General Thoughts on CI - 6

Classroom control comes from the synergy between you and your students and is easy to achieve when you create reciprocal, back and forth authentically-interesting narratives in class. When you do that, your students engage and magically seem less snotty. It’s because you know how to lead them into their hearts and laughter in class. They become less zombie-like.

Would you rather go into a class full of zombies with a traditional lesson plan or into a class full of interesting, intelligent kids with solid, naturally-unfolding curriculum in front of you? The latter opens their heart. I would rather have that.

Our students always sit in class looking for something real until they give up in October. What can we do to give something real to them? The first thing we can do is to stop trying to change them, to “get them to learn” boring material. This is not what they need. We can’t “get students to learn” anything, ever. Students choose to learn. They choose to participate or not.

If your instruction is boring and only the college-bound kids seem interested, know that they’re not - they just need the A for college so they play along. The other kids are thus elbowed out of the class without even caring if that happens.

Instead, we must tap into our students’ natural interests in tableaux and stories and stop making them prisoners of our test-driven instruction. They cannot leave the room, so they are prisoners. We must, then, bring compassion and an open heart to them, because of the power we wield over them.

Then you won’t hate your job so much.