Affirmative Classroom Management

How do I develop effective rules and consequences in my school? (ASCD Arias)

Richard L. Curwin

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781416618522
• eBook ISBN:
  9781416618553
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This publication offers clear and positive strategies that empower teachers and administrators to develop effective rules and consequences. Richard Curwin's approach emphasizes student and parent engagement; schoolwide collaboration; and developing student responsibility. Curwin shows how educators and administrators at all levels can

-Ensure that classroom and schoolwide rules are meaningful and significant.
-Involve students to develop effective rules and appropriate consequences.
-Collaborate with parents and colleagues to foster a sense of community.
-Treat students fairly by enforcing consistent rules while adapting individual consequences to fit the circumstances.

The strategies offered aim to make schools more harmonious and equitable environments, where students and teachers can move beyond discipline problems and get down to the real work of learning and teaching.

Introduction

This guide is written to help teachers create a positive, practical plan for managing behavior issues. It is written to help administrators guide teachers through a process that will improve their classrooms and support efforts to develop the best behavior plan for their schools. It is also written for professors of education, who can use all of the activities to help prepare students of education to be better teachers.

When groups of people get together to form a community, no matter how big or small, a social contract is built, based on three key elements:

• Values, beliefs, or goals
• Rules or laws
• Punishments or consequences

How well developed these three elements are determines how effectively the society functions. Schools work the same way.

Try This: Reflect on the different challenges that students today face. This might be done in a group or faculty meeting, with everyone sharing their insights. Here’s a scenario to get you started.

(1) Relive a day in your life when you were the age of your students. Start by recalling waking up, getting ready to go to school, the clothes you wore, what you had for breakfast, and how you traveled to school. Go through your classes, both the good ones and the bad; try to remember your teachers, your books, your relationship with other students. Remember going home and how you felt about the day. (2) Now repeat the exercise, this time imagining you are one of your students.

The Nature of Rules

The way to motivate students to follow rules is by deriving those rules from what is most important to them and to us: our values. For those who may not have seen the connection of rules and values before, consider the following illustration.

When you board an airplane, the first thing the flight attendant might say is, “The number one value of this airline is safety.” Safety is a value, not a rule. It cannot be enforced because it’s too vague. The flight attendant next provides three actual, specific, enforceable rules: Fasten your seat belts, shut off all electronic devices, and set tray tables and seat backs in the upright position.

Although these three rules can be enforced, what actually motivates us to follow them is that we believe in the value that underlies them: safety. There is nothing inherently motivating about fastening seat belts. If we didn’t grasp this rule’s connection to safety, we would be much more likely resist it, to cheat.

One of the best strategies for connecting rules to values is the “Operationalizing of Fuzzy Concepts” technique (adapted from Tom Hutchinson’s work at the University of Massachusetts). Think of a value you hold, then close your eyes and watch a mental movie of that value being broken in your classroom. Use no words, just mental pictures of behaviors. For example, if you value students being kind, what does it look like when students are behaving in a manner that is unkind? Perhaps you see a student ignoring someone who needs help. Now you have the basis for a rule. The value is “be kind, “ and a rule you might derive from that value is “help others when they need it.”

Here is another example. You value respect. Your mental movie of a behavior that violates that value shows a student swearing at a classmate. The value is “show respect for other students,” and a rule based on that value is “swearing at others is not allowed.”

Both rules and values are equally important and dependent on one another.

Try This: See how many behaviors you can think of for the following values:

1. Be respectful.
2. Be honest.
3. Be fair.
4. Be nice.
5. Try hard.

Now look at the list of rules that follows and identify an underlying value for each. Do not limit yourself to the five values above. Think of any value that makes sense to you.

Twenty Potential Rules

1. No touching others without permission.
2. Do your work on time.
3. Do not use inappropriate words.
4. Raise your hand before speaking.
5. Be on time.
6. Help others who need it.
7. Do not insult the teacher in public.
8. No running in the halls.
9. Do not throw food during lunch.
10. Shut off and keep off all phones during class time.
11. Clean up your area.
12. Do not deface school property.
13. Complain to the teacher only in private.
14. No putdowns of other students allowed.
15. Leave all weapons at home.
16. Come to school dressed appropriately, without offensive or provocative clothing.
17. If you know that a student is going to do harm in the school or to someone, tell an adult.
18. Do not use racial slurs.
19. Do not touch another student’s property without permission.
20. Make sure all notes home reach your parent(s).

Developing Great Rules

My definition of a rule is what you will formally enforce every time it’s broken. Issues covered by rules are serious and significant enough to always require intervention, no exceptions. A step down from rules are expectations, which cover issues that are still important but less significant; depending on circumstances, you may or may not wish engage the student about falling short of an expectation. An example of an expectation is raising hands during a discussion. Most of the time, a class functions more smoothly when students raise their hands before interrupting the teacher or other students. But when a discussion becomes intense, students may just offer ideas without raising their hands. Interrupting this great discussion with a reprimand about hand-raising would be inappropriate.

