Thought patterns that make consistency hard

Is it hard for you to be consistent? Do you feel guilt over holding your sensitive generally well-behaved children to the same standard as everyone else? Do you sometimes purposely overlook some misbehavior because it was minor? Or because that child is normally on task? Or that child is getting their work done?

This is causing your more difficult students to dislike you. Difficult students tend to have a very strong sense of justice and fairness. They also want to look outside themselves to blame others for their problems. It is much easier to think, "My teacher is always picking on me. She's not fair," than it is to think, "Wow. I really am making some poor choices."

When you have different standards for different students, you are not being fair. Especially if your different standards lets some children get away with more. And since we are all racially biased, you probably let your white students get away with more than your kids of color. This is especially true if you use emotion to decide when to intervene and give a consequence. That is code red for you might be allowing bias to decide who gets what consequences.

The key to consistency is not your difficult kids. It is not even your middle of the road kids. It is the children who normally behave! Yes, this is totally counter-intuitive. The deal is, everyone else takes subtle clues from how you treat these children. If Jane can't even get away with shouting out and walking around the room, John thinks - there is no way I'm going to get away with x.

So - how are you going to get over your guilt about holding these children accountable? Well, one thing that works for many teachers is you are going to teach everyone up front, from the point of view of a child, what to think about when you get a warning or a time out.

Just like you model a think out loud with your reading lessons, you need to model a think out loud for receiving a warning or a time out. You need to model for your sensitive children how to not overreact about getting a warning or taking a time out. Yes, this is strange. You are giving a child a warning and at the same time teach them to talk themselves out of being upset over the warning.

Won't that make them not care about getting a warning?

No. It won't make students want to break the rules. It will, though, give you the confidence to enforce your rules consistently, kindly and calmly. Treating your generally well behaved children like everyone else is the key to a calm classroom.