A Series on Empathy - Part 4 - Logical Consequences

 

In an earlier blog, I talked about a No Tolerance Policy in schools.  Every school I've been in has had such a policy.  Even local and state governments have No Tolerance policies.  But, for me, No Tolerance Policies take the human being out of the equation.  And it's never right to do that.

Punishment is a scary idea in schools.  According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, punishment is "suffering, pain, or loss that serves as retribution." Really?  Is that what we want in school? Suffering? Pain? Loss? 

When I was in school, I know I had teachers who enjoyed watching the children suffer.  I spent most of my elementary years wearing gum on my nose.  That was the punishment for chewing gum in school.  It never deterred me from chewing gum.  I just learned how to hide it better.  I had to write my punishments one hundred times. "I will not call out in class.  I will not call out in class. I will not call out in class."  I still called out in class. My desk got dumped over at least once a week to demonstrate to me and the rest of the class just what a slob I was. I never learned how to organize my desk any better.

When I first started teaching, I had no idea how to manage a classroom.  I reverted back to what I had learned through my own experiences.  But I very quickly realized a few things. 

1.   Punishment does not work.  Just as I never stopped chewing gum in school, my students didn't do their homework more frequently, or study for tests, or sit quietly, or stop fighting with each other.  They just stopped for the moment.  And they hated me for that moment.  

2. I hated doling out punishments. I wanted my students to like me and like coming to school.  And they hated punishments.  So I stopped.  And, surprisingly enough, they didn't take advantage of my no punishments idea.

3. I needed to find ways to manage my classroom without doling out punishments. This one was huge for me. I spent 12 years in school, learning that school was a place to go, get instruction thrown at me or drilled into me, and if I didn't go along for the ride, I got ridiculed by the teachers for "being bad."  

I went into teaching because I wanted to change things for my students.  So I needed to rethink the whole management system.  It wasn't easy.  Yelling was what I knew.  But the first time I made a child cry, I knew I couldn't keep yelling at my students.  So I tried something different. 

In the real world, when one messes up, one has to fix the mess.  That's a Logical Consequence.  Spill your coffee? Clean it up.  Hit the neighbor's mailbox with your car? Pay for a new mailbox. Forget to pay your credit card bill? Get hit with a late fee.  Logical Consequences.  Not designed to induce suffering (well, maybe the late fee is) but designed to just fix the problem.  So I started finding Logical Consequences for the behaviors in my classroom. 

But, before finding the consequence, I had to find out why these behaviors were happening. You see, if I spilled my coffee because I was carrying it across the room while trying to navigate through the random toys scattered on the floor, then the family needs to clean up the random toys before they all go to bed.  Problem solved. If I hit my neighbor's mailbox with my car because his mailbox was turned to sit in my driveway, then I was always going to hit his mailbox as I backed out.  Solution? Turn his mailbox sideways.  Problem solved.  If my credit card bill was late getting paid because the due date for payment came before my paycheck could clear, then I could change the due date on my card.  Problem solved.  Find the reason for the problem and you can solve it.

One of the things I've always worked on in my classroom is understanding why children do the things they do.  Why does Sami always have to play with the pencils on her desk while I'm talking?  Why doesn't John perform well on tests when he's got the best remarks during class discussions?  Why is Sunal always so angry during math class? And once I find out the why, the consequences change.  Sunal getting angry and throwing something doesn't mean he gets suspended, or kept in from recess, or has to write 20 times I will not throw things in class.  It means I help Sunal take responsibility for his actions and we move on.

For each of these questions, finding out the answer can lead to greater learning and happier children.  So maybe Sami needs fidget toys to help her focus.  Give her various options for fidget toys that are more quiet than the clicking pencils in her desk.  Maybe John is having difficulty formulating his answers. Try having him work with a partner or an adult to speak out his thoughts first.  Perhaps Sunal needs help learning how to communicate his feelings verbally.  Spend time helping him practice how to tell a classmate or teacher how he feels.

By taking a bit of time to talk with and learn about your students, you can avoid many typical classroom issues. And, if we start early teaching children how to communicate their needs more appropriately, how to even recognize their needs, we can avoid larger problems later in their school career or even later in life.  

Let's go back a bit. When I first started teaching, I had no skills in classroom management.  The only experience I had was my own schooling.  So when Sami started playing with her pencils, I took them away.  When she pulled out erasers to play with, I took those, too.  And I called Sami's mom.  "Sami is having some difficulty staying focused.  Maybe you can speak with her, I'll move her desk, and we'll talk in two weeks."  Guess what happened?  Go ahead.  Right.  Nothing.  Sami's mom spoke with her, yelled at her, punished her.  But Sami still played with her pencils.  And, to me, it looked like Sami was not paying attention to my very exciting lessons.  Sigh. Punishment was not working.  It never does.

