Managing Undesireable Student Behavior: Specifically, Emotion-Neutrally & Positively

Use precise and objective language while managing your students’ behavior. This works especially well with highly defiant students, or with students who toy with the teacher by feigning misunderstanding of the teacher’s directions to get away with more. Precise language is also important for common misunderstandings of expectations by benevolent students. Teachers (adults) assume that students know exactly what they want when they call out a student’s name in a frustrated tone of voice, but kids are kids! Sometimes they forget the expectations, or don’t even immediately realize what they are doing is disrupting others around them or is otherwise not meeting class expectations.

Imprecise / vague / emotional / subjective	Precise / emotion-neutral / objective
[out of seat] “Eric!” [yelling student name]	“ope!...” [my sound to let students know something has gone wrong without calling an individual student out] “…students are seated right now.”
[persistent pencil tapping noise] “Cut it out!”	“All pencils flat on desk.”
[slouching student] “I want rock star behavior out of you.”	“Rock star position please.” [use gesture] if more guidance needed… “Please place your feet flat on the floor, knees between the front two corners of your seat, back flat against the back of the chair, fingers of your two hands interlaced. Good, now you look like a rock star.”
“I told you not to flip to the back side until you had finished the front. You need to start listening.” * Kids space out. Kids forget things. Lecturing, being passive aggressive or being straight-up aggressive doesn’t help the situation.	“I’ve asked all students to finish the front side before moving on.” “Students are finishing the front first, Steven. You’ll be prepared to succeed in our class when you carefully listen to the directions.”

Avoid commands in the negative or narrating the negative behavior that you observe in the classroom while attempting to redirect. Make objective statements in the positive, and narrate only the behavior that is adding to the culture of success in your classroom.

Commands in the negative / narrating the negative	Precise / positive / narrating the ideal
“Shut your mouths!” “There is no reason anyone should be talking right now.”	“Mouths sealed, please!” “Silent students!” “The expectation is for silent, hard work.” “Rock star silence!”
“I hear noise in this room!”	“Students have been asked to be silent.” “The rock star students who are working silently are on their way to reaching their Big Goals.”
“Don’t move on to question 4 yet.”	“Students, please pause after number 3 and wait for directions.” (“Can a student repeat my direction? When do we stop?”)
[during silent work time] “I hear everyone starting to talk.”	Chances are, there are plenty of students who are not talking. Avoid casting your disapproval over all students. It lowers class wide morale and discourages your positive role model students.
“Steven, you shouldn’t be doing that right now.”	“Steven, right now students have put their leftover M&Ms away and are switching their focus to History question number 1.”

Consider the final example. Not only do statements expressed in the negative lower class wide morale and/or highlight negative behavior in the classroom–promoting a class wide conception that students are in a “bad class” – they also open up a ton of leeway for the student. If all you say is “Steven, you shouldn’t be doing that right now,” even if Steven knows what you’re talking about (he was eating his M&Ms) and is prepared to change his behavior at your request (not all students will be so easy), all he has to do to follow through on your implicit command is to stop doing what he is doing, i.e. eating M&Ms – which might include the action of stopping his munching to begin sticking the M&Ms into his nostrils to make Eric laugh. This is probably NOT what you had in mind, but Steven hasn't actually disobeyed you: he did stop what was doing before. Practice the art of polite, teacher terse-speak with your students. For more ideas, check out Teaching with Love and Logic:

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Love-Logic-Control-Classroom/dp/0944634486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340643749&sr=8-1&keywords=Teaching+with+Love+and+Logic

The take-away: Not only does narrating in the negative (and narrating the negative things you see) cast a gloomy mood of negativity across your class and damage the culture of high achievement, it also sets teachers up for additional problems by opening up vagueness and giving students excessive leeway in how they interpret your directions. Teachers must say precisely what they do want to see.