Use your influence Set aside the power struggle, and you might find a better way to manage your class.
the Christmas holiday? How do you make the transition if they won’t respond? • Use your voice just above the volume of the class, and do so quickly. Your voice will shock or interrupt the class, and they will be more likely to hear you. • Having paced ahead of the class’ volume, you have reached a powerful point. You have a short time span to lead them into content and can choose between two effective techniques: 1. Drop your voice to a whisper 2. Step your voice down to a whisper
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ducators have always been surrogate parents, but now for some students we are their only role model. Increasingly, students seek attention at any expense.
If you have enough auditory voice control, you can do a step-down. The step-down in some cases is your only salvation but the skill takes more discipline and control.
How does this affect the way we manage the class? More than ever the child needs to have consistent and fair parameters while the relationship between the teacher and student is preserved. In the past, a teacher could manage with power to set parameters, but an increasing proportion of our pupils will no longer be motivated to behave and learn if we operate in this old, authoritarian way. Instead we have to start building relationships based on influence.
Remember to bring your voice volume all the way down and then down to a whisper. The drop to a whisper will, for most teachers, be successful.
Getting their attention Opening your lesson is a critical time because you establish the tone and expectations. The traditional way of getting the class’ attention is for the teacher to indicate that it is time to begin. The actual wording varies based on the year group and the individual instructor’s style. Whatever words are used they verbally communicate, “stop and focus here.” Some non-verbal techniques that support the verbal level of “getting their attention” are: 1. Standing still (Freeze Body) 2. Being at the front of the room (the location of authority.) 3. Toes pointed ahead 4. Weight distributed evenly between both feet 5. Giving oral directions that are brief What happens if there is a discrepancy between the teacher’s verbal message of stop and the teacher’s non-verbal communication of move? • As you ask them to stop what they are doing, they will look up. If you are walking, they notice that you are non-verbally contradicting yourself by continuing to move, so they tend to go back to what they were doing. What about the class that is loud on right-brain days, such as the week before
In either case, either by a direct drop to a whisper or a step-down, make sure you elongate your sentences, slow your voice down and give it a softer timbre. By doing so you will put the class in a listening mode. Exit directions Evidence of how confusing the oral format of giving Exit Directions can be is demonstrated by the frequent stream of students coming up to the teacher and trying to find out specific details. The bewildered pupils often preface their queries with, “Did you say...?” or “In other words, you want us to...?” At times it is, “Where do we put this when we’ve finished?” Sometimes we feel like screaming the answer because the information the student is seeking is so obvious to us. This is especially true when the instructor has used the same routines since the start of the year. The solution is to write the Exit Directions on the board so that there is a stable visual representation of what was said. Visual Exit Directions both increase the clarity of the message and double the length of the memory. This, of course, frees the teacher from having to be a parrot repeating what was said. The instructor can now assist students one-onone during the taskwork segment of the lesson. Kinaesthetic students The kinaesthetic student often has a high degree of distractibility during seatwork and may need one-on-one attention to stay on task. As a result, teachers often feel as if they need to stand next to the student for him or her to remain productive. Usually a classroom has two to six students who fit such a description. On some days a teacher literally has to race from one of these students to the next putting them back on task.
MICHAEL GRINDER
On the surface it looks as if this type of student is either on task or off task, but a closer examination reveals that there is a third mental state: Neutral. This is important because as the teacher races around with octopus arms trying to put off-task students back on task, he or she is probably just putting them from off to neutral. It is like the gears of a car: We really don’t shift from one mental state/gear to another without going through neutral. Through trial and error instructors have learnt that kinaesthetic students often don’t hear or see particularly well so that teachers have to touch them or, at the very least, be near them to get their attention. By the time certain students reach Year 4, they respond to a teacher’s presence with guilt. This makes them hold their breath. Therefore it is recommended that the teacher approaches the student in a slow manner and stays until the student finally begins to breathe and goes back on task. The influence approach The teacher who uses power gives the sense of feeling personally threatened by the student and consequently the intervention is “confrontational.” The teacher who uses influence separates the student as a person from the student’s behaviour. The focus is on the work. Does the Power Approach work? In many cases it does because there is an increasing number of students who don’t have a lot of human contact with adults at home. We know that students much prefer to have positive contact, but their second preference is to have any contact rather than no contact at all. This population of students is unconsciously willing to get into trouble to have adult contact. The influence technique is designed to break the “negative reinforcement syndrome.” The liability of the Power Approach is that the teacher has to physically remain in order for the student to comply. There is no self-motivation. How would a teacher increase her influence on the student being on task during seatwork? Since it is often the teacher’s proximity to the kinaesthetic student that puts that student on task, the teacher could move into the student’s area indirectly. The farther the instructor is from the student, and yet is still able to manage, the more the student tends to believe that he is on task because of his own efforts instead of the teacher’s presence. This action truly is influence.
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