Should I give up?  At first, that was my reaction.  Sami will never learn, never improve, her teachers prior to me complained about the same thing.  Why couldn't Sami be more like the rest of the kids?  And, then, I remembered...I was responsible for my students' learning.  If they weren't learning, I must change something to help them more.  So I stopped bugging Sami about the pencils.  I just handed her a stuffed animal at the beginning of each lesson.  It was much quieter than the pencils.  Sami played with the stuffed animal and started answering questions during class.  Wow!  She really was paying attention! I went on a search for more appropriate fidget toys, that could keep Sami busy and be quiet in the process.  The other children tried them out, too.  I kept a basket of fidget toys in my room from then on.

What about John?  How could a child who seemed to understand so much during class discussions do so poorly on class tests?  So after one failed test, I called him over and asked him what happened.  At first, he told me he didn't study and forgot about the test.  I started asking him the questions on the exam.  He knew all the answers.  Wait a minute! "John, why can't you write down that answer?" Turns out, John didn't know he knew the answer.  "I didn't know how to begin," he said.  John, I discovered, has some Executive Functioning issues.  "Where do I start?  How do I format this answer?  Where should I write it down?" By having him work with me or by giving him sentence starters, John was able to demonstrate his knowledge very well.  And, some of the other children did better with sentence starters to help them out.

Sunal?  He had some issues formulating ideas when speaking.  He struggled with language so how could he explain himself.  You see, it turns out he was late leaving his house each morning.  So his day started with Dad yelling at him to get up, get dressed, and get to the bus.  Math was our first class of the day and not Sunal's strong suit.  So all his pent up anger got taken out there. If he didn't understand the problem and someone else got the answer and blurted it out, he got angry and yelled or threw things.  Dad and I got him an alarm clock set to give him one hour before the bus came to get ready.  And I spent more time focusing on Sunal during math, partnering him with a friend, getting him to use more tools to help him, and giving him extra help when needed.  And Sunal learned how to say, "Don't call out the answer.  Let me try to get it first."  And, guess what?  He wasn't the only child who needed the tools and extra help so other children benefitted too. 

Now back to a No Tolerance Policy.  In elementary school, that usually has to do with bullying.  And, for my classroom, bullying was NEVER, NEVER tolerated.  But I didn't send the child to the principal.  I tried to find out why this was happening.  Sunal was considered a bully.  But by spending time with him teaching him to use words, his actions calmed down and the other children learned he wasn't such a bully after all. 

Let me tell you about Malinda.  She was a bully.  She would tell Sue not to be friends with Julie.  And if Sue continued to be friends with Julie, Malinda wouldn't be her friend and would harass Sue.  She would laugh when Michael got an answer wrong and call him names.  She would take over the tops of her classmates desks if they sat near her, pushing their materials out of the way.  When another child retaliated or complained, Malinda would tell mom she was being bullied in school.  Mom, of course, believed everything Malinda told her.  

At first, I called in Mom.  Threatened to tell the principal.  Told her she could be suspended.  Mom balked.  We were at a stand still.  Until I remembered that Malinda was 10.  She was a child.  A hurt child.  So we talked.  Malinda's view of the world was that everyone hated her so she was mean to them.  I started class meetings that year.  And, with Malinda's permission, we brought this up at a class meeting.  The children, at first, agreed with her.  Nobody wanted to be friends.  She was mean. This was the Logical Consequence to her actions.  Act mean - have no friends.  Actions had to change. 

And the class was willing to help, but only because they were a class that had been working on CARES and, particularly, Empathy.  I pointed out that we were talking about this because Malinda really did want to change.  So the class agreed.  The girls agreed to play with her at recess as long as she didn't try to take over and exclude some of them.  And, they would point it out if she did.  (There were a few times where they had to remind her.) Malinda recognized, reluctantly, that she had to take responsibility for her actions.  She had no friends because of how she treated others.  Nobody wanted to sit next to her because of her tendency to take up more space than she had.  She learned to move to a work table during lessons instead of pushing someone else off their desk.  

Malinda was a bully.  But she learned that she was responsible for how people treated her.  If they didn't want her around, there must be something she was doing to cause that. Malinda had to figure out a Logical Consequence to her actions. She apologized to the class verbally but, then, had to change her behavior. And the class learned to help Malinda.  They helped her learn the difference between Assertion and aggression.  They helped her learn to include everyone, instead of exclude people.  They helped her learn to be a bit kinder.  Malinda was happier with the class and they were happier with her.  

