The kindergarteners were getting antsy. They had been sitting on the rug for twenty minutes, engaging in the warm-up and first activity of an IM lesson. The teacher, with years of experience with this age group, had anticipated this and had set up centers for the rest of the class period. Something remarkable happened then: Ms. P (as we’ll call her) directed students to move to their centers – in English and in Spanish, to accommodate several newcomers to her class who had limited English – and the students did. Within one minute, every single student, other than the small group that she had pulled to work with her, was engaged at a center. Pairs of students began collaborating, picking a card and showing it to their partner and deciding what to do or reminding each other of the rules of the game. Some students made mistakes while playing the games, of course, but every single one attempted to play the best they could.

This is the kind of vignette you might see in a video on the Teaching Channel and think sure, that looks amazing, but my kids can’t do that. Whether their students are kindergarteners, third graders, middle schoolers, or even high schoolers, many teachers see well-run centers and group work as an impossible dream, one that only the best behaved students with strong math understanding can manage. They marvel at the teacher who can successfully meet with a small group while the rest of the class essentially runs itself. It seems impossible – and Ms. P succeeded with five year olds! This got us thinking: what did she do to make this happen? 

When we asked her, Ms. P had trouble articulating exactly how she had gotten her class to run so smoothly and independently. This isn’t surprising at all. She likely didn’t know because the answer was simple: she expected it to. She knew five-year-olds could follow directions, play cooperative games, and help each other with the math when necessary. She set the bar high, and they rose to meet it. 

This simple solution – have high expectations – can be remarkably hard to execute. Often it means we need to change our mindsets. Ms. P expected her students to act a certain way, explicitly taught them how to do this from the start of the year, and trusted them to follow through. By giving them the autonomy to move to stations on their own, she sent the message that she trusted them. We’ve all seen students beam with pride when entrusted with a task – getting more paper from the office, for example. They can only learn self-regulation and autonomy if we give them these opportunities to act responsibly. 

Ms. P’s class doesn’t run perfectly every time, of course. But she doesn’t admonish the kids, threaten to take away recess, or use shaming tactics to get them to behave. Instead, she waits until the end of the lesson to have a discussion about what they can do better next time. She uses objective statements to describe what she saw: “I noticed that some students…” or “We had some trouble today with…” She ends with “Tomorrow, let’s remember to…” She invites the students to reflect on their behavior and trusts them to do better next time. 

Peter Liljedahl, author of Building Thinking Classrooms, also recommends reflection as a behavior management tool. He suggests co-designing a behavior metric with your students at the beginning of the year, and then taking the time at the end of the lesson to have students rate how well they did that day. It’s a way of saying “you know the expectations and I trust you to meet them next time.”

Think about your classroom: How do you communicate your expectations to your students? How do you verbally and nonverbally tell your students that you trust them? And what effect do you think these messages have on their behavior?