The year I spent with Tasha in my classroom turned out to be a very fruitful year for both Tasha and me. It took several months for her to really blossom as a student, but there was a noticeable difference in her behavior immediately.
Tasha struggled with reading, but I quickly found out that she was good at math. She was also willing to help other students with their math seatwork. Once she saw that I treated her differently than she had been treated, she began to relax in the classroom. However, her reading showed zero improvement until the second half of the school year, when she gained a year’s-worth of improvement in reading. By the end of the year, she was a completely different student.
By the end of the year, I was also a completely different teacher.
The culture of the school (and school district) was to treat students like data points. Students were expected to behave in a quiet, compliant manner so teachers could fill their heads with the knowledge and skills they would need to achieve a passing score on the state standardized test at the end of the school year. At no point were students considered individual people, each with their own set of skills and needs. This created a vacuum in which teachers would insert their own thoughts and feelings about students with behavior issues. Their thoughts and feelings were usually grounded in deficit thinking.
When my husband asked me how I would treat Tasha if I didn’t know her reputation, his question reoriented my thinking away from fear of Tasha’s potential lack of behavioral compliance and toward thinking about what Tasha needed from me as her teacher. In other words, I stopped trying to think of how to control her and started trying to think of how to serve her. I was driven throughout that school year to see Tasha as a child, rather than a test-taker, who needed me to provide a safe space for her to learn, a safe space in which she could fail at something without fear of repercussions.
At the end of the school year, I thought long and hard about how I had interacted with Tasha. The changes in her behavior seemed almost magical, but I had a deep suspicion that I had found a new way to manage a classroom. I kept wondering how I could teach it to someone else.
I took this idea of centering student needs, rather than testing-related data, and developed it in my classrooms for the rest of my teaching career. After I left teaching, I pursued a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership so I could take my experiences and turn them into a coherent classroom management framework that I could share with other teachers.
Classroom Management School 