In a No Tolerance world, Malinda would have been suspended for a couple of days, sat at home with Mom, who would be telling her how wrong it was that the school blamed her, and she would have come back to school exactly the same.  Instead, by taking some time to learn why Malinda was a bully and help her take responsibility for her actions, things were different.

We, as educators, have a whole year to help our students learn to be better people.  We have a whole year to help them learn to be more productive, more accepting members of our classroom.  We tend to spend all our time helping them learn math and science and reading and writing and and and.  But we need to change that.  Malinda wasn't learning academics.  She was more interested in controlling the people around her.  By taking the time to work with her on responsibility, I was able to make the classroom more comfortable for her and the rest of the children.  So learning academics became easier and more important to her.  A win-win for all of us.

Now imagine if consequences matched the action.  Apologize? Not enough.  Change.  Make it better.  An apology of action is what is needed. Mess up someone's paper? Help him fix it.  Call out an answer in class? Be the child who calls on others to answer questions instead.  Exclude someone from a game.  You can't play the game anymore today.

Just imagine if every bully learned responsibility in elementary school.  Imagine if every child learned empathy for others in elementary school.  Imagine what middle school, high school, college, life would look like for the rest of us.  Try it.  Spend the time learning why your students are doing what they are doing, instead of doing what they are supposed to be doing in school.  Look for Logical Consequences to the actions of children. See if things get easier.  And let me know how it's going.  I'd love to hear your stories.

Want to know more? Look into Responsive Classroom, check out Universal Design for Learning, read my old blogs.

A Series on Empathy - Part 3 - CARES

Note to my readers - I know I said in my last blog that I would discuss Logical Consequences in this blog.  But I needed to talk about CARES first.  Stay tuned for blog number 4 in the series for Logical Consequences.

Elementary teachers often talk about the Summer Slide - the effects on academics because of children not being in school for two months over the summer.  And teachers often spend one or two months at the beginning of the year just reviewing what should have been learned at the end of the previous grade. Of course, year round school would eliminate the Summer Slide.  But so would children reading and writing over the summer months. But, for many of us, neither of these situations actually occurs.  

For me, I relished the review time.  Why?  I needed that time to teach something more important than the given curriculum requirements. Because, at the beginning of every year, I spent one or two months teaching my students about CARES.  What is CARES?

I spent time at the beginning of each year teaching - really teaching - each of these words and meanings.  We watched videos that demonstrated CARES.  We blogged about which CARES term we were working on.  We spied on each other looking for examples of CARES.  We wrote each night about examples of CARES.  We looked for examples in books, on tv, in the news, in the cafeteria, during lessons. My CARES bulletin board stayed up all year as a reminder of the meaning of these terms.

Why does this matter?  Why did I spend so much time each year on it?  Because I truly believed, and still do, that my primary job was to teach my students to be better members of society. And the society we were working in was the classroom and school society, first and foremost.  Also, by spending time at the beginning of the year on CARES, the rest of the year went very smoothly, since, when something went wrong, they would just need quick reminders to get back on track.

I remember one child, Robbie, (not his name) who struggled all year to learn these concepts.  He was a complainer and worked hard to attack and blame his classmates.  His seat was moved often, since no one wanted to sit with him for any length of time.  His parents encouraged his behavior, saying he was standing up for himself, even though I repeatedly demonstrated that this was not the case. 

At the beginning of the year, as Robbie caused problems, we would have class meetings to solve these problems he and the other children were facing.  The children would speak to him about their difficulties, using our CARES vocabulary.  He started out being defensive and then, began to listen. Eventually, Robbie learned a bit more self-control.  In fact, he asked the children to help him when he forgot.  They would walk up to him while he was ranting and simply say, "S-C." He would stop in mid-sentence, and breathe.  

Robbie didn't completely stop complaining about others.  But he did recognize that empathy and self-control were his difficult concepts.  And the class sincerely praised him at the end of the year for working so hard to be someone who CARES.

Robbie was my struggle that year but I'm glad I got to work with him.  We need to teach our children about CARES and all that those concepts imply.  We need to heal this society and improve it.  And it all starts with being a society that CARES.

Want to know more about CARES? Look into Responsive Classroom. Even if you can't afford the training, which I HIGHLY recommend, the books are amazing. I especially recommend The First Six Weeks of School.

