Assume nothing! Most importantly, don’t assume that your students have ever been in a structured environment, especially if you’re a high school teacher. I remember making that mistake in thinking that high school students should all somehow intuitively “know” how to behave in a classroom at this point in their school years. “Surely they know how to behave by now,” I thought. Was I ever wrong! A sad reality for some students is that they only know and recognize disruptive learning environments; it has become their version of a normal classroom.
As a teacher, you set the tone and provide structure for your class. To me, structure in a classroom means two things: safety and organization. Ultimately, students want to know that you have their back when they come to your classroom, that it is safe to be themselves, and that they will not be judged. Students also want to walk into a classroom where the teacher is organized and there are clear and consistent class procedures in place. As crazy as it may sound, students appreciate structure. It may not be something that they are used to, but even students who are more used to a chaotic classroom appreciate structure. Structure also decreases disruptions and negative behaviors. If you do not have structure in your classroom, the students will act out— not because they want to but because they can. Students who struggle behaviorally and emotionally need a structured daily environment. Teachers who create a structured environment for these students early on end up facilitating positive relationships between the students.
It is important to hold all students accountable to school-wide expectations. Inconsistencies in expectations or a lack of structure, destroys, and worse of all; undermines a teacher’s authority in the classroom leading to misbehavior and insubordination. If students hear the same language being spoken throughout the building concerning school expectations and procedures, they will be likelier to enter each classroom modeling those expectations. On too many occasions students have tried to undermine my authority in my class with the infamous sayings, “Well, so-and-so teacher lets me eat in class, and so-and-so teacher lets me have my cell phone in class. As a school community, we must continue to push for general procedures to be implemented throughout the building with the hope that the behaviors we want to see modeled will begin to show up in other teachers’ classrooms.