Defining a rule as something that is always enforced has two implications. The first is that we must choose only rules of significance and avoid wasting time and energy on small issues that can be quickly and quietly dealt with without going through a formal process. For an illustration, think back to childhood and the informal way you learned social skills. Maybe one or both of your parents told you not to shout in restaurants or reminded you to wash your hands before eating, but it’s unlikely they formally enforced these expectations with a series of consequences. What your parents did formally enforce were the rules of significance, most likely related to safety: no hitting, no crossing the street without an accompanying adult, and so on. In the classroom, deciding which behavioral guidelines are important enough to be enforced every time versus sometimes is the first step in developing rules. Try the following strategy:

1. List all behavioral guidelines you believe you need in order to run your school or classroom effectively. Refer to the list of 20 potential rules in the previous section for examples.
2. Go back and rank the guidelines you’ve listed in order of importance.
3. Set a cut-off line, deciding which are rules of significance that must be enforced every time and which are less important—expectations that don’t require that kind of enforcement. Now you have the basis for rule selection.

The second implication of defining rules as behavioral guidelines that are always enforced is that it allows students to reliably predict that rule breaking has consequences. Students cannot develop responsible behavior without certainty that something will happen when they break a rule. Predictability of rule enforcement is key. In fact, studies have shown that the certainty of getting a ticket slows speeding drivers more than the severity of the punishment. If teachers or administrators do nothing when rules are broken, things will fall apart.

To find out how predictable your rule enforcement is, try any of the following experiments:

1. Ask you students all the different things you do when a student breaks Rule X [add one of your rules here]. Do they see you as enforcing rules in a consistent way?
2. In a journal, keep a simple list of your rules and check off each time one is broken. Later, go back and write down what you did after each incident. A week should be enough time to get an indication of your consistency.
3. If it is possible to have an observer in your classroom over an extended period of time, ask that person to provide feedback on your enforcement consistency. You can find a wealth of honest and free observers by working with students in education programs at your local college.

Administrators are frequently judged by their faculty on how consistently they enforce violations of both classroom and schoolwide rules. One of the most common complaints I have heard over the years from teachers is that the administrator didn’t do anything after a student was referred to the office. Although the fairness of this charge is debatable, teachers’ perceptions do have a strong influence of the functioning of a school.

Administrators can check their enforcement consistency by asking for feedback in a discussion with the whole faculty, in discussions with department heads or team leaders only, or through anonymous written letters. If the administrators’ perceptions differ from those of the faculty, something must be done to address this disconnect. There are two ways to begin this process:

1. Hold a whole-faculty meeting to discuss the difference between rules and expectations and how to deal with each.
2. Clarify the responsibilities of administration and faculty when students are referred.

Try This: At a faculty meeting or department meeting, or in informal groups, take the list of 20 potential rules offered earlier and see if all participants can agree on the value each is based on and whether it is a rule or an expectation. The goal is not to unanimously determine the “right answers” but to give each participant a chance to test his or her decision by explaining it to others and considering their feedback.

Categories and Qualities

I have identified categories of rules and expectations as a way to assist in rule development and overall behavior management. I call them the critical categories. They are meant to be guidelines, not absolutes. Each category has its own focus—its area of critical concern. Some issues, like those related to safety, cross categories; they may lie somewhere between procedural (e.g., what to do if there is an intruder in the school) and social (e.g., keep your hands and feet to yourself). It is less important to decide which is the best category for any specific rule than it is to reflect on the concerns each category addresses. What ideas do they give you for setting rules and expectations?

The Five Critical Categories

• Academic: These are rules and expectations that relate to learning, such as doing homework, participating in class, cheating, and interrupting others. Examples: Do your own work. Hand in all work on time.
• Social: These rules and expectations involve issues such as fighting, put downs, insubordination, and the misuse of technology-related devices. Examples: Keep your hands and feet to yourself. Touch other students’ property only with permission. Shut off all smartphones in class.
• Procedural: These rules and expectations are more important with younger children but apply to all students. They include being on time, lining up, getting notes from and to home when necessary, following dress codes (if your school has them), and behaving appropriately in common areas. They also include safety procedures to inform students what to do when there is a dangerous situation in school. Examples: Put your supplies away when you finish using them. If there is danger in the school, like an oncoming tornado or an intruder, I will warn you to get to safety. When you hear me warn you, go immediately into the closet (or another designated safe room).
• Cultural: These rules and expectations are about the way we treat minority groups based on religion, race, sexual orientation, or disability. Examples: Do not offer food to a student who is fasting. Do not insult another student’s religious clothing.
• Personal: These are rules and expectations that students create for themselves to help them be better students and improve the way they treat others. Personal rules can be divided into two groups: those students keep confidential and those they share with others through means such as journals, sharing circles, and “the Friday report.” Example: I will let others finish saying something before speaking myself.

Try This: Return to your earlier list of rules and expectations and place each into a category (academic, social, procedural, cultural), trying to find at least two rules and two expectations for each category. Just guess what your students might say for the personal category.

What Is a Good Rule?

1. A good rule is related to an important value. Students need to see the reason why the rule is important.
2. A good rule is parsimonious and easy to remember. A rule like “because there are so many students in class and the room is small and the desks are too close together, everyone must sit down when the f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The Nature of Rules
• Categories and Qualities
• Exceptional Expectations
• Developing Rules
• The Nature of Consequences
• Fair Is Not Equal
• Putting It All Together
• Encore Divider
• Encore
• References
• Related Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright