How to Gain Control of Your Classroom

Who’s in Control?

This is an important question…but, before I attempt to answer it, I should explain that I CAN’T answer this question for you. I can only answer it as it applies to me. As a former classroom teacher, it was a question I grappled with the first day I walked into my cooperating teacher’s classroom during my semester as a student teacher.

It was easy to see that I wasn’t the one in control. It was Mrs. Hall’s classroom. She was my incredible mentor teacher during my student teacher days, and since it was her classroom of third graders, she was in control. Not me. But, I did what I was told to do, going through the various aspects of learning how to teach children. I did well…but, I was never truly the teacher—just the helper, as far as the kids were concerned.

I awaited the time during my training when Mrs. Hall would leave me alone for a few hours on occasion while I tried to figure out how to solo. Man! I’d be lying if I said that I felt like I was in control even then. I wasn’t, and it was painfully obvious by the way the third graders reacted to my approach. They weren’t listening to me. I was trying all the strategies I was taught to use that, in theory, were supposed to work with kids. I reverted to yelling, as that was how control was gained in my growing-up years. Out it came. I found myself raising my voice to be heard above the din of noise my out-of-control students were making on a daily basis. Funny, the more out-of-control they became, the more control they had…over me.

Control.

If you were to ask me today what the definition of control is, I would tell you that it is an imaginary, self-centered perspective that we create in order to mask our fear. That’s what I was doing in my early days as a teacher. Thankfully, with the help of Mrs. Hall, Jim Fay, Foster Cline, and Betsy Geddes, I was able to reset my dysfunctional default and change the direction of my approach to dealing with kids. Let’s face it, if a teacher has classroom management problems, he or she is not truly able to get to the craft of teaching. Almost anyone can learn how to disseminate knowledge, but without exemplary management skills, it doesn’t matter how sharp you are with content, very few of your students will ever get to benefit from your expertise if you don’t know who’s in charge.

That brings me to the answer to my opening question—who’s in control? Wait. Before I answer it, I have to change something. I have to change the question. The question cannot be, “Who’s in control?”

As a classroom manager, the real question is, “WHAT can I control?”

Let me tell you folks, knowing the answer to this revised question is what saved my career. Here’s the answer…I can only control myself, and that is ONLY on a good day! The point is, I learned that I cannot actually control ANYONE who lives outside my skin. So, if it’s true that I cannot actually control anything, then what? How would I ever get anything done in my classroom? Simple. I quit thinking that I should have the control to make kids listen, to make kids behave, to make them learn.

I adopted a new philosophy. I would only try to control how I would react to situations that arose in the classroom. It was very freeing to learn that not only was I NOT in control over my kids, but also that I didn’t need to be. What I needed control over was how to handle myself and my attitude when things didn’t go the way I thought they should go. Cline, Fay, and Geddes somehow sprinkled magic fairy dust on me and I really began to fly as a classroom manager. I learned how to SHARE control with my students over matters that I was willing to let go of. For instance, I had to figure out what was really my problem as a teacher and what were really my students’ problems. I quit taking ownership over my kids’ problems. I figured out that there were only a few big issues to deal with in most of the behavioral issues my kids’ displayed.

In order to get buy-in with my students, I quit imposing my rules upon them. Instead, we had a nice long conversation about the kind of classroom THEY wanted to learn in. It was amazing! My students explained that they wanted to feel safe, they didn’t want to fight or be called names, and they wanted to be treated fairly. Some offered that they needed times to be able to talk and also times for quiet. Hmmmmm. Well, those became our rules for a happy classroom, and they applied to me as the teacher, as well.

Soon, when disagreements arose in the classroom, when noise became too loud for me to handle, or when I felt like they were making it impossible for me to teach, I was able to call a meeting of the minds and discuss how we needed to realign ourselves with what we all had agreed would be our classroom rules.  I told them that I can only be the best teacher they have ever had if they let me teach. So, if I begin to feel that they are preventing me from being the best teacher they have ever had, I cannot allow whatever is happening to continue.

This new approach was startlingly successful. It was as if a cloak of darkness had been yanked off of all of us. I remember saying to my students when they were getting noisy that I was more than happy to let them make all the noise they wanted during recess time. That is their turn to make noise. When it is classroom time, that is my time to make noise, and since I would rather teach than make noise, I should be allowed to use my share of my time the way I want, just like they get to do. It made sense to them. It made sense to me. So, when I said, “Whose turn is it to make noise?” they all agreed that it was my time when we are in the classroom. I didn’t have to say anything more about noise except, “Is it my time or your time for noise?” I said it with a smile on my face—no anger, just an air of logic that allowed them to take hold of their own self-control.

I have many ordinary classroom experiences that became extraordinary simply because I had figured out whose problems belonged to whom and whose responsibility it was to fix the issues when they arose. By having a very general set of logical rules for all of us to abide by in the classroom, management or need for it became minimal. And, best of all, no more yelling to get what I wanted. I only needed to ask if we were all adhering to the decisions we had made about our rules. The rest of the issues truly took care of themselves. As my experience and wisdom grew over time, I became even more aware of what I needed to control and what I could let go. Parents were absolutely stunned that their kids behaved as well as they did in my classroom. All I could say is, “We have a very democratic method of class behavior that we use in the classroom, and it makes sense to all of us.” The secret was shared control, and it is a game changer.

Being Smart, Getting Smarter

Did you know that there is more than one way to be smart? According to theorists, educational psychologists, and professors, such as Howard Gardner, Carol Dweck, and Thomas Armstrong, evidence suggests they’re right.

Howard Gardner developed the Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory about 35 years ago. I stumbled upon his theory when I was earning my graduate degree. I was immediately entranced by it because I had been teaching to my students’ intelligences for some time prior to knowing what such pedagogy was actually called. I had not received formal training in MI theory, but I had learned how to teach Shurley English, using the Shurley Method. When I began to realize the potential of what MI could do in my classroom, it delighted me to realize that I was already half-way there because I was teaching Shurley English daily to my first and second graders. Almost every new concept I taught in the Shurley Method began with a jingle. The jingles became a one-stop shop for my kids’ multiple intelligences. Gardner described the various intelligences with some fairly lofty terms that Dr. Thomas Armstrong has simplified. Here’s a quick run-down of the intelligences. I thought you might like to see a side-by-side chart of Gardner’s original titles and Armstrong’s simpler version:

I won’t go into all the particulars about the intelligences at this time, but I encourage you to research them. For now, let it suffice to say that I am unabashedly biased when it comes to teaching the language arts with Shurley English, but the excellent research available about MI makes me appreciate it even more.

Take the Shurley English Reading Jingles for example…say you want to teach your kids about their multiple intelligences and then to help them discover their unique combinations of smarts. Shurley jingles bring Word Smarts, Picture Smarts, Body Smarts, and People Smarts to the table every time. Using the brightly illustrated, text-rich Jingle Posters, I point out the one-to-one correspondence of the text to the words I am teaching students in the jingle. The illustrations help create a memory marker for the students to associate with the particular jingle. That’s the Picture Smart and Word Part component. As the jingles are learned to a rhythm or a tune, students tap into their Music Smarts. To help them lock down the memorization of the jingle, I have my students make specific choreographic movements to jingles, bringing in their Body Smarts. It’s amazing to watch how students’ coordination improves simply by rehearsing the same movements every day in the jingles! Finally, my students’ interpersonal skills get a workout as the jingles are mastered. Since the jingles are recited or sung aloud chorally, a sense of community saturates the classroom. When someone bobbles up a jingles, everyone can giggle freely without risk of feeling “called out.” Jingle Time generates a perfect opportunity to help kids develop risk-taking skills under the careful community support of their peers. Of course, this gave me the opportunity to help students learn HOW to support, self-correct, and peer-correct without creating a sense of shame for making a mistake.

This is where the work of Dr. Carol Dweck comes in. Her Growth Mindset theory is all abuzz right now, and for good reason. I love how her research defines the possibilities for every learner. Basically, her theory posits that our smarts are not necessarily a fixed quantity of intelligence, talent, or aptitude—we are not just a bundle of inherited genetic traits that spell out fame and fortune for our future. Simply stated, her theory explains how we can help students (and people, in general) to perceive themselves as potential learners of anything new they would like to know. Unfortunately, empty praise for a child’s looks, smarts, or athletic ability can promote a lack of motivation. Whereas, a systematic mindset of “My smarts are not fixed—I can become smarter if I apply myself” seems to have a remarkable impact upon student learning.

As I taught systematically the structures behind the Shurley Method, I was doing just what Dweck prescribes in her research…more time on task learning the tougher parts, practicing systematically every day the various aspects of the lessons—it all makes sense. I was “accidentally” stretching my students’ self-awareness and their self-esteem by teaching them to have fun while learning the hallmark concepts of our language. This daily practice had a profound influence on my students, and now that they are grown and pioneering their own careers, I still hear from them. They tell me how they believed they were smart when they were in my class. Their underlying beliefs, as Dweck puts it, were directly influenced in a remarkable way because they actually believed they could get smarter with hard work.

