Friday, October 9, 2020

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.

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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 ...