A Series on Empathy - Part 2 - No Tolerance Policies

My second year of teaching had me in an inner city school in Brooklyn, NY.  I was very young, very inexperienced, and, really had no idea what I was doing.  The school was a safe haven for most of the children, who came from broken, drug filled, homes.  It was a daily occurrence to have a child come in upset because a family member was killed or arrested the night before. And my job, my ONLY job, as I was told often by my principal when we butted heads, was to teach these fifth graders the curriculum.  I failed miserably in doing just that job.  But that is a story for another day.

The principal believed that the only way to control the children - yes, I really meant to say control - was to have complete order.  That meant silence in the classrooms and hallways, scheduled bathroom breaks, silence in the cafeteria, chained and locked doors during school hours, and lock step teaching from the staff.  The environment was not conducive to learning for either me or my students, which was the main reason my principal and I did not always get along.

I had 35 children in my class that year.  I started with 30 but got more throughout the year.  On any given day, another teacher would be absent and that class would be split up among the rest of us.  So there were usually about 40 children in my small room at one time. And, because I never believed in following rules that made no sense, my room was noisy.  Controlled chaos is what I called it because the children would always talk and discuss and help each other out but, when the principal made her rounds, we would get silent instantly and I would take my place in front of the room.  The kids loved being part of this deception and they learned.  They learned the curriculum, they learned they could teach me a lot (like Spanish or like that the stationary store across the street was a place to buy drugs), they learned to be a family.

So one day, I get a new student, Harry (not his real name).  Harry came with his dad from China.  He spoke almost no English.  He was very small for his age and loved being in the classroom.  Harry's dad thought I, as his teacher, was the best thing that ever happened to him.  I learned that China treats teachers much differently than we do here in the US.

Harry fit in well.  He loved math (very little language needed) and worked hard to learn both English and Spanish.  He made friends in class. I thought things were going well and then the principal called me to her office. 

It seems that Harry had come to school with a switchblade knife.  This meant instant suspension.  There was a No Tolerance policy about bringing weapons to school.  And Harry had shown one of his neighbors that he had this knife in his backpack. So Harry's dad comes to get him and he is gone from my classroom for 10 days.  I asked the principal why Harry had the knife but she didn't know.  She never asked.  He had the knife, he gets suspended. Period.

When he came back, I decided to find out why Harry brought a knife to school.  "Did you know," I asked, "that you weren't allowed to have a weapon?" He did.  "So why did you bring it to school?" Harry told me, in his broken English, that there was a boy who was bullying him before school, while he waited for the doors to open and let him in the building.  He tried to tell the teacher on duty but couldn't get himself understood.

My first thought was, "Why didn't he tell me or another classmate?"  And then I started thinking about Harry coming to school.  One day he had a small cut over his eye.  He told me he fell.  One day his hand was bruised.  He told me he was playing ball and got hurt. 

My inexperience was showing.  I have since learned that I cannot ignore all the cuts and bruises.  I have learned to spend more time listening than talking.  But that day, I learned about the unfairness of a No Tolerance policy.  Harry was not a bad kid, nor was he a danger to anyone.  He didn't even take out the knife when the bully confronted him.  But Harry got suspended. And the bully? He went to class, never met with a teacher or the principal, and kept on bullying other children. 

Harry didn't get bullied anymore because my students, his classmates, came to the rescue.  They told me about the bully and told Harry how to avoid him.  They protected Harry before and after school from then on. I never went to the principal with my new information because, well, she scared me (she was a bully, too) so I talked to her as little as possible.

No Tolerance policies don't work.  Children do things for reasons.  By ignoring the reason and only doling out punishment, we are telling children they are powerless and we don't care about the why.  And suspending a child from school takes that child from the one place that is stable and puts them in a home situation that very well could be the cause of the problems to begin with. 

The start of teaching Empathy is teaching Responsibility.  Children need to learn that they are responsible for their actions.  But if we dole out punishments without giving them an opportunity to take that responsibility, we have taught nothing. 

 

When my students heard why Harry was suspended from school, they rallied behind him.  Their empathy was clearly showing.  Before we knew why he brought in the knife, rumors were flying about what a bad boy Harry was.  No empathy at all.  But Harry took the responsibility of his actions seriously.  When he came back to school, he stood, this tiny little boy, in front of the room and told the class that he did something wrong.  And then he answered all their questions about his why.  It gave them the chance to empathize.  And they did.  

Teach Responsibility and you begin to teach Empathy. And turn punishments into Logical Consequences.  (More on that in my next blog.)