Playing the Game - Mastering the Art of Classroom Management

By Gretchan Thompson

The "Point Game" is a methodology, an incentive-based program for teaching children to “self-police.” It changed my daily classroom experience from disruptive and chaotic to remarkably productive and fulfilling.

I have written this book to share my experiences in the hopes that it will also enhance your classroom experience. I explain why and how the objectives were formed and show you how the same principles of the game can be employed in any classroom.

The Point Game has the flexibility to cater to the needs of your individual students, and to improve your Classroom Management and teaching proficiency. Take heart. There is an alternative to the madness, and I am delighted to share the system I discovered and developed with all of you.

The Point Game has produced stellar results for me, and I know it will work for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257876600

Book preview

ISBN-978-1-257-87660-0

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1—Introducing the Point Game

Chapter 2—The First Ten Ways to Earn Points

Chapter 3—Game Evolution

Chapter 4—Tips to Getting Started and Keeping It Going

Chapter 5—Earning Points and Gaining Recognition

Chapter 6—Turning Points Into Tangible Prizes

Chapter 7—Tips to Sell It

Chapter 8—Closing

Introduction

There are literally thousands of great books on the market discussing what it takes to be an effective teacher.  Whatever the subject matter, someone has written a book discussing the latest and greatest techniques for teaching it.  Go to any state government website, and you’ll find the relatively universal standards to which all teachers from coast to coast must adhere when teaching a particular grade and a particular subject.  Considering the plethora of information available, one might believe that teaching is no more different than say, baking a cake.  Simply follow the recipe.  First, you need your ingredients:  students, supplies, teachers, classroom, etc.  The ingredients will vary depending on what you’re attempting to make.  However, for the most part, the staples are the same.  Just follow the directions and voila, you have a wonderful final product - an EDUCATED CHILD.  So why doesn’t it work like that?

Let’s focus on the issue that, if not addressed appropriately, will prevent you from ever being an effective teacher:  Classroom Management.  If ever there were a hot topic in the academic community, particularly the urban academic community, it’s Classroom Management.  Classroom Management is often explained as the process of maintaining a well-functioning and highly stimulating academic environment that is conducive for learning.  Prior to becoming a teacher, I believed that easy, rather simplistic sounding definition.  Reality check!  Sounds good, but trying to implement it in the classroom setting with real, live students is a different matter.  I was not prepared for what the day-to-day challenges would bring.  That was never taught to me.

In addition to the obvious, Classroom Management requires understanding that, on a daily basis, two or three students can hijack a classroom and effectively destroy the learning environment for everyone.  The chronic offenders manage to enlist a handful of other students into their daily chaotic routine and despite all efforts to rein them in, the constant distractions completely destroy the rhythm that is vital to effective learning in the classroom.  The students that don’t get sucked in and genuinely want to learn will end up bored, detached or frustrated.  And, equally challenging, if you don’t address the issue right away, those students often will start to become disruptive as well.

In an unmanaged classroom, you end up losing everyone’s respect, and all of your attempts to facilitate learning will be unsuccessful.  This is when many teachers experience breakdowns and wonder why they went into teaching in the first place.  If you’re like me, you reach a point where you dread seeing the students’ faces as they file into class each and every day—knowing  that you’ll spend the day pleading with the students to care about their own lives and education as much as you care.  You try to stay positive, but in the end, no one is learning and everyone ends up miserable. 

I knew that I had to find a way to change the environment from chaos to one that would be structured, energized, and conducive to learning.  Now, I’m not suggesting that I have all the answers.  However, the information I share in this book was a system that helped me, and I know it will help others, too. 

Qualified, dedicated people leave the teaching profession in alarming numbers every year.  Yet, what is even more profound is the fact that some teachers would never leave if they could find a way to cope with the classroom environment.  Frankly, who wants to be miserable and feel ineffective daily?  People go into teaching because they care about children and want to make a difference in their lives.  However, too often low-pay, highly stressful situations, worn-out facilities, and inadequate supplies (which ultimately end up being funded by the teacher) leave them asking, Why am I doing this?  At the end of the day, teachers in low-income, urban neighborhoods and school districts—even those with a sincere belief in the power of education to change lives—will be hard-pressed to find reasons to keep fighting the good fight.  With all these challenges that many teachers face, having a Classroom Management system or tool is essential.

While it’s hard for me to admit it, I felt this way at first.  Like most, I don’t like feeling like a failure, and I certainly don’t like admitting it out loud.  Not to mention, I was supposed to rock this whole teaching thing.  Before I became a teacher, I was a probation officer.  I mean really, you think I can’t discipline or show authority?  Let me repeat myself, I WAS A PROBATION OFFICER.  And I was 25 years old and single when I adopted my sons, who were teenagers at the time.  Getting them to college was no easy feat.  I had to employ a lot of shrewd, tactical decision-making along the way.  I was comfortable being the enemy, and I whole-heartedly accepted that the path to success was not a straight shot.  So teaching science to a bunch of children was not going to be a problem.  I mean, seriously?  You just have to know how to talk to the kids, right?  And I was a master.

Or so I thought.  I remember hearing horror stories about teaching prior to entering the profession.  What a bunch of pansies, I used to think.  How hard is it to talk to kids in a way that garners respect? You simply show respect to these precious darlings and in return, they will love and respect you.  For me, I had this teaching thing down pat before I even started.  All I needed to do was to focus on how to actually teach the CONTENT, and as I mentioned earlier, I thought that was easy.  There are books for that.

However, in October of my first year of teaching, it wasn’t books on how to teach chemical and physical properties to middle school students that I searched for in the bookstore.  That wasn’t the problem.  Instead, I was on a quest to find information, a book, ANY book, that gave me step-by-step instructions on how to sufficiently muzzle the little, unruly bunch of *&^$#@@s that had started coming between me and my mission.  Where was the book that told me how to deal with the fact that every single trick in my arsenal had failed to stifle the two or three students in every single class that repeatedly created chaos and eventually distracted everyone—including me!?  Education was nowhere in sight.  And my classroom was looking more like Mission Impossible than Teacher of the Year material!

My search began and I found many books about discipline...  "Make sure to repeat your rule every single day, in a calm tone, to remind the students what is expected of them."  Or what?  Or I repeat the rule again?  So, I will repeat the classroom rules over and over and over every single day and if they don’t start following them, well... Well, what?  Okay, so that wasn’t really working.  In fact, most of the advice I found in books about discipline simply wasn’t working for me.  And while I knew I was probably a part of the problem, I still needed something I could work with that fit my personality – Type A with a twist.

In fairness, some of the books were modestly helpful, but none of them were specific enough for what I needed–a methodology, an incentive-based program for teaching children to self-police.  I needed concrete examples.  I wanted someone to show me what the path to complete classroom control looks like!  While some teachers can handle a little unruliness, I can’t.  I’m not happy, even if only one student isn’t engaged.  And I’m certainly not going to talk over anyone.  What I have to say is important, and I want everyone to listen!  I did not go into the teaching profession because I needed to learn science.  I already know the stuff.  I’ve got a college degree to prove that.  However, and more importantly, I knew that education might be the only shot many of these kids got at changing their lives.  Education is the key to their success and without it most of them will remain trapped in the never-ending cycle of poverty.