Middle school teacher shifts from "as if I don't have enough to do" to "my job is a breeze"

0:02 Middle School Teachers Discover Conscious Discipline Conscious Discipline combines social-emotional learning, school culture and.... classroom management into the fabric of your classroom. Which yields higher achievement! I remember walking in there saying unconscious discipline has always worked just fine for me, so I was pretty resistant.

0:33 Classroom management and discipline like that has never been a real big problem for me so I was just like, "Oh God, how many hundreds of hours am I going to have to sit through for this?" I used to just blow things off. I'm sort of passive-aggressive by nature, I guess. Like tattling: Is there blood? Are there bones showing? Okay. Go away. And now I am getting more towards "Okay, let's sit down and talk about it" but it's a lot of little things. I didn't just wake up one day and say "Oh, this is great" and I remember sitting there thinking, "I don't have enough to do, right?

1:06 I have to do this, I have to do that." That's not the way I feel now, but that's how I walked in. If I were talking to a fellow teacher that was resistant to this, I think I'd start off by telling them you should start with jobs. Think about some of the things that you hate doing and have a kid do it. I hate answering the phone in the middle of a lesson. Now I have a receptionist and they pick up the phone, "Good afternoon, Mr Miller's class, how may I help you?"

1:33 Ninety percent of the time they don't need the teacher, so the kid will listen and then they'll say, "Lashaunda, you're out of here." Lashaunda gets her stuff, and she's gone, and that's one thing you don't have to do. I started realizing that this makes my job a breeze, and now this year I don't even start until about 15 minutes into class. I sit in the back and I do the activities and the kids just do our Conscious Discipline and get ready for the day activities and after 10 to 15 minutes I start. So I get to be a student for the first quarter the class so that's nice.

2:05 Boys and girls please remember these first three activities: breathing, safe keeper, wish well are for three minutes of focus. We breathe to get oxygen into our brain so we can learn. We do safe keeper so we feel safe. Why? So we can learn. Then we do wish well to make us realize that we're not the center of the universe. There's other people out there. What's the goal for us for these three minutes?

2:37 To pay attention. Being quiet is the start of that. Paying attention; three minutes of attention. When you're ready. Boys and girls it is my job to keep you safe.

3:08 And it's our job to help keep it safe! I'm not really a touchy-feely connection kind of person so it's sort of funny but the thinking of you, I think that will be huge. I don't know if it will help the kids, but it will sure help me.

3:42 I've always thought you need to have time to have fun. One thing that's changed, and this showed me how I'm internalizing this, is that I've always use lunch as a reward. I had elaborate systems. I had glasses with pennies, and "Oh, everybody has their pencil when the bell rang, that's two pennies for you. And when you get fifty pennies, you get to have lunch on the patio or lunch in the classroom or something. Well this year, I looked around and it was a beautiful day so I just wrote "tomorrow lunch on the patio for everyone" and so it became not a reward, it became a celebration.

4:14 When I switched away from rewards to celebrations, it took a burden off my back. I found that I could focus more on the children rather than on keeping track. I hate to say it but I thought yeah, I rock. This is good.Yeah, I'm good. I wish I could say that more often but in this one case I pegged it. And I had a lot more fun. A big part of Conscious Discipline, I think, is that you're working on yourself and then as the leader you spread it through the class but you have to do it first.

4:50 I work with at-risk kids, and the year before last I didn't have one kid pass the state test. We made several changes and one of the big changes was I started using Conscious Discipline. My sixth-grade went up quite a bit and my fifth-grade, we went from 7 out of 23 passing to 19 out of 23 passing. 7 had passed in fourth grade and 19 passed in fifth-grade.

5:21 It was huge and I think a big part of it is that after we did our Conscious Discipline routines, then they were mostly ready to learn. They were still fifth-graders, but they were mostly ready to learn. I think the biggest change in me that it's created is before I used to teach a class. I don't teach classes anymore, I teach individuals and I noticed last year, about the second week of school I just knew everybody's name. Before, I used to stand them up and say, "this is your name, this is your name. Okay, go stand over there. I got you guys."

5:53 I'd treat the kids like flash cards. Now because I'm making those individual connections the names just come. That might seem silly but for me it's huge. Discover for yourself! facebook.com/ConsciousDiscipline twitter.com/consciousd youtube.com/lovingguidance Conscious Discipline