No.2 By doing what you say you will do, you teach them to be accountable.
In my classroom, the warning is the easy part…
“If you don’t bring a pencil tomorrow, I’ll give you extra homework.”
“If you don’t stop talking, I’m going to send you to the principal’s office.”
“If you don’t memorize these vocabulary words, I’m going to make your test even longer.”
Warnings pop out of my mouth without even thinking. It seems natural and logical to assign appropriate consequences to certain actions (or inactions). But the difficult part is the follow through. When my little students fail to realize that maybe, just maybe, they will need a pencil at school, then I now must follow through and give them more homework, which means extra work for me. When that little punk in 3rd period decides to test me and continues talking, I necessarily must send him to the principal, just like I promised yesterday. This of course means I must deal with the hassle of explaining myself (across a language barrier) to a principal that doesn’t want to be bothered. And when my students decide anything else is of more importance than studying the 5 new vocabulary words that I assigned yesterday, then I’m now obligated to make their upcoming test even longer than usual, which means another hour of grading. Because I said I would do it, I now must follow through. That’s hard.
But on top of the new language skills we’re handing over to our students, we’re also teaching them lifelong lessons; lessons that will propel them further down the road of their education.
In our classrooms, by doing what we say we’ll do, we are teaching our students to be accountable. Certainly, they don’t understand that now, and maybe they never will. But we can sleep well tonight, knowing that we have done what is best for them.
Go to the next Tip:
Everyone is a Teacher (3 of 5)
