Repeating Instructions Yet Again
Mr. Lawrence relates an amusing anecdote over at Get Lost, Mr. Chips.
He was subbing for a teacher whose high school journalism class apparently was signed up to use a "mobile computer lab" on a cart:
| There's this rolling cart that was brought into the room filled with laptops (the teachers have to sign up for it) and in order to access the Internet, the cart and the laptops need to be properly 'set up.' Since I knew how to do this from another class that needed the cart, I asked the class if they needed the laptops arranged so they can access the Internet, print, things like that. |
This was met with deafening silence. He figured maybe they didn't hear him, so he offered a second time, but he got no takers. The kids were pretty well behaved, so he settled in and let them do their thing.
Then, as he writes, they woke from their collective stupor. When they realized that their computers wouldn't print or access the Internet, they began demanding that he do it.
So this guy did what most other teachers would do in the same situation, and dutifully acquiesced to their demands, hooking up the system to the network.
This is exactly why our students don't learn responsibility, when the adults in their lives bend over backwards to cater to their every whim, repeating instructions and giving third chances.
Actually, it didn't happen that way: we made up the above italicized portion of this story.
What Mr. Lawrence actually did was nothing. No, he didn't hook them up to the Internet. No, he didn't connect them to the printer. No, he didn't pay their complaints any heed.
| I could have been kind and given them the instructions or even gotten up and lent a hand, but I [ . . . ] figured no, not everyone in life is going to give them third and fourth and fifth chances. They didn't even politely ask me to help after they fiddled with it - the one female student said to me: "Make this thing work." No, you make it work. And you know what? She couldn't, and neither did anyone else. Next time: listen ... |
Bravo, Mr. Lawrence.
A common complaint by teachers is "my students won't listen to me." When observing these teachers' classrooms one sees just that: the teacher gives instructions like, "please take out your homework, please stop talking, please sit down," which must be repeated endlessly because there's no response to them the first five times they're repeated.
A tough situation, to be sure, but what should a teacher do? We'd argue that there's cause-and-effect here: Instructions repeated are instructions ignored. To get kids to stop ignoring your instructions, simply don't repeat them. Of course this only works if you have consequences that have teeth, such as Mr. Lawrence not hooking up the network.
Say "please stop talking" and then wait for them to stop talking. Say "please take out your homework" and give credit only to the students who do it, ignoring the rest. Say "please sit down" and wait for them to sit. Of course if waiting for compliance doesn't work, then there must be further consequences for defiance, but whatever you do, don't repeat the instruction.
We've used this technique very successfully in public middle and high schools in some of the toughest neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and it actually works. We even know an elementary school teacher who only gives instructions once, and exactly once. If students don't hear it the first time, they must make do however they can (such as finding out what to do from a classmate), but this doesn't often happen, since they've long since learned that when the teacher's talking, they must listen or else.
One analogy for the debilitating effect of repeated instructions uses money. For example, say the instruction "please take out your homework" is worth $10. That means each word is worth $2. If this instruction is given twice before it's expected to be performed, then each word is now worth only a buck. If this instruction is repeated only five times, then each word is now only worth forty cents. And so on.
All a teacher needs to do to make what she say worthless is repeat herself. Instructions repeated are instructions ignored.