I’d Like to Speak With the Classroom Manager

Episode Transcript

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:00:00]:
Last time on Year One, Jenna's much anticipated first day as a teacher just came and went. And while it didn't go exactly as she had planned, she knows it's a marathon, not a sprint.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:00:13]:
I underestimated how long everything was going to take. I got through three out of the twelve things that I planned. That was one of the hard things was because then I was like, I'm behind, like I'm doing something wrong. And it's like, no, you're not. It's just taking more time than you anticipated. And the first week of school anyway, you're not teaching any content, nor should you be. It's just teaching routine and getting to know everybody.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:00:36]:
On this episode, Jenna learns that she has to have so much more prepared than simply an effective teaching routine. This is Year One from Carnegie Learning, a podcast that chronicles all the ups and downs of one teacher's first year in the classroom. I'm your host, Kanika Chadda Gupta. Jenna is now in the first couple of weeks of her first year as a third grade teacher and she is rapidly making new discoveries about the amount of preparation required to run her classroom.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:01:13]:
The first day of school I was expecting it to be chaotic. Second day of school I was expecting it to be chaotic. But when it started to become a routine of chaos was when I was like, holy cow, I need to learn how to do this better.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:01:25]:
Every day, students have to follow daily routines that allow them to flow in, stay focused, and flow out of the classroom with consistency and accountability. Having these routines is baseline so teachers can move on to the many lessons of the day.

MAGGIE [00:01:44]:
Procedures, procedures, procedures.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:01:46]:
This is a new voice you haven't heard yet. Her name is Maggie. She's a midwestern teacher with 15 years of experience in the classroom. And we reached out to her for this season for a couple of reasons. One, she has a very different perspective on some of the challenges that first year teachers face and how they have shifted over the years. She also has experience working in a district that is lower on the socioeconomic scale. You'll hear her a little bit throughout the episodes as we give more context and color to some of the other situations.

