At least once a semester, within my first three years, I hit a point where I lost it. I yelled. No, I screamed at my class. Sometimes, it was the build-up from failing to address conflict. Often, it wasn’t a single incident, but a build up of behaviors that shouldn’t occur in a “good classroom.”

Why were three girls talking during bell work? Why did I see side conversations when I was talking? What was with the comment saturated with an apathetic attitude? Why did two groups completely fail to do a project? Other times, it was the constant barrage of meetings, paperwork and the shame-fest about how awful our school was when our test scores don't increase by a high enough ratio. The truth is that I felt overwhelmed by teaching and I didn’t want to engage in the necessary conflict needed to handle the small discipline issues that were occurring. I was choosing denial, because I was tired.

I have a really long fuse, but the explosion is ugly, like the clicky pen moment in my third year of teaching.

Students kept whispering during the test. Not cheating noise, per se, but little whispers about what happened at lunch and who was attracted to whom. I sat at my desk attempting to grade the previous class period’s tests and then I’d yell out a warning.

One boy nervously clicked his pen. I looked up.

“What?” he asked.

“The pen,” I responded.

“This one,” he said and clicked it two more times.

“Yeah, please stop it,” I told him.

“Okay,” he responded. Then, looking at his pen, he realized that he had to click it one more time. So, he did and I lost it.

“Really?” I snarled.

“What? Do you want me to write on this test or not?” he snarled back.

I jumped out of my seat. “Just take your test,” I told him.

“I was taking my test just fine . . .” he said with a smirk.

“Enough!” I yelled. I paced and screamed. My face turned red. A kid laughed nervously and it set me off even worse. It's not an issue of raising my voice. I'll increase my volume deliberately. Instead, this was the issue of an explosive temper that I've had since I was a child.

I could easily rationalize it by saying, "It's really changed over the years. I’ve never gotten violent. I don't yell at my family. It's become incredibly rare in the classroom." Instead, I have to admit that my temper, no matter how rare, is still ugly and that it hurts people. Like any other exploding bomb, the victims are often innocent. I can't blow up at laziness and bureaucracy.

So, I came back and apologized. I spent the following month pulling shrapnel out of the students. It made me a little timid and hopefully a little humble. It became a healthy process of mending wounds. I won't pretend that it went “back to normal.” I had changed. They had changed. I can’t even say whether it was for the better or for the worse. However, my students forgave me. It's not that kids are made of Kevlar. It's just that so many of them live within the walls of constant anger that they have grown used to the war zone. If anything, it's been hard for me to realize that my yelling at the class was not shocking to students already wounded with shrapnel.

The incident also became a reminder that I had gotten lazy with discipline. I had made some critical mistakes before, during and after the incident and now I had to deal with the shrapnel.

The Goal
The true cause of the Shrapnel Moment of 2006 had less to do with specific actions and more to do with my goal of discipline. I had slipped into the mindset that discipline exists to make kids behave in class. I had set the definition of behave as “shut up and be good.”

The truth is that discipline should exist to keep students safe and to protect the right to learn. I should have created preventative structures so that a nervous test-taker wouldn’t have to be a disruption to the other students. I should have reacted differently in the moment, too. Due to my desire to multi-task, I had slipped into a “what’s best for me” mentality instead of considering the needs of my students. Finally, I reacted poorly afterward. Instead of calmly reminding a student why pen clicking might be a distraction,
I lost it in front of the entire class.

However, in my better classroom leadership moments, I am able to see discipline as a learning process. It’s a chance for students to be more considerate, more ethical and more self-aware. It’s not an issue of fixing a problem so much as it is guiding a student toward better relational understanding.

Before
Looking back at the shrapnel situation, I realized that the entire lesson had been doomed to failure. I had bought into a lie that the only way to assess whether students knew a social studies concept was through a silent, multiple choice, end-of-the-unit test. It’s not that I truly believed it, but out of a pressure to present “real” data, I sacrificed what I knew about motivation so that I wouldn’t look flaky. In the process, students had little sense of autonomy, creativity, purpose or a chance to act their age.
The following are a few preventative things that I can do to help minimize discipline issues in my classroom:

• Meaningful lessons: Lessons need to have a sense of purpose to them. They need to motivate students through relevance, critical thinking and creativity.
• Student autonomy: Students are less likely to misbehave when they feel that they are in control of their own learning
• Developmentally appropriate lessons: Kindergartners will act crazy if asked to sit silently for four hours. However, the same is true of eighth graders. Unrealistic expectations about age and development will lead to discipline issues
• Rituals: Having quality rituals helps prevent some of the accidental misbehavior that exists in the class
• Community: A quality classroom community helps prevent discipline issues, because students know that they belong to a group and that they are safe within it.
• Authority: The teacher needs to be the leader in the classroom or students will misbehave out of a resentment for the teacher.

