Point of Inflection

It is the rare adult that intentionally uses strategies to explicitly show respect to others.  Our students are learning a lot of things, not just math, and respect has to be one of them.

Last week I wrote about how to teach responsibility.  The quick version: give and expect responsibility.  This week, respect.  The quick version: give and expect respect!

In both cases, it’s harder than it seems, which is my best excuse for writing pages and pages about it.  This post will focus on tangible ways to increase the level of respect in your classroom right now.  I write as a teacher of high school students at a private boarding school and as a director of a summer camp with 25 staff and 150 campers – two places where respect is vital to my mission.  I do not work at a school with a single student who would cuss me out in the middle of class, though I have been called some names and broken up a (singular) fight in the last five years.

Easy Ways to Give Respect

• Please say “please” when you ask someone to do something, and thank them after they do it. I direct a summer camp and this is almost a mantra I try to repeat with the counselors.  We make little kids do say “please,” right?  As adults, we sort of forget to do it, or understand that we’re all comrades and forgo the explicit “please” to… save time?  Anyway, saying “please” and “thank you” is probably the easiest way to show your respect for someone.  ”Take your homework out” becomes “Please take your homework out,” an expectant pause while they do it, and then “Thank you.”
• Say “Thank you” when you’re thankful for something.  For extra power, name explicitly that for which you’re thankful.  ”Thanks for being prompt, everyone” or “thanks for getting so into this material, guys, it makes my job really fun!”  This has the top-secret side-effect of making it easier to give negative feedback when you need to do that.
• Let them know how you’re feeling. You have to trust them before you can do this one, but once you do, it really shows them that, uh, you trust them.  ”When you guys get into discussing a concept so thoroughly it makes my job fun because the concepts are my favorite part!”  If they understand that you have favorite parts, bad days, pet peeves, and personal triumphs (“I’m really proud of this lesson plan”), they will all but have to respect you.  You trust them and you are a person and you are telling them all the ways you are trying to help them.  How could anyone resist?

Already, with this easy stuff, you are implicitly creating and reinforcing a culture of respect.  There’s deeper respect than adding a few words to your diction, though.

Hard Ways to Give Respect

• Make the schedule of your class clear, and stick to it. If you say you’ll hand back graded work the next day, please actually do it.  If you say there will be a test every Friday, please be ready to give one every Friday, and if you say your office hours will be at 7:30 on Thursdays, don’t change that at the last minute.  If you do need to change the schedule, please show respect in that as well, by announcing the change as soon as possible ahead of time.  If you change things up all the time, take variable amounts of time to grade work, and are inconsistent with your schedule, please do not expect the students to have their work done when you want it to be, or for them to even show up to class on time!
• Find ways to make students part of their own assessment. If you can trust a student to be his own judge (in any part), he will see that you respect him and his time.  You’re saying, “hey, I’m getting paid, and you’re required to be here by law.  I think you should have some say in what goes on here.”  If you can find a way to let students guide the class as a whole, that’s even better.  ”You’ll go to jail if you leave (or whatever happens), but while you’re here, I want to do my best to make this interesting and enriching from your point of view.”
• Tell students what you’re trying to do with the class. Just tell them everything.  This was hard for me in some sort of ego way I can’t describe.
  • Apologize when you waste a student’s time. The obvious corollary is Try Not To Waste Students’ Time, but you’ll fail in that for at least some kids (sorry, I’m a pessimist I guess).  When you do give a stupid assignment or are unprepared for a lesson plan (not that I’ve ever been unprepared!) just apologize for it.
  • State the objectives of your lesson. It’s OK if they know your plan.  Bill Ferriter, a NC county teacher of the year, explains why the pedagogy is good.  But it also just shows your students that you want them involved in the process.  You think they’re smart enough to be in the know.
  • State everything else. “I was hoping you would do xyz.”  ”I never thought of that!”  ”It’s frustrating to me that you won’t focus on this.”  ”Today we’re going to try something that I’m a little worried about” (and then all the reasons you think it’ll be great, of course).

These harder things to do are hard for me because I can’t remember to do them all the time.  Some of them are a lot of work and some of them just don’t occur to me naturally.  Why do the students need to know what’s going to happen – they’re about to find out!  But intentionally striving to express your respect is worth some extra work to me, and, I’m not kidding you guys, I’ve seen these methods improve my classroom and camp culture dramatically.  Please try these out!

Explicitly Appreciate Respect You Receive

All the same reasons, and all the same benefits.  ”I appreciate you letting me know that you’ll have to miss a class next week,” “thanks for getting back to me about this,” “thanks for waiting so patiently while I answered Sarah’s question,” “it was so nice of you to think of this!”

Don’t Accept Disrespect

Frankly, I have much less experience with this than some other teachers at my school.  I don’t know if my methods of fostering respect are just SO GOOD, or that I mostly teach older students, or what, but I don’t get a lot of disrespect directly.  More often one student will disrespect another in some way.  Whether I get it or a student gets it, I address it directly and immediately by saying briefly something like “that was disrespectful, and disrespect has no place in our school.”  I’m serious when I say this.  I’ve got a controlled anger in my voice even for such a small infraction as “shut up” (“shut up” usually gets said exactly once per year in each of my courses).  I ask the students involved to (please) find a respectful way to express whatever they want to communicate.

This is a high priority for me and I will stop a lesson to talk about respect even when we’re a week behind my original schedule (“sorry class, we have to change the schedule because I made unrealistic estimates/you guys aren’t in to it/you guys are so into it”).

I hope you’ll give some of this a try.  I bet all of you think of your students with respect, and I’m sure almost all of you treat your students with respect.  It is the rare adult, though, that intentionally uses strategies to explicitly show respect to others.  Our students are learning a lot of things, not just math, and respect has to be one of them.  Please audit your own communication methods and see if there are any ways you can build more respect into them!

