Technique 36: 100 Percent

(Part of chapter 6, Setting and Maintaining High Behavioral Expectations)

This technique can be summed up very easily: 100 percent of the students must comply with directions given in your classroom.  Your authority in the classroom must be not subject to interpretation, situation, student, etc.

You can enforce this without being a bully.  The best teachers find ways to

finesse their way to the standard with a warm and positive tone.  They are crisp and orderly; students do as they're asked without ever seeming to think about it.  Yet the culture of compliance is both positive and, most important, invisible.  (p 168)

It is important for everyone to comply with a teacher's instructions so that 1) compliance is the norm, and non-compliance is not; 2) compliance does not make some student feel like he/she is trying to act like the teacher's pet; 3) the students all do the activity that is going to help them learn the material and excel.

There are three important principles:

1. Use the Least Invasive Form of Intervention: if a student is non-compliant, then an intervention is necessary, and should be done quickly.  Using the least invasive form works best.  The author lists these interventions from best (least invasive and most efficient) to worst:
• Nonverbal intervention: make eye contact with the student, or teach from the students side. (this way you don't interrupt your own teaching)
• Positive group correction: a quick verbal reminder to all students of what is expected of them right then: "We're following along in our books." or "We're tracking the speaker."
• Anonymous individual correction: again, a quick verbal reminder to all students, but being more explicit about the non-compliance.  E.g., "Two people are not tracking the speaker."
• Private individual correction: go to the students desk and quietly ask them to comply.
• Lightning-quick public correction: when absolutely necessary, use this technique, but make it quick and try to make it positive. "Back row, I need to see your eyes.  Thank you."
• Consequence: when all else fails, you have to apply a consequence for non-compliance.  When you do this, be unemotional, quick, and decisive.
2. Rely on Firm, Calm Finesse: be firm, calm, and unemotional.  Stress the universality of expectations.  Use language that emphasizes the expectations are not personal.  E.g., "That's not how we do it here".
3. Emphasize Compliance You Can See: don't just ask for students' attention.  Instead, ask to see their eyes.  Or better, ask to see their pencils down and their eyes.  If you do this, then a student has to "go farther" to not comply.  Also, don't allow students to comply marginally.

My response:

This can be a real problem in the college classroom (a fact that still surprises me)!  In one case, I needed to have everyone's attention to emphasize a really important point.  I could not get everyone to stop what they were doing so that they were paying attention to me.  It took me 5 minutes to get everyone's eyes on me!  (I should have had everyone put their hand (or hands) up in the air -- there is less ambiguity then about compliance.)

Also, I've had classrooms in which I ask the students to pair up to discuss something, or write some code, and while most students did it, others just simply ignored me.  I've had to stop the class and chew them out!

So, I think I do this pretty well, but not as well as I could.