A culture of leniency has infected our schools from top to bottom, and it’s hurting everyone in its wake.
Cheating and disrespect are rampant. Students repeatedly caught fighting are never expelled. Standards are so low it’s nearly impossible to fail.
There is virtually zero real accountability.
And the brunt of the pain is felt most acutely by us, the teachers, who have fewer and fewer options to correct it. Now more than ever you must be an expert at classroom management.
There is no other option. You must shore up your weaknesses and leverage the strategies that still work despite the permissiveness pushed from on high rotting education from the inside out.
One area through which almost every teacher can improve behavior is time-out. The keys to making it effective include:
Ensuring students know your rules backward and forward.
Explaining in detail the ‘why’ of time-out.
Modeling the words you will use to send students to time-out.
Modeling precisely how to go to time-out.
Modeling what is expected while in time-out.
Being 100% consistent with every student.
Refraining from lecturing, scolding, or otherwise adding to the consequence.
You must also live up to your end of the bargain. In other words, to ask for and receive good behavior from your students, you must make being in your classroom worth their while.
This has always been the case. You still and always must provide compelling instruction. You still must create a classroom your students enjoy being part of.
A few important elements of this include:
Being an expert in your content area(s).
Bringing energy and passion to your instruction.
Being a bold, confident leader who does what they say.
Using humor and having a spirit of fun.
Shifting more and more responsibility to your students.
Continuing to challenge, provide purpose, and raise the bar of excellence.
Refraining from rewarding students in exchange for good behavior.
Praising only new learning or true progress.
Leaning on well-taught and expertly performed routines.
Being consistently pleasant day in and day out.
Together, they amount to an environment students look forward to and feel pride in. This is what makes your consequences matter to students.
If time-out doesn’t feel any different than the experience of participating and learning in your classroom, then misbehavior will continue.
Which brings us to the length of time students should be sitting in time-out. You’ve likely been encouraged to keep it short. Perhaps you’ve even heard that time-out should be no longer in minutes than the student’s age, or even half their age.
But in a climate of little to no accountability your students need to feel time-out. Not as an extended punishment, but as a time to reflect on their mistake and how it affects others.
This requires all of the points above and longer time-outs.
12 to 15 minutes isn’t too long for for primary age students. Yes, even kindergartners. And 15 or 20 minutes or more for older students. Those who misbehave, presumably a second time if you’re using our SCM classroom management plan, must be given time to sit and stew for several reasons.
They need to calm down.
They need to be away from classmates they’ve disrupted.
They need to experience the feeling of missing out.
They need a strong message that their behavior wasn’t okay.
They need to begin feeling appreciative of being in your class.
They need to think about their specific misbehavior.
They need to be affirmed by being time-out that they alone broke a rule.
They need to feel the weight of accountability.
They need to feel contrition and remorse.
They need to resolve not to make the same mistake again.
As long as you follow the guidelines for making time-out most effective as mentioned earlier, all of this happens naturally. It’s what taking responsibility looks like.
Misbehaving students need time.
A few minutes won’t cut it. In fact, five minutes or so merely tells them that pushing a classmate or interrupting your lesson wasn’t a big deal.
There is a lot to this topic. If you have questions, please check out our books and guides to get a more complete picture and explanation of what exactly to do. In the meantime, know this:
Over the course of a school year, not only will longer time-outs result in better and more respectful behavior, but they’ll result in far less total time in time-out.
Your classroom is sacred. Every act of misbehavior must be viewed by you and by extension your class as absurd and completely out of place.
And wrong.
It must be viewed culturally as a big deal. In this way, and only in this way, will it help reverse the current landscape of anything-goes indulgence and misguided justice that is hurting the very children it purports to help.
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