Graceachen recently wrote a post that got me thinking about ways to teach the “stuff” that is hard to assess accurately and even harder to teach explicitly.  For example, I would like to teach all of my students:

• Responsibility
• Respect
• Curiosity
• Investigative skills
• Teamwork skills
• To be comfortable with a lack of knowledge and with mistakes

But I’m not going to make a standard for each of these things and assign grades, and no section of any one of my lesson plans will start, “here’s one way you can be curious¹.”  However, I do teach these things intentionally and I do assess them.  In this post, I write about how to teach responsibility, and about some traps that seem important to avoid.  There are two types of responsibility: the fulfill-your-obligations kind and the take-ownership-of-your-destiny kind.  I’m talking about both.

Find Ways to Give Ownership, and Communicate Them

Give students the answers to their homework

Matt Townsley and grace said that they use homework to teach responsibility.  I do this too and so do many other teachers.  The three of us make sure that students have answer resources available before assignments are due so that they can more easily feel responsible for the quality of their work.  Without answers, if a student does his work incorrectly, the excuse is easy: “I didn’t know how,” or “I guess there’s a mistake.”  With solutions, a student is denied these reasons for poor work.

Tell students, “the solutions to these problems are available to you so that you can make sure you understand; please make sure you understand.”  This communicates that it is their responsibility, that you think they can do it, and that you trust them to do it.

Refer to student work and expertise during class

Please have students create projects that explain or summarize the concepts you’re studying.  When you’re lecturing, or when a student has a question, refer to those projects.  Whomever made that project will be directly responsible for the knowledge being disseminated.  You might also make different groups of students “expert groups” in different areas, and ask those groups specific questions (but please do give them the tools to actually become experts before putting them on the spot).

Again, it’s not always easy to think of telling the students that you’re doing this, but saying “these posters will be used as reference for the rest of the year” will let the kids know that you expect them to make production-quality work.  Actually using them will show them that you expect them to make production-quality work.  ”These posters are going live, kids.”  They won’t mess it up after you’ve articulated (and demonstrated) such high expectations of them.

Use Standards-Based Grading (if you must grade)

Or at least, some grading system as clear.  Please don’t use a grading system that obscures the reasons for your students’ grades (like averaging), because then the focus will shift from the responsibility of the knowledge to the responsibility of the grade.  I think grades should be as invisible as possible.  SBG is the best grading system I’ve seen because it gives the clearest idea about what a student needs to learn to improve his status.

You can only hold a student responsible for his grade after convincing him he can control it, and showing him how the controls work.  If, at any point, he loses that control, you won’t be able to expect anything more out of him.

Model responsibility (visibly)

Let your students see something you’re working on.  Let them in on your process for their class!  Show them all the ways you practice, prepare, and follow up.  Some of my students read my blog (hey guys!) and they see me in their other classes, observing other teachers.  Unique to Scattergood, perhaps: they see me attending required community events, keeping my apartment clean, helping with dinner cleanup when it’s my turn.

Don’t take responsibility away

Don’t grade homework

You shouldn’t grade homework because doing so transfers responsibility in a bad way.  When students have to do homework for their own sake, they are being responsible for their own knowledge and edification.  When you give them a grade, they will change – they will think themselves responsible only for that grade.  Please also tell your students why you are not grading homework – the effect doubles when they know what you’re trying to do.

There are many arguments for grading homework, but I haven’t heard one yet that’s convinced me.  Let’s debate in the comments if you’ve heard one that’s convinced you.

Avoid assigning unnecessary work

No one will feel much passion for work that they consider pointless.  If you really think that Johnny needs to do 30 factoring problems (lots of good arguments for assignments like these), then please explain to Johnny why you think so.  It may take something more convincing than mere explanation.

If a student thinks your whole class is unnecessary work, you have a more fundamental problem on your hands, and you might consider starting there.

Of all of my suggestions, which are all hard to do, I think this is the hardest.  If you’ve got a bunch of kids at different levels, 140 hours, and 140 skills to teach, you may have to give assignments that are not individually tailored to each student’s level – but you can at least tell them that!

Don’t answer questions that your students have the tools to answer

In my experience, I am my students’ favorite resource.  They will ask me a question before they use any other resource, including their notes, their books, or even their own understanding.  If you think that a student should be expected to be able to answer a certain kind of question, expect it of her!  Please do not waste your own effort by completing parts of your student’s lesson for her!  Don’t be too helpful!

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None of these are explicit ways of teaching responsibility.  You make them explicit by talking about them, but the real lesson lies in their practice.  The real lesson happens when a student didn’t do some homework and can connect that with the fact that he’s feeling left out in class, or when he doesn’t understand something he’s expected to.  The real lesson happens when his classmates are looking at the crappy poster he made and complaining to him about how inaccurate or incomplete it is, or, better, when his classmates are looking at the awesome poster he made and complimenting him or incorporating it in their own work.  I guess that for my suggestions to work, your classroom culture needs to be set up in a way that allows these feelings to happen, and you need to be on the lookout for them, ready to emphasize them and focus them.

Assessing responsibility is more vague in my mind than teaching it.  I mean, ultimately, if a student passes a class, she’s responsible for that, and if she doesn’t, she’s responsible for that too.  If you get the opportunity to give written feedback to your students, or to have one-on-one meetings with them, make sure to emphasize what you saw working and not working towards the goal of passing.  Any other ideas out there?

This is a fascinating topic to me as a teacher and as a member of society contemplating parenthood.  Expect more, focusing on my other bullet points!