Twenty Ways to Help Students Learn to Be Accountable

                 

 

 

                   If you are like most educators at this time of the year, you are probably more than ready for your students to assume more responsibility for their own success. To be more self-disciplined. To learn to hold themselves accountable for their work and behavior. Unfortunately, our students do not learn accountability quickly or with a few easy strategies or even very predictably. Instead helping students learn to be accountable is an ongoing process that involves consistent effort on our parts. Hang in there. The end result is well worth the effort. Here are twenty things to consider as you move your students forward.

 

           1.        Involve parents or guardians as often as it takes for you to create an effective team of caring adults who want to help a child succeed.

                  2.        Teach your students how to do their work. Students should be taught the study skills they need to reach the standards you have for them.

                  3.        Call on every student every day. Allow no student to be invisible in your classroom.

                  4.        Return graded papers promptly so that students know what they should do to improve.

                  5.        Make sure your comments on assignments are geared to helping students correct their errors and improve their performance.

                  6.        Foster responsibility through the daily routines and procedures you establish for your students. Involve them in routine classroom-management tasks.

                  7.        Teach your students to pace themselves by paying attention to the time it takes for them to complete various types of assignments. Teach them how to estimate the amount of time it will take to complete assignments and how to time themselves.

                  8.        Keep your interactions with individual students brief enough so that your attention can stay focused on the rest of the class as well. Don’t allow your time to be monopolized by one attention-seeking student at the expense of the others in the class.

                  9.        Make sure your students know that you pay attention to them. Students who know their teacher is paying attention to their behavior are not going to misbehave as readily as those students who believe they can get away with bad behavior.

                10.      Hold your students to the same behavior standards for substitute teachers that you expect when you are in the room. Discuss this with them in advance of the time when you will be absent; you will find that your students behave much better than if you adopt a “kids will be kids” attitude.

                11.      Refuse to allow your students to sleep or to do homework for other classes in your class. They should be doing your work in your class.

                12.      Make it a point that you expect 100% accuracy in student work. Some students will aim to just get by with a minimum of work unless you encourage them to do otherwise.

                13.      Have students edit or double-check each other’s work before turning it in. Peer editing works best if you provide students with a checklist of standards to follow while proofreading.

                14.      Instead of having all of your students shout out answers in an oral activity, ask them to write their responses first and then answer when you call on them. This will force everyone to think before responding.

                15.      Plan the procedures you want your students to follow in case they don’t have their materials or textbooks in class. Don’t allow students to get away with not working because they don’t have their materials.

                16.      When you are moving around the room to monitor activity, ask your students to underline the answers they think are correct and circle the ones that puzzle them so that you can work together to make sure they understand how to do all of their work well.

                17.      If you find that some of your students are reluctant to accomplish their work on schedule, contact their parents or guardians. If students know that their progress is being monitored at home as well as in class, they usually perform better.

                18.      If you see that students have trouble grasping an assignment, reteach the material. Don’t allow students to rest on their ignorance.

                19.      When students miss the answer to a question, ask them to write the correct answer on their papers. Students should be held accountable for correcting their papers.

                20.      Make neatness an important component of the work in your classroom. You don’t have to be a perfectionist, but you should expect your students to turn in neat work.

HOW TO DEAL WITH A REALLY DIFFICULT CLASS

There are difficult classes and then there are really difficult classes. A difficult class is one where things don't always go as planned. Students may get a little loud. They don't do their homework consistently. Sometimes they are distracted and bored or off task. A difficult class won't cause you to toss and turn all night long. There is usually a reasonable fix--a tweak here or there solution

 

 

On the other hand, the really difficult class is exhausting, time-consuming, and stressful. It's the class where you are so busy trying to contain the chaos that you have difficulty just checking attendance. It's the one that makes you want to explore other careers. It's the one that you mentally replay over and over on the way home from school.  If you have one of these really difficult classes this year, you are not alone.

 

 You are also not without resources. You can deal successfully with this type of class. I should know. I have had enough really difficult classes in the course of my long career to develop some expertise in dealing with them. Here's what works for me:

 

 

• Own the problem. If you accept responsibility for what happens in your class, then you can start making efforts to improve the situation. Blaming students or anyone else only wastes time that could be spent creating productive solutions. Thinking of this as a solvable set of problems can move you forward.

 

• Identify the trouble-causing issues in the class. Is the noise level too loud? Is there a problem with students being off task? Is the start of class the problem? Transitions? The end of class? Not enough materials? No social skills? There is rarely just one reason for a class to be really difficult.

 

• Make it easy for students to behave well. Look hard at the procedures, policies, rules, and expectations that you have for this class. Do your students know exactly what is expected of them? When you are trying to manage a really difficult class, you must explicitly spell out the information that they need to know.

 

• Be ruthlessly consistent. If you say it, enforce it. Think through what you expect from your students, tell them what you want, and then mean what you say.

 

• Be patient. If you work steadily at chipping away at rude or unproductive behaviors, sooner or later things will change. Dealing with a really difficult class will take time.

 

• Attack the problem from as many sides as you can. Involve parents and administrators, reward good behavior, have negative consequences for bad behavior, allow for short attention spans...there is no one single approach that will solve the problems in a really difficult class.

 

• Work on the relationship you have with your students. Smile at your class. If you were videotaped while teaching, would your body language reveal positive or negative feelings about your students?

 

• Keep the expectations for your class high. Students live up to the expectations of the adults in their lives, so let them know that you expect a lot from them.

 

• From the first class meeting onward, establish that you control the class. Demonstrate that you will oversee the behavior in your classroom for the good of all students.

 

• Work on the noise level every day until your students learn to govern themselves. Teach students which volumes are acceptable and which are not. Establish signals to help students learn to control the noise.

• Stay on your feet and monitor. Students who know that you are watching over them will hesitate before misbehaving.

• It seems simplistic, but tell your students that you expect them to do their work well and that you will help them learn to do it. Be clear that you are on their side.

• Offer incentives other than grades. Students who have never received a good grade may not be motivated by grades. Offer small, frequent, rewards instead, such as stickers, computer time, or bookmarks.

• Praise good behavior as often as you can. Difficult students do not always know when they are behaving well. When you praise your class for good behavior, you are encouraging all of your students to repeat the behavior.

• Don’t allow students to argue with you. Be polite, but clear that you are the person responsible for the well-being of all students in the class.

 

• Acknowledge the rights of individuals in your class. Showing students that you are fair will ease many sensitive situations.

• Students who do not believe they can succeed have no reason to try. Teachers who achieve success with difficult classes turn the negative energy in a class into a positive force by persistently communicating their faith in their students’ ability to achieve.

What works for you?