Being The Adult In The Room
I have mentioned my fondness for precepts in a previous post, and one of my favourites is, "be the adult in the room." This was said to me many years ago by a very wise colleague and it has stuck with me because it is surprising how often I come across colleagues NOT being the adult in the room.
In its most extreme manifestation, I have seen teachers and TAs (not just newbies either) behaving like children in order to curry favour with them. I once heard a veteran colleague say that he liked to mess with the kids because it "kept them on their toes" if they "didn't know what he was going to do next". He would do things like throwing books out of the window. I am not kidding. He once sat in a lesson observation and kept knocking the table of a child who was trying to work. He thought this was funny. If you want to entertain children, get a big red nose, some face paint and call yourself Mr Giggles - there's good money to be made at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs all over the country. Mazel tov!
Much more common however, is the teacher (and it can happen to any of us) who takes things that happen in the classroom personally. Teachers work incredibly hard and invest so much of themselves in what they do that it is easy to lose perspective. When you have spent an hour or more producing a beautifully presented, differentiated resource carefully designed to support your learners in making progress and they burn carelessly through it in 5 minutes in the most perfunctory way possible missing the point on their way through, it is hard not to take offence.
Tough to take also, is the behaviour of the slightly tricky class who let you down during a learning walk - normally they are a bit lively but when a member of SLT walks in they suddenly become loud and obnoxious and off task.
It is equally hard to deal with the child who is shouting at you and telling you that you are a fat cow and they hate you and wish that you were dead under a bus because you have asked them for their homework.
Being the adult in the room means one simple thing to me: don't take any of this personally - in fact, take responsibility for it.
If learners rush through your lesson - and it happens to the best of us - ask yourself why. How did you set the task up? What information did you give them at the start? How well did you communicate the learning aims of the lesson? What success criteria did you give them and what did they understand about them? Was this the right task for this group at this time?
Did that whole class let you down, or was it just a few students who were off task? What is it about your classroom practice that allowed them to behave as they did? How did you respond when the SLT member walked in - did that affect them? What can you change?
The child effing and blinding is not angry with you - it's never about you. Why is homework such an issue for them? Are they lacking organisational skills that you could help with? Are they overwhelmed by too much homework? Are they struggling academically? Do they lack space and privacy to complete work at home? Are they a young carer with responsibilities that come before homework? Did you pick a good moment to raise the issue or did you embarrass them in front of their peers?
Being the adult in the room means owning what happens in it. And that's hard because actually you can't control everything that children do - they are not robots - and things don't always go to plan.
It means doing dynamic assessment all the time - watching carefully to see who is struggling, who needs moving on, who needs a quiet word - and then acting appropriately on it.
It means never blaming them for your own shortcomings.
In its most extreme manifestation, I have seen teachers and TAs (not just newbies either) behaving like children in order to curry favour with them. I once heard a veteran colleague say that he liked to mess with the kids because it "kept them on their toes" if they "didn't know what he was going to do next". He would do things like throwing books out of the window. I am not kidding. He once sat in a lesson observation and kept knocking the table of a child who was trying to work. He thought this was funny. If you want to entertain children, get a big red nose, some face paint and call yourself Mr Giggles - there's good money to be made at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs all over the country. Mazel tov!
Much more common however, is the teacher (and it can happen to any of us) who takes things that happen in the classroom personally. Teachers work incredibly hard and invest so much of themselves in what they do that it is easy to lose perspective. When you have spent an hour or more producing a beautifully presented, differentiated resource carefully designed to support your learners in making progress and they burn carelessly through it in 5 minutes in the most perfunctory way possible missing the point on their way through, it is hard not to take offence.
Tough to take also, is the behaviour of the slightly tricky class who let you down during a learning walk - normally they are a bit lively but when a member of SLT walks in they suddenly become loud and obnoxious and off task.
It is equally hard to deal with the child who is shouting at you and telling you that you are a fat cow and they hate you and wish that you were dead under a bus because you have asked them for their homework.
Being the adult in the room means one simple thing to me: don't take any of this personally - in fact, take responsibility for it.
If learners rush through your lesson - and it happens to the best of us - ask yourself why. How did you set the task up? What information did you give them at the start? How well did you communicate the learning aims of the lesson? What success criteria did you give them and what did they understand about them? Was this the right task for this group at this time?
Did that whole class let you down, or was it just a few students who were off task? What is it about your classroom practice that allowed them to behave as they did? How did you respond when the SLT member walked in - did that affect them? What can you change?
The child effing and blinding is not angry with you - it's never about you. Why is homework such an issue for them? Are they lacking organisational skills that you could help with? Are they overwhelmed by too much homework? Are they struggling academically? Do they lack space and privacy to complete work at home? Are they a young carer with responsibilities that come before homework? Did you pick a good moment to raise the issue or did you embarrass them in front of their peers?
Being the adult in the room means owning what happens in it. And that's hard because actually you can't control everything that children do - they are not robots - and things don't always go to plan.
It means doing dynamic assessment all the time - watching carefully to see who is struggling, who needs moving on, who needs a quiet word - and then acting appropriately on it.
It means never blaming them for your own shortcomings.
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