My Classroom Management A-Ha Moment

My third year teaching, something wonderful happened.

It started a couple of weeks into the school year. One of the teachers on my team had a student whose behavior was too difficult for the teacher to handle. He asked our team if we could transfer the student into another teacher’s class. The student was an African American girl, and one of the other teachers on our team was an African American woman. We all agreed that it would be beneficial to place the student in this teacher’s class.

That placement lasted one day.

The second teacher said she wouldn’t tolerate the student’s attitude, so we needed to move the student to another teacher’s class. Our team lead approached me about taking the student. He assured me if this placement didn’t work, he would take the student. I cautiously agreed to take the student in my class.

My cautious attitude toward this student, who I’ll call Tasha, was based on what I had heard about her from other teachers. They talked about Tasha as someone with a bad attitude and not much of a future. The consensus among the teachers was that it was just a matter of time before Tasha was arrested, pregnant, or both. With this reputation in mind, I was scared of allowing Tasha into my class. My class was a happy place, and I was worried that Tasha would disrupt my happy class.

With only one afternoon to prepare for Tasha, I went home and discussed my fears with my husband, who had also been a teacher. He listened to my concerns about Tasha joining my class, then he stopped my thinking in its tracks with one question:

“What would you do if you didn’t know her reputation?”

I was stunned. Was the answer really that simple? Possibilities for how I could change Tasha’s experience of school were flooding my mind. I began to plan for how I would integrate Tasha into my class, giving her a fresh start in a year that had already become chaotic for her.

Rather than concentrating on how I would react to Tasha’s behavior, I began to plan for how I could meet Tasha’s needs. This simple change in my perspective was about to change my classroom management forever.