Why Accountability Isn’t Working In Your Classroom Smart Classroom Management
If accountability isn’t working in your classroom, whether individually or class wide, the problem is that you have an area of weakness.
The solution is to identify the weakness and correct it.
Remember, effective classroom management is knowledge based. Apply SCM strategies as described and your students will become predictably well behaved.
Therefore, if your students don’t seem to care about your consequences, pinpoint where you’ve gone wrong from the list below and then make the requisite adjustment.
Accountability will begin working as it should.
1. Consistency
Nearly every teacher who struggles with classroom management is inconsistent, which is the death knell of accountability.
Because it isn’t fair. It infuriates students and causes them to dislike you, distrust you, and misbehave more often. You must watch your students like a hawk and follow through like a referee.
2. Vagueness
Your students must know precisely what does and doesn’t constitute breaking each classroom rule. Gray areas equal confusion, misbehavior, and aggressive pushback when you try to enforce.
Every misbehavior must be a choice students know they’re making ahead of time. It must involve crossing a clear, nonnegotiable line that triggers the same, predictable, every-single-time teacher response.
3. Boredom
You can’t ask students to listen, learn, and behave if you don’t make it worth their while by delivering interesting lessons and bringing enjoyment to your classroom. In other words, it’s a two-way street.
In this day and age, there is no way around it. If sitting in time-out feels no different that being a regular, participating member of your class, then it won’t improve behavior.
4. Sloppiness
Clutter, inefficiency, confusion. Poor organization and preparation cause students to see you as weak and easily manipulated. It’s also associated with careless, inattentive students.
You must move with purpose and clarity. You must show high competence and create a pin-neat room environment that is congruent with your call for excellence—or else nothing will matter to them.
5. Excitability
Your students will feel any and all stress and anxiety you bring to the classroom. Worse still, it will transfer to them in the form of excitability, which is one of the biggest causes of misbehavior.
You must remain as calm as a Tibetan monk inside and out from opening bell to dismissal because this too transfers and has a powerful effect on behavior and your students’ ability to grasp and accept accountability.
Who is to Blame?
If it’s not the students, then you are to blame, right?
Not exactly. Students are always 100 percent at fault for their own misbehavior and must be held accountable according to your classroom management plan. Full stop.