that need completed. Mrs. Hoover explained that she has had
to deal with parents in the past and when she takes this approach, she doesn’t
have issues with the parent like other teachers and administrators have described.