My hat’s off to these gifted researchers, whom I consider mentors, for making public such important, evidence-based theories that helped me achieve success in my teaching. And a special thanks to Brenda Shurley for developing a curriculum for teaching English that enabled me to apply these theories naturally!

Help reluctant writers with reverse engineering!

In the world of technology, reverse engineering is a slippery slope, as any technology patent office will tell you. But, in Shurley English, we feature a clever type of reverse engineering that can be groundbreaking for reluctant writers.

In Shurley English, we make it our goal to help students understand basic grammar concepts and definitions in a fun way. But, we also want to make sure students can transfer their grammar knowledge into writing. We use a strategy called Sentence Blueprints.

Sentence Blueprints are the result of studying the Question and Answer Flow, the innovative system of questions and answers that help students classify the parts of speech of words used in a sentence. Basically, a sentence blueprint is actually the Question and Answer Flow process after it undergoes reverse engineering, Shurley style.

Since students are taught the Shurley English Jingles early and often, they already have gained a wealth of knowledge about how words work in English. The Question and Answer Flow advances that learning by putting it into practice in the analysis of sentences. Now comes the reverse engineering aspect. We provide young writers a blueprint for a sentence. The sentence may be built from a set of parts of speech labels, such as A (which stands for Article Adjective), Adj (Adjective), SN (Subject Noun), V (Verb), P (Preposition), A (Article Adjective), OP (Object of the Preposition). Printed all together, the labels or blueprint look like this: A Adj SN V P A OP.

Next, we present the writer with a page filled with open fields where words can be arranged into sentences, using the blueprint.  (I'll include a Sentence Blueprint at the end of this article!) By reversing the process of the Q & A Flow, we ask the writer to start with the same core of a sentence they would classify, asking the exact same questions as they would during analysis. This time, however, they will have the freedom to use whichever words they like to create a sensible, correctly written sentence. If I take this example a step further, I think you will see what I mean. Here is my example:

In this example, I would start with the subject noun and verb. Then, just like in the Q& A Flow, I would move past the verb rummaged and go to the prepositional phrase, word by word. After I finish the verb part of the sentence, I would then move to the subject noun and work in reverse until I get to the last word I write in the sentence, the Article Adjective The, which is the actual first word of my sentence. (Here's a great video that shows you the entire process.)

By teaching students to think of the Q & A Flow in reverse, they are, in a sense, participating in reverse engineering in the realm of linguistics called semantics. How cool is that! After teaching kids to focus on just one sentence at a time to focus with special emphasis on the skill of sentence building, they seldom struggle with knowing the difference between a complete sentence vs. a fragment, a problem many, many students have in school when it comes to writing.

Listen, Move, and LEARN!

TPR (Total Physical Response) has its roots in second language acquisition, but it found its way into Shurley English too. TPR was first incepted by a psychology professor from San Jose University, CA, James Asher. He developed the idea almost fifty years ago, but it has truly helped students to acquire new languages with great facility.

What is TPR (Total Physical Response)?

The strategy Asher developed first involves teaching students to just sit back and listen attentively, much the same way that babies typically acquire their first language. Then, a requested response is modeled repeatedly until the student has connected the response to the request. The request is focused upon helping students acquire new vocabulary and associating the word to a movement, to a gesture, or to a repeated meaningful practice of some kind. When the movement is linked to a specific vocabulary word, students acquire the word easily. With lots of practice, the new word moves into the student’s long-term memory.

How can I integrate TPR into my ELA day?

Integrating TPR can be a fairly simple task; let's start with language arts definitions. In Shurley English, our grammar and reading jingles tap into the TPR philosophy. In fact, any kind of action song or jingle is basically a TPR event with added music. The jingles we teach in Shurley English introduce students of any language to a whole host of vocabulary and help them lock in the new academic language through music and movement. (Here's an entire article about it!)  Even if students merely chant the jingles, it’s the cadence, rhythm, and rhyme, along with the movement, that enable students to make strong connections between the movement and the vocabulary. This ultimately helps students lock down important language concepts that will stay with them for a lifetime. 

If you haven’t checked out our ELA jingles yet, you can listen to a sampling of them on our YouTube channel. Enjoy!