Everyone of us must cross the bridge over Crazy Town
when switching our D.A.S. – Default Adulting Settings
from Authoritarian to Authoritative. 

At age 17, I committed myself, after another go-round with my mother, to never treat any child the way my parents, teachers, and peers had treated me.

Then, in my first year of teaching, when I heard myself starting to become my parents, I was faced with a decision to either fall into my authoritarian parents’ way or to find better ways of dealing with children.

A Defining Moment

The first thought that popped into my mind was, “Well, my parents did it this way, and I turned out fine!”  But the truth is, I didn’t turn out fine at all; I’ve had to rebuild nearly everything from the ground up.

The second thought was, “I promised myself I would never do what I just did to this group of kids.”

My third thought was, “Well, if I don’t threaten, yell, demean, minimize, shame, humiliate, and guilt kids into behaving, what can I use to keep me in control?”

That, folks, is the million-dollar question. 

If I don’t hurt kids to make them remember to behave, then what will I do?

I’m writing today to share a better way – field-tested – that I have lived by for the past forty years as an educator and parent.

I’m sharing this because a gut-wrenching video of a 25-year veteran teacher that dropped into my feed last week.

Today, I intend to demonstrate a contrast between the outdated methods of the past and what actually works in the long term to leverage a group of students to self-regulate and co-govern so every one can accelerate their learning capabilities.

By highlighting this stark contrast, I will underscore the continuation of a generational legacy of pain and suffering that will persist if we don’t stop using approaches that cause more harm than good.

Please take 3 minutes to watch this:

“Silence in the face of injustice is a form of complicity.”
“Inaction allows oppression to continue unchallenged.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Because we are divided on how best to discipline children in need of age-related social skill development, I feel it necessary to make 3 points:

1-If I were coaching this person and feeling hard-pressed to intervene, I would start with my What, If, When Method to get to the heart of what drives her fierce need to traumatize her students.  I’d start there because coming “at” her firmly held belief in hurting kids to teach them a lesson will not change without finding out what’s at the heart of this for her.

2-Even though she had a friendly letter from an eighth grader, understand, it’s common for traumatized children to still profess love to their abusers. It is not uncommon for children (and abused adults) to mistake love for abuse and abuse for love.

3-The research is in, and it’s not one bit true that traumatizing children raises their academic achievement; in fact, it’s the opposite. This teacher prays for her students to mess up so she can “drop the hammer” and “slaughter the lamb,” believing this will give her the upper hand to gain control for the school year. 

This tactic is like pushing a child to the ground,
putting our foot on their shoulder, and yelling at them to “get up!”

 

Simplest explanation of Authoritarian vs Authoritative:
Authoritarian is one-way communication.
Authoritative is two-way communication.
Whereas Permissive and Uninvolved is zero communication.

Best explanation for Gentle, Humane, Positive,
Firm, Fair, Flexible, FUNctional Adulting is:
Don’t do to a kid what you would never, ever, ever
do to a person bigger than you, period!

Here’s a micro Brag & Blab for me:

When I remarried, I got to co-parent peacefully with two sets of other parents. 

Together, we used gentle, kind, compassionate parenting on our three kids that was Firm, Fair, Fearless, Flexible, Focused, Forthright, and—most importantly—FUNctional. 

We feel so blessed that each of our three children excelled in school academically but most importantly as kind, happy, and engaging human beings. 

They put themselves through college and one was awarded valedictorian and even got a full ride scholarship to college. 

Two of the three graduated “Magna cum laude” and one graduated “Summa cum laude” which translates to “with highest honor” and is awarded to those who achieve the highest level of academic excellence. 

What is most important to us, is that now as adults with children of their own, they are productive human beings who are joyous, kind, and give of themselves to their families and communities.

High Expectations?!

The teacher in today’s video is not setting high expectations.  High expectations are about believing in each child’s ability and then consistently and repetitively teach the needed skills while holding a safe space for them to explore intellectual disobedience and fail forward as they learn. 

I had one dyslexic student, from my first year of teaching in a rural school grades 3, 4, 5, and 6 in all subjects, all extracurricular activities: art, music, Christmas musical, and recess, write to me on Facebook, telling me that what she remembered most about me was that because I believed she could, she did. 

To be honest, at the time I didn’t exactly know what to do to help her other than to believe in her as I deeply wished someone had done for me.  Then one night I had an epiphany.

I was thinking about her and I wondered how teachers used to do it in the “old days” in the one-room K-12 rural school house. That’s when the idea came to me and because of her, I created my team-building approach.  She told me that she cried when I told her this in my response. 

