The Student and the Behavior

Ms. Deborah Haislip

Ted 414 Classroom Management

Dr. Sapp

3 August 2016

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  “First, Ms. Carol will give them a verbal warning to stop checking their phone or she will have to keep the phone in her desk for the rest of the period. Then if Ms. Carol sees them check again, she takes the phone and puts it in her desk.”
  

– Miryam H., Antioch Unified School District, 14 year veteran Aid, my mom!

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  “I have students keep busy, so busy that they don’t have time to waste. We all know that students compulsively use their phones when they feel it’s “down time” so my lesson plans always include a string of tasks.”
  

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  Heather S., Green Dot Los Angeles, 5 year veteran Teacher
  

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  Student Response Systems (SRS), common brands like Sentio and eInstruction use clickers to gather multiple choice answers. There are free options that use cell phones. Use the cell phone for SRS whether multiple choice as in polleverywhere.com or a teacher screen where students send written response to the shared board in answerpad.com –by making the cell phone an ally, students are too busy to mess around if they’re phones have to be used to participate.
  
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  Teach research skills using the cell phone in class. Students are welcome to use their device to frontload before a lesson. Make it routine to use the phone to frontload. Start every class period with a warm-up think-pair-share, then introduce what will be covered today and give the students 5 minutes to frontload for the lesson using their devices.
  
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  Have a lesson on compulsive phone use, and the science behind why we’re so addicted to checking our phones. This lesson will serve to explain why our desire to check our phones constantly is an addiction that can be controlled in the classroom, an environment for learning not social media.
  
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  When a student is using their phone to distract themselves, have tasks prepared to assign to that student. Jobs such as collecting the data from the SRS, creating the next couple of prompts for the SRS, passing out papers, choosing that day’s exit-slip prompt, reading the SRS questions aloud, etc. The reason to do this is not to punish the student per say, but to re-engage them – besides most students enjoy having jobs. This fulfills the behavioral function of belonging, according to Glasser’s Choice Theory.