Teachers who can’t figure this out are doomed.
I will never forget one of my high school science teachers.
He was a good man. A decent person. His instructional practices weren’t exactly progressive, but he meant well.
The biggest problem for him was that he had a very short fuse.
Get under his skin, and things could really unravel. He would raise his voice. His skin would start changing colors. He would throw chalk at students. He would smash his speaking podium on the floor.
All of this was highly entertaining for his 16-year-old learners. For a couple of my friends, it became a sort of daily ritual to try to get this teacher to lose his mind.
One of their favorite strategies was to whistle when his back was turned. And his back was turned a lot, because one of his go-to instructional strategies was to write chalkboards full of notes that he expected students to dutifully copy into their binders.
Every time the whistlers would strike, he would turn around and insist that they stop — quietly at first, and then with increasing severity. With growing frustration, he’d demand to know who the whistlers were.
Of course, he’d get no helpful responses from these teenagers — just some chuckles. The whistling game would continue, and things would go from bad to worse.
Emotional self-regulation is an essential skill for students
Today, emotional self-regulation is considered an essential skill for students, and rightfully so. To be successful in society requires learning how to manage one’s own emotions.
Fail to do that, and you’ll have trouble keeping a job, a relationship, a bank balance, or a driver’s license. Or any number of other outcomes that form part of a successful life.
You’ll have trouble gaining and keeping the respect of others. In 2024 terms, you’ll become a meme.
Pixar’s Inside Out (characters pictured above) brought the zones of regulation to life. As helpfully illustrated, the red zone is temporary insanity.
Returning from red to green is the focus of countless IEPs and behavior support plans for students. Strategies include controlled breathing, moving to calm spaces, engaging with comfort objects, going for a walk, getting a drink, taking a break, and talking to a trusted adult. All good things and helpful solutions, depending on the child.
British Columbia’s K-12 curriculum identifies emotional self-regulation as a facet of Personal Awareness and Responsibility, one of the few official core competencies that all students in K-12 must develop.
According to the Ministry of Education,
students must “understand their emotions, regulate actions and reactions, persevere in difficult situations, and understand how their actions affect themselves and others” (condensed).
That’s true for students. Now let’s bring this back to educators.
Dysregulated teachers lose all credibility
In Essential Truths for Teachers, Danny Steele and Todd Whitaker write that “When a student is misbehaving, the teacher needs to make sure the student is the only one misbehaving.”
Unfortunately, we’ve all seen teachers misbehaving in classrooms. It’s not pretty.
Sure. The raging teacher might get some compliance for a while. Maybe.
But that’s a very cheap and short-term win. It doesn’t last.
The unfortunate fact is that dysregulated teachers lose credibility in the eyes of their students. And teacher credibility, according to Dave Stuart Jr., is the bedrock of student beliefs. It’s where student success begins.
Like it or not, students don’t consider us to be competent professionals when we’re throwing tantrums like a toddler.
At best, they’ll respect us less and simply become less cooperative. They’ll offer fewer responses during discussions. They’ll be slower to respond to instructions. They’ll be less likely to cooperate with requests. They’ll invest less effort in learning activities.
That’s the best case scenario.
At worst, students become downright hostile. The mood in the room becomes tense and adversarial. Episodes of student defiance multiply, leading to more teacher outbursts. “This teacher hates us” becomes the reinforced narrative, and every class becomes a battle.
What I just described is a living nightmare. It’s enough to make teachers leave the profession entirely.
Effective classroom management starts with keeping your cool no matter what
It’s this simple. If we’re looking to manage our classrooms effectively, we absolutely have to keep our cool, even in pressure situations.
Lose our minds, and it doesn’t matter what other strategies we try.
We’ve lost the room.
Teachers on Fire 