Classroom Management: Clear Positives

Last night, I finished Ruth Sidney Charney's book Teaching Children to Care: Classroom Management for Ethical and Academic Growth K-8. In the book, Charney describes how to create a positive learning environment for elementary school students. The key to her technique is student involvement: students help formulate the rules, and when the rules are broken (as they certainly will be), Charney describes how teachers can be consistent and sane.

Charney's belief that it is possible to teach children to become good people is heartening. At a time when schools and teachers are charged with so much responsibility, character education often falls off the map. Yet it is the lessons about ethics and values that stick with children throughout their lives. The classroom where they learned to treat one another kindly will have a major impact on the way they behave, both inside and outside the school walls.

One of the chapters I found most interesting is about "clear positives." Charney defines "clear positives" as the "strong reasons for what we teach and how we teach it." She writes, "Most people who become teachers have an initial vision of what they will add to the world through their teaching. This vision is often lost in the pressures, confusions, and constant demands that exist for every teacher in every type of school." Charney believes that teaching with clear positives at the forefront of your mind allows you to act with joy and conviction. Her clear positives are:

1. Schools need to teach alternatives to violence and to stress nonviolence as an essential characteristic of the community.
2. Children need to learn to think for themselves.
3. We need to stretch, not track, potentials. (Charney means that children must try everything, not just the activities where they show natural aptitude.)

Charney's discussion motivated me to develop my own clear positives for the coming school year. Here they are:

1. Children will be excited to come to school even when they find material challenging.
2. Children will be able to work collaboratively and listen to their classmates and teacher.
3. Children will see value in all academic disciplines.

This is just a start - I fully expect to refine and even change my critical positives over the course of the next year. For now, we'll see how they hold up.