MAGGIE [00:02:20]:
If there are no procedures, if there's no structure, you can't teach and you can't assess and you can't do all these other things that you're wanting to do with kids. So that's why it's really important. And when I say procedures, I'm talking about how do we line up to go to the hallway, how do we walk in the hallway? How do we use the restroom? How do we sit in circle time? How do we raise our hand to get the teacher's attention? How do we line up from the cafeteria to walk back to the classroom? How do you get to recess? And then once you get those procedures in place, you have to have clear expectations with kids and follow through. So it's a lot of communication with kids. It's a lot of patience on the teacher's end.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:02:56]:
At the start of the school year, these expectations, routines, and rules need to be taught, and Jenna is finding it less straightforward than student teaching a prepared lesson plan.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:03:08]:
So many people said their advice was to set the routines and set the expectations from day one. But no one gives you a list of everything that you're gonna have to do or say. Like, that would be the longest book ever written in history if it was every rule of what you're not allowed to do in my classroom, you know? Cause they'll come up with some pretty.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:03:28]:
Crazy things every day. Jenna is learning to adjust and implement new strategies to help students follow these procedures.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:03:39]:
There are so many things that I already wanna change and I already want to do. I think I literally changed the seats in my classroom, not only where the kids were sitting, but how my physical seats were set up in my room on, like, the second week of school, because I was already learning, oh, this is not going to work, or, oh, this works. I need to keep it. This is not working. But it's too late to fix that, because I already taught it to them that way. Very, very early on. I had that realization where I'm like, okay, we're learning as we go, and we have to be flexible.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:04:07]:
Part of the daily routine at Jenna's school is helping our students understand and follow the school's mission statement.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:04:15]:
Our school mission statements. Number one, I take care of myself. Number two, I take care of others. Number three, I take care of this place. So that's, like, the big thing that they break it down to.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:04:25]:
For the elementary schoolers, getting her young students to regularly follow the school's mission is easier said than done. Fortunately, Jenna school has created a clever incentive program that helps keep students motivated to follow these principles as an incentive.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:04:44]:
To follow those expectations. In that mission, we actually have little tickets. We call them. It's just a sheet of paper that you write your name on as a teacher, and you make a bajillion copies of them, and you cut them out, and they look like little. Like money almost. And on there, a little checkbox that says, I take care of myself, I take care of others. I take care of this place. And then throughout the day, if I see people taking care of themselves or each other or this place, then I give out tickets.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:05:10]:
It's a big thing for hallway behavior. I'll bring, like, five or six in my pocket and be like, I'm looking for five or six people to get a ticket. So then you check off what they're doing and give it to them. Some students are super, super motivated by it. Like, if they get a ticket, it's amazing. And some students think it's the dumbest thing in the world. So, you know, there's a balance of it. At the end of each week, you take all the tickets that were turned into you in your classroom.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:05:35]:
You dump them into a giant laundry basket, one laundry basket per grade. And it's right in, like, our main hallway of the school, so everyone can see how full it is. And at the end of every week, they pick, I think, three winners from each grade. So they'll pick out a ticket, they'll read the name on the back to see who it was. They'll read it over the announcements on Friday morning, and those kids can go get a prize from the office. And then on top of that, what's super nice is that if a student in your classroom wins, then you also get a prize. So they'll walk around with, like, a little snack cart for the teachers with, like, soda and snacks and candy and stuff. None of my kids have won yet, but one day, one day, I'll get that benefit from having them win.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:06:17]:
Using incentives like these can be highly effective with younger students because they have increasingly shorter and shorter attention spans. Researchers estimate the average attention span has dropped by a whopping 25% in the past 20 years, according to a study from the University of Denmark. The rate of that drop is accelerating every year, and much of it can be attributed to the rapid increase in screen time usage. Simply put, creating a place for effective learning has become more difficult than ever.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:06:50]:
I feel like I have a different management incentive for every single thing. Like, I have one for kindness, I have one for transitions, I have one for blurting. I have one for being on task while they're working. Like, I'm juggling, like, 16 different management strategies, because for my kids, I haven't found one that's all encompassing, and I'm still trying to search for one. I tried out one that I saw on TikTok that was basically just an anchor chart, and it had, like, a bunch of different things on it that would be expected of the kids, like, different routines and expectations that they would need to be reminded of how to do once they got back from school. So it would be, like, entering the room and then, like, call and response or lining up or, like, level zero in the hallway or packing up at the end of the day. And then there were a bunch of check boxes next to it. And, like, as the first week of school went on after break, when you saw that they were doing those things and they remembered those routines and expectations, you would give a check mark.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:07:50]:
So I did that, and it worked out super well. They were super motivated by it. We filled it up within, like, the first week and a half. So then I actually asked my kids, when we filled it up, one of them was like, can we do one of these again? And I was like, oh, okay. If you're motivated by it, absolutely.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:08:05]:
And that's not the only incentive that's worked well.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:08:09]:
I have this thing called sign in to win as well, where if I do an attention getter, because I noticed that I would do an attention getter, like, the clap repeats or, you know, saying back and forth to get their attention, and they just wouldn't listen. They would just keep talking. They would not stop what they were doing. So I made this incentive specifically for that, where if a student, like, after I do a call and response, or I stop to try to get their attention, I pick one student who stopped what they were doing, put their eyes directly on me, and I tell them to go sign in to win. And then once the sheet is full, at the end of whatever day it gets full on, I will spin a wheel. And then whoever's name is in that box gets to pick a prize from, like, my little candy drawer.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:08:52]:
While some attempts at incentivizing her students have gone well, others have shown her it's a learning curve.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:08:58]:
We were doing a math lesson, and I was having the kids take turns coming up to the board and, like, switching places with me and, like, pretending to be the teacher and me pretending to be the student so they could teach me, quote unquote, how to do, like, three digit addition or three digit subtraction, because, like, they should know that. So it was a review sort of thing. So I would let them come up to the board, one, like, one by one, and teach me how to do it in front of the whole class. But then some people would come up to the board and start to make fun of it or start to say, you know, like, inappropriate things at the board to get everybody else's attention. Or draw something they weren't supposed to on the board and that sort of stuff, it got out of control. People were getting out of their seats. So I had to turn into mean teacher for everyone in that moment because there was chaos happening. Like, honestly, it was a safety hazard.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:09:49]:
So I was like, everyone in their seats, lights off, heads down until lunch. So, like, they had to sit with their heads down for like seven minutes until lunch because I was like, you don't get fun teacher. You don't get interactive lessons like this if you behave this way.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:10:01]:
I want to take a second to mention that using incentives as a technique doesn't necessarily work for every classroom. In fact, some teachers avoid using them because they can fail to be effective long term. As Jenna is finding out, some kids.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:10:17]:
What works for them one day or one week they will have no interest in in the future. If they are super, super motivated by something for one week, and then they come back the next Monday and you're like, all right, here's this again. Let's get going for week number two. They're like, I don't care about that anymore. I'm trying to come up with things and catch them when I can, but it's hard when they lose interest very quickly. So I either haven't found the right thing yet or I haven't implemented the right thing or my kids are just crazy and want something different all the time. So it's a work in progress.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:10:52]:
In addition to not always being effective, long term incentive systems can also potentially make things less equitable in the classroom, especially for students needing special accommodations. Take a student with ADHD, for example. They might not receive as much positive reinforcement if the reward is for good behavior. Exploring other techniques like setting clear expectations, employing nonverbal cues, modeling desired behavior, or teaching conflict resolution can also be effective. The point being, there isnt a one size fits all approach. Each teacher has to find their own way, learning as they go and leaning in to what works best for them. Here's Maggie again with her take on the situation.

MAGGIE [00:11:35]:
The first year is always the hardest because you don't have that experience. When you're actually put into a classroom and you're in charge of, you know, anywhere from 20 to 25 students and you got to keep it running for six, six and a half hours, it's a whole other ballgame. And that's something that you gain as you work every year. I tell kids all the time, I said, you just make me a better teacher every year because there's not one student that's exactly alike.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:12:01]:
In other words, first year teachers like Jenna are having to face the same unprecedented challenges as veteran teachers, only with fewer tools in their tool belt.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:12:12]:
It's exhausting. And as a teacher, you are making decisions and answering questions all day long. Like your brain does not get to turn off once. So I'm really proud of how, how I've been handling that and how even, even with the ups and downs, and there have already been plenty of downs that I've experienced with my class that like, you just have to get back up and you have to be that mentor and you have to keep going no matter what. I still have had my down in the dumps moments where I'm like, what am I doing wrong? Why are my kids doing this? Like, you know, throwing a little pity party for myself every now and then. But I'm proud of myself for not giving up. I know that I'm capable and I have to just keep pushing through because it's only going to get better from here.

KANIKA CHADDA GUPTA [00:12:59]:
This is Year One, an exploration of one teacher's first year in the classroom, brought to you by Carnegie Learning. Join us for the rest of the series as we follow Jenna through every moment. And be sure to follow Miss MacNulty on Instagram and TikTok to keep up with Jenna. For exclusive additional content, free teaching resources, and more, visit yearonepodcast.com. That's yearonepodcast.com. Next time on Year One, the challenges are just beginning. Jenna encounters some new behavioral issues that force her to seek help outside the classroom.

JENNA MACNULTY [00:13:39]:
Pretty swiftly. We ended up having like a whole meeting with me, the vice principal, principal, his resource teacher, and our behavioral specialist at the school. We've tried so many different things and it's just not working.