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THE TACTICAL TEACHER
circumstances where educators described many students as being “challenging” or, in more extreme cases, “at risk” of dropping out of school. Even when I was teaching in more mainstream schools, there were typically one or two students in my classes who were not interested in school; as a result, their behaviors were often disruptive. I found that in most such instances, there were ways to connect with these students and to have a positive impact on their attitudes and their behaviors. This book is based on extensive research in the fields of influence and persuasion as well as my decades of experience in K–12 education, much of it working with students considered at risk. It presents a range of influence and persuasion strategies and illustrates how K–12 teachers and administrators can use specific strategies as tools to positively impact the attitudes and behaviors of all students, even the most challenging ones. You will learn how to be tactical in your approach to students by exploring what psychology teaches about effective influence tactics, how game designers use payoff strategies to get people to keep playing, the techniques highly successful sales and advertising people use to persuade others to do what they want them to do, and even how professional hostage negotiators ensure peaceful outcomes. In the following sections, I explore the importance of influence tactics and how I’ve crafted my approach to applying them to students’ benefit. I then outline how I’ve structured and organized this book to help you do the same.
TACTICS AND INFLUENCE I’ve dedicated most of this book to the exploration of soft tactics and how teachers and administrators can effectively use them in a classroom. In Influence: Mastering Life’s Most Powerful Skill, Kenneth Brown (2013) defines soft tactics as those that support a target’s autonomy: They attempt to get someone to think or act in a certain way by making that alternative more appealing than others. These tactics include attempting to persuade with reason or with
emotion, complimenting the target (ingratiation), and offering an exchange. (p. 76)
In other words, soft tactics work to get the student to cooperate with you willingly. Soft tactics are very effective in positively influencing student behavior and attitudes over an extended period of time, and they’re quite different from hard tactics, which Brown (2013) describes as an “attempt to get someone to think or do something specific by metaphorically pushing them in that direction. These tactics include making reference to formal authority, building a coalition, and applying pressure” (p. 76). A teacher who announces to a student, “You should do what I tell you because I’m the teacher,” or a teacher who threatens to send a student to the principal’s office or to call home is using hard tactics. As you will discover in chapter 14 (page 171), these strategies can sometimes be effective in getting students to comply in the short term, but they seldom have any positive long-term effect. Although I use examples from a variety of contexts and sources, I examine the tactics and techniques in this book primarily through the lens of classroom teachers. You will see how effective these tactics are in a school context, with students from elementary to high school, even with those students who are the most challenging. Through real-life examples and the application of a wide range of research, you will learn various strategies to effectively influence the students in your classes to become cooperative and successful in school. Teachers and administrators who read this book and utilize even a fraction of the tactics described herein will see a significant improvement in their ability to positively impact student behaviors and achievement. To be clear, this is not a book about classroom management but one about behavior and influence. While there are certainly some strategies included that can work for an entire class, I mean for you to use most of the strategies I describe with an individual student or with a small group of students. As well, when you read this book’s strategies, you will likely find some that immediately attract you; you will