I recently read another educational consultant’s take on Day 1: standing at the front of the classroom checking off the rules, and his advice is to rigorously re-tell the rules repeatedly during the first weeks of the school year.

And therein lies the rub that leads to adult burnout:
we often tell, tell, tell, instead of invite, invite, invite
kids into the solutions we seek.

So here’s the thing.

I will be the first to admit that I did not manage student behavior perfectly when crossing the bridge over Crazy Town, as my students will attest.

However, with that said, even though I vacillated between authoritarian and authoritative (crossing back and forth over the Crazy Town bridge too many times to count) in the early years, I did maintain a consistently non-judgmental attitude, vibe, and tone toward each child, and they did, in fact, feel welcome, wanted, and celebrated in my classroom.

I yelled, but I yelled affirmative messages.  I did co-govern with them on the rules we all agreed on.  I held high standards, but certainly not in the way the teacher above did, because I never once set them up to mess up so I could strike them down – I always believed in them and called out the best in them.  I approached things differently, on purpose, with a firm intention to create better ways to bring kids together to care about each other.

I’m not sharing my accomplishments with children to impress you, but rather to impress upon you that compassionate, collaborative ways do, in fact, genuinely enhance children’s critical thinking and accelerate learning in measurable ways.

In most of the schools I taught in, having established a reputation as a firm disciplinarian, I was assigned 55-65% at-risk students in my classrooms.  Every year, beginning with the biggest, baddest sixth-grade class (featured in my training video), we not only met the standards, but we also achieved an average growth of 2.5 to 3 years, despite the students diagnoses, labels, and having lost ground with previous teachers.

My point is this:

Every single person wanting to use better methods
will have to cross the bridge over Crazy Town. 

What is Crazy Town? 

It’s the place we must eventually cross over when we are trying a new method for “controlling” children in a more humane and equally beneficial way, that the old, worn-out, exhausting, punitive method of “dropping the hammer” on kids, rears it’s ugly head and yells at us (in our minds) “These kids are going to take advantage or you.  They are going to run you over and annihilate you!” 

There are those who rigidly believe that if we don’t use traditional tactics of force as in shame, humiliation, threats, exclusion, seclusion, etc., we will lose control – when the facts are, we’ve most likely already lost control – as this class of sixth graders had already proven.  

We already know that doing the same thing over and over again is the definition of insanity.  And yet, the number one mistake adults make is doubling down on what doesn’t work, never did work, and never will work to create mentally healthy, productive, soul-fulfilled children thriving in route to their adult years.

My hairstylist now uses my What, If, When Method with her children, and each time I come in for my monthly appointment, she shares another success story with me. Here’s one that happened this past spring:

Unbeknownst to my hairstylist mom, her first grade son’s principal, who, one day last spring, marched into every classroom and announced that she was adopting a new “zero-tolerance” policy, and there would be absolutely no leniency given to any child misbehaving from now to the end of the school year.

One strike and you are out. Period. Done. Game over.

The next day, as she was dropping off her son at school, he wouldn’t get out of the car.  She could not get him to budge.  So she pulled the vehicle over out of the drop-off lane and used my What, If, When Method on him.

She asked, “What’s going on for you that you won’t get out of the car this morning?”

His first response, as he broke down and cried, was, “I can’t do it any more, I can’t do it any more, I just can’t do it any more.”

She asks, “What can’t you do anymore?”

He said, “I can’t behave myself every day in class.  I just can’t do it.”

She asks, “What happened that you think this?”

He then shared that the school’s principal had visited his classroom the day before and informed them that, from now on, they could no longer make any behavioral miss-steps without facing expulsion from school.

My hairstylist mom parked the car, got out, and together with her son, went to get the facts from her son’s teacher (not the principal).

The teacher assured them both that she was not concerned about his behavior and would never kick him out of class.  That he would be safe to make miss-steps in her classroom.

So “what” was going on for this principal?

Was she just a mean, horrible human being?  No.  Her job was on the line, and her school was failing to meet standards. She panicked and dropped the authoritarian hammer, even though it doesn’t work to help kids accelerate in their learning – long term.

Now that we have the “what,” we can move on to solutions. 

Unfortunately for this principal, she was relieved of her duties soon thereafter.  In my forty years of doing this, I’ve never seen doubling down on what doesn’t work, ever work!   

Let’s create a thriving educational environment together.

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Reaching out …

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