All She Needed Was A Jump Rope: Helping Teachers Learn How to Deal With Classroom Management Situations

By Harlan Hansen

The book describes a sample of school incidents and teacher-training situations to help readers understand the behavioral problems schools deal with on a daily basis. It also shows how, in working together, it is possible to convert many classroom misbehaviors into positive learning experiences for students, teachers, and school principals, as w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781648955594

Harlan Hansen

Harlan S. Hansen is an Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. His areas of expertise were Early Childhood Education and Classroom Management and Discipline in the Elementary School. He continues in retirement sharing his ideas with college students preparing for careers in teaching, parent groups seeking insights on raising children, and schoolteachers and administrators dealing with the variety of student behaviors. Professor Hansen has written or co-written a number of books on these topics, including 16 Ways To Fix or We’ll Never Fix Public Education, Amazon, 2012; Lessons in Literacy, Promoting Preschool Success (with Ruth Hansen), St Paul, MN, Redleaf Press, 2010; Classroom Management and Discipline in the Elementary School – Helping Children Insert Reason Between Impulse and Action: (TeachersPayTeachers website) 2005; and Playway-Education for Reality (with Ruth Hansen, Dave and Madeline Davis) Winston Press (TeachersPayTeachers website) 1973.

Book preview

Overview

The book describes a sample of school incidents and teacher-training situations to help readers understand the behavioral problems schools deal with on a daily basis. It also shows how, in working together, it is possible to convert many classroom misbehaviors into positive learning experiences for students, teachers, and school principals, as well as faculty members in the teacher education field. The key is to ensure that all participants—teachers, students [and parents???? do you say anything about parents???] are treated with respect and whatever behavioral situations that arise are treated as learning experiences.

This book grew out of the many years I served as the classroom management and discipline expert in the School of Education at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction. The role of expert became attached to me by former students who, now teachers at all grade levels, approached me for advice and help with school discipline issues in the elementary school ages, from age four through age ten. This role came naturally to me because my major field of study was Early Childhood Education.

The book contains thirty vignettes that illustrate the wide variety of behaviors that can occur and my general approach to them as well as specific suggestions for handling these behaviors. The challenge is to find ways to insert reason between impulse and action, often too swift action on the part of teachers and principals. Simply writing the names of offending students on the blackboard, in effect shaming them for their behavior, avoids the opportunity to engage students by asking them what accounts for their behavior and helping them see that they are undermining their own learning as well as that of their classmates.

I have used these vignettes in my classes to show young teachers who they might most effectively deal with behavioral situations that arise in their classrooms. While new situations will constantly arise, working through these vignettes has given them practice in dealing with new situations as they arise. The vignettes range widely in their focus, many of them dealing with classroom behaviors, others with behaviors outside of school. Some focus on Finally, some of them deal with problems that arise in the way we do and often do not equip new teachers to gain the experience needed to become effective classroom teachers.

My Publications

So You Want to be a Teacher! Trading a Business Career for the Joys of Teaching. (A Memoir) Xlibris, 2017. (105 pages).

Classroom Management in the Elementary School: Helping Children Learn to Insert Reason Between Impulse And Action. Teachers Pay Teachers, 2017. (282 pages). (Now under revision for broader publication).

16 Ways to Fix (or We’ll Never Fix) Public Education. Amazon 2012. (178 pages).

Lessons in Literacy - Promoting - Preschool Success. Redleaf Press. 2010. (184 pages).

Discipline Toolbox. Alliance for Children, Naples Fl. 2006. (48 pages).

Discipline Toolbox B. Alliance for Children, Naples Fl. 2003. (36 pages)

Special Event Days and Activities for Elem Classrooms. Rulan Press. 1985. (205 pages).

Me (Kindergarten section of K-Six Early Childhood Social Studies Program. Houghton Mifflin, 1980. (152 pages).

Part of Grades 1–6 National Language Arts Program. 1979. (75 pages).

The Playway Method of Early Childhood Education. Coauthored with Ruth Hansen, David Davis, and Madeline Davis. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 1973. (250 pages).

Education and Work Experience

1950. Graduated Washington Park High School, Racine, WI.

1952–54. US Army, Korean War. Instructor, Artillery Survey, Ft. Sill, OK.

