Chapter 5: How not to get control of the classroom
But, the reader may think, why would a teacher not want to control his classroom? Truth is, it all depends on the goals you have for the learners in an environment. if your goals is to force compliance, kill creativity, productiveness and, authenticity, put to an end the voice of the students, mommies that sit around and wait until a bell rings so that they can stand up and sit again in a classroom that looks exactly the same as the first one.
Is your goal to make the students spill out the teacher’s values, or do you want them to explore and find meaning in their daily interactions with other people what’s right and wrong?
Is your goal to have compliant students or proactive, energetic and solution finder students?
If your goals are learning, exploration and discovery, give up control. If your goal is obedience and compliance that will very likely stay forever, control the students.
Caring, responsible, curious, life long learners, happy and creative are some of the buzzwords used by most educational institutions in their school’s mission and vision. I say buzzwords because there is a big abyss between said values and the actual practices that directors and teachers put into practice every single day of school.
Alfie Kohn argues that incentivizing students through rewards just so that they act in a certain way will work in the short run. Rewards will make a person do what we want them to do in that moment, but the same person will very likely feel no commitment to what she is doing, does not even understand the reasons for why she is acting in such way and therefore not probably wanting to act in the same way in the future.
“the more we ‘manage’ students’ behavior and try to make them do what we say, the more difficult it is for them to become morally sophisticated people who think for themselves and care about others.” pg. 62
Making moral meaning:
In order to develop morality, an individual must wrestle with questions, hear different perspective, evaluate them and act. This happens naturally and it happens many times until a person develops a sense of morality through context and experience.
A good teacher helps her students experience the value of learning and caring in context with the students’ concerns and interests.
More specifically, this can be achieved by:
1. By broadening the opportunity for students to choose, discover and learn for themselves.
2. By turning classrooms into caring communities where students have the chance to choose, discover and learn together.
Besides focusing on behavior, educators should focus on the person who behaves, specially on the reasons for why she does so.
A tip from Kohn on how to assist children in developing a good image of themselves:
-Point out to what you notice. Point out to the effects of a child’s actions in other people. E.g. After Maria shared a piece of her cake with Dan: “Maria, look at Dan’s face!”. Little by little the child will construct a positive image of herself.
Beyond rules
Rules can sometimes cut down on learning opportunities. When a problem arises in a community of learners, the trouble is something that the students try to solve together. Have deep conversations as you try to define the meaning of the rules that the student set and its importance. Instead of focusing on having specific rules and consequences for the people who break them, ask: “how can we as a community help Maria get over her present struggle to ’x’”.
“Student-generated rules that emerge from a deep and ongoing conversation are likely to be valuable not because of the rules themselves but because of the conversation that gave rise to them. The process is the point.” pg. 72
When the students make the rules, do not make a list of particular behaviors for the following reasons:
1. Students will become lawyers looking for loopholes in their list when problems arise. Students start to evaluate if personal gain is worth the loss they get if they get caught.
2. Rules turn the teacher into an enforcer of the law and into the source of order in the classroom.
3. Most of the rules have punishments as a consequence for breaking them, but offer no solution to the problems.
So, what do we have instead of a list of rules?
-Lots of conversations on how we want our class to be and how we can make that happen.
-Lots of space for students to problem solve and to find solutions to their own conflicts.
-Lots of collaboration on abstracting few principles that students value and practice.
Carmen Rodríguez A 