During
Looking back at the shrapnel situation, I failed in the moment. I chose to multi-task and take my attention away from the students so that I could have more time with my six-month-old son at home. I chose to sit at my desk, because I didn’t want to face the boredom of actively proctoring a test. I thought I could allow the assignment to be a babysitter so that I could have a free-of-charge extra prep period to take care of administrative tasks. The following are a few strategies that can help in the moment:

• Body language: conveying both humility and authority through posture, hand gestures and eye contact. It goes beyond the teacher Darth Vader death stare (though that has its place) and into the way we intuitively share the fact that we care
• Space proximity: I have rarely experienced a discipline issue happening within three to four feet of me. In the aforementioned shrapnel incident, I had barricaded myself behind a desk and thought that I could monitor long-distance. Yet, the remote control wasn’t even remotely controlled and I failed.
• Tone of voice: I snapped at the student when I said, “Please stop . . .” which led to the student getting on the defensive. Instead, I should have had a calm, direct tone of voice.
• Awareness: This is the sense of being present, of not allowing my mind to wander during a lesson. It’s the often intuitive sense of what is happening in a multifaceted classroom.
• Remaining calm: My sense of anxiety spoke volumes to the class. However, when I can convey a sense of calm confidence, students pick up on this. Don’t get me wrong. This sense of calm often looks like high-energy passion. Yet, even then, there is a sense of calm to it, because it lacks fear and anxiety.
• Avoid shame: I failed with Clicky Pen Boy because I shamed him. I disciplined him in front of the group. He responded with snarls and snark.

After
Looking back at the situation, I recognize that I didn’t handle the after-incident problem well. First, I let it escalate. I turned it into a power struggle. When I yelled, I initially tried to justify it with the students. It wasn’t until the next day that I apologized and the reconciliation took awhile. The following are a few things I should have done:

• Waited: When the student responded with a disrespectful remark, I should have waited for awhile and approached him after class to talk about how he had reacted to me.
• Distance: I should have distanced myself from the situation by walking around the class, taking a deep breath and calming down.
• Reframing: When in-the-moment discipline happens and students respond poorly, I need to reframe it from a situation that’s about my status to a moment when students can learn to rethink their own actions. 
• Reflection: After the day, it’s valuable to rethink the moment and analyze a better approach. Bust out the mental highlight films and approach it honestly with the question of “What could I have done differently?” It doesn’t have to be a time to beat myself up. Instead, it’s a chance to analyze actions in order to grow.

Losing the Group
I used to hate when teachers would punish an entire class for things one student did. I remember telling myself that I would never do that, only to fall into this trap my first year of teaching. Each year, though, I reduce the number of times I discipline the class as a whole.

Typically, there are three main reasons that teachers discipline an entire group. Often, these tactics aren't the most effective.

Sometimes teachers believe that one person did this and no one will rat them out. However, this creates an unnecessary power struggle between students and teachers. It forces students to decide if they want your approval or peer approval. Often, peer approval is still worth the risk. A better option for me has been to say, "Whoever it was needs to admit it. I've already forgiven you, so you might want to apologize. " I know it sounds strange and you can take it or leave it, but this method has worked well.

Other times a teacher tries to pit the group against a student in a method of peer pressure. Typically, this creates a martyr situation and martyrs are admired, not scorned. The best it can possibly produce is a potential bullying situation where they will still hate the teacher. A better situation would be to figure out how to deal relationally with that one particular student.

Finally, the whole class as an entire group was too loud, too crazy, too bad for a sub. When this is the case, it's usually an issue of bad procedures, poor expectations and other issues (including a bad sub). While it makes sense to address individuals, usually all it takes is a quick review of expectations with the entire class rather than a large-scale punishment.


Presumptuous, Pretentious and Perhaps Even Practical Advice

• Reflect upon your discipline after a large-scale screw-up:
• What could I have done differently to prevent this?
• How did I handle it in the moment? Did I do anything that caused it to escalate?
• How did I handle things after they escalated? What was my mindset?
• Video-tape yourself and watch how you are handling discipline. Take the time to see where you are aware and where you are unaware. Don’t use this for surveillance. It’s not a time to catch students screwing up so much as it is a chance to grow in awareness.