Reblog: 30 Goals Challenge for Educators: Goal # 6: Choose Your Battles-Updated

Goal # 6: Choose Your Battles:

Oh, battles!. I´ve been there so many times!. I can´t help it: I teach teenagers, I am Italian descendant and Argentinian. I was born in the city and have lived in the “city” all my life. Never got used to it, though. We, “City People”, battle every single second of our lives: when we walk, cross the street, commute daily...it is always an adventure with an unknown ending. "It's survival in the city, when you live from day to day, city streets don't have much pity,when you´re down, that´s where you´ll stay" (Joe Walsh). However, our battles inside a class are now different from the ones we faced in the late 1980´s and 1990´s when I started teaching. Since I started working back in my country in 2010, I felt I had to work really hard on my professional development because my previous job as an international educator in the United States had given me the priceless opportunity of daily professional development. While doing some research I discovered a wonderful author called Michael Linsin whose blog, “Smart Classroom Management” and his book “Dream Class”, have made me rethink what I was doing inside the class, brainstorm with a future project on giving advice on classroom management to new teachers and also to not so new ones too, who sometimes need to recharge batteries and add some oil to their engines.

In his article “Why Picking Your Battles Is a Poor Strategy”, he says that picking your battles only causes more misbehavior, resentment and although it might work with some “difficult” students and/or classes, it will prevent us from creating the well-behaved classroom we really want.
On the contrary:

"How does one go about picking battles? Is it based on the severity of the misbehavior, who is doing the misbehaving, the teacher’s mood at the time? The truth is, leaving classroom management so haphazardly defined causes tension and anxiety and creates a climate students don’t want to be part of." Michael Linsin.

Teaching in Argentina has turned a little bit more complicated than it had been before, because our society has undergone many, I would say too many severe crisis: economical and psychological ones as a consequence. The ones who suffer the most are the children, and at our school we try to turn misbehaved students and “warriors” into good soldiers, ready to battle life outside the nice, cozy and comfortable school environment. If confrontation and a feeling of resentment persists, we never know how the situation may end. Unfortunately, violence asks for violence, Peace brings peace. Do not give way to "battles" in our classrooms, let us free them from the stress and wasted time. Just do some System Restore, clean that annoying update and bring back peace and restoration to our favorite place: our class. Stick to your classroom management plan, I am talking about well-taught and consistent classroom rules.

Unlike what I was told by some administrators, discipline in a classroom needs to be consistent: it must be handled by the educator. I cannot accept the fact that I have send a student to the office if she/he continually misbehaves, which it could only be talking. I don´t consider side talking a severe misbehavior but I do address it in different ways: students may like it or not, because they want to talk with friends, they just need to understand the class is not a coffee store or a social gathering when instruction and practice are being delivered. Period.
That is my number one rule.