1955. BA. University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Private Sector Employment

1955–57. Wisconsin Telephone Co. Management Trainee, Milwaukee, WI

1958–62. Encyclopedia Britannica, Management Position, Chicago, IL

1964–65. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Research Assistant, set up new Children’s Book Center.

1964. Summer. Co-taught Statewide Televised (WHA) Experimental Early Childhood Kindergarten Course, to test effectiveness of husband-wife teaching team.

1965–66. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Acting Instructor, Taught Elementary Childhood Education Courses, School of Education.

1967. MA. University of Wisconsin–Madison.

1968, PhD. University of Wisconsin–Madison.

1968–1995. University of Minnesota, Assistant to Full Professor, College of Education, Teacher for Early Childhood Education courses.

1996 to present. Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota.

Honors and Awards

* Racine Wis. Park High School, Hall of Fame.

* The National Horace T. Morse Amoco Outstanding Teaching Award, University of Minnesota.

Founding Editor of Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education.

President of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators.

President of the Minnesota Association of Early Child Teacher Educators.

Consultant to Early Childhood Programs in Portugal, Sweden, and Spain.

Consultant to various school programs across the country.

Books: The Competitive Market

Dozens of book have been published on Classroom Discipline and Management, some recent and some not so recent. Among them are the following:

—Classroom Management Techniques (Cambridge University Press, 2012) by Jim Scrivener

—Classroom Management for Elementary Teachers (Pearson Education, 3016, 10th Edition) by Carolyn M. Evertson and Edmund T. Emmer

—The School Discipline Fix: Changing Behavior Using the Collaborative Problem Solving Approach by J. Stuart Albom and Alisha Pollestri

—Discipline with Dignity: How to Build Responsibility, Relationships, and Respect in Your Classroom (ASCD, 2018), by Richard. C. Curvin, Allen N. Mendler, and Brian D.Mendler

The first of these books, Classroom Discipline and Management, is encyclopedic in its coverage, with shaded Technique boxes on virtually every page. The Evertson and Emmer book, Classroom Management for Elementary Teachers (2016, 10th Edition), is quite similar in its exhaustive content. By contrast, The School Discipline Fix (2018, 4th Edition) offers a more pragmatic and flexible approach, what the authors call a Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach. The Discipline with Dignity (2018) is similar in advocating a more collaborative approach that involves working with students in helping them learn how to behave in the classroom.

My book differs from all of the above books. It advocates for a reasoned approach to disciplinary processes, focusing primarily on kindergarten and first grade teachers, students, and classrooms. It calls for interjecting reason between impulse and action, both for students and teachers. Discipline must be introduced as a part of the elementary school curriculum, not as a separate add-on that is divorced from the curriculum and what students should be learning about the world around them. In recent years, the emphasis on teaching students specific skills and preparing them for the standardized testing that they are no longer taught the content knowledge they need for their own intellectual and social development. The book also describes the author’s experience in helping teachers and principals learn how to deal with behavior issues. Finally, it includes thirty-two vignettes that capture the author’s long-time experience in helping teachers learn how to resolve classroom situations they were unable to resolve by themselves.

Treating Discipline as Part of the Curriculum

Historically, classroom teachers had the responsibility for keeping the classroom focused on learning. In more recent years, education experts have offered new programs for dealing with classroom management and behavior problems. Among these programs is a popular one called Assertive Discipline that was adopted by entire school districts and offered a one size fits all solution for every situation. Teachers would follow the identified steps and students would be shamed into good behavior. No one realized the burden facing teachers who lost valuable time teaching amidst the ever-growing number of misbehavers.

Rather than utilizing disciplinary systems conjured up by education professors, a better solution is to embed the treatment of discipline into the curriculum.

Here is how it worked: When a teacher observed a student causing a problem (note: personal judgment!), the teacher wrote the student’s name on the blackboard. If the same student that day caused another situation, a check was added to their name. If the student acted out again, the same happened. That part of the process ended with three checks. Further misbehavior by that student called for a trip to the Time Out Room where malcontents from other rooms joined in. (In some schools, the Principal’s Office served as this purpose.) Administrators deemed this a perfect solution to the perceived growing misbehavior problems; no student would want to be singled out in front of their peers!

The program failed to anticipate human nature, causing new problems to arise. First, teachers are human beings with their own personalities already formed and their handling of behavior problems already established. Some jumped at any small disturbance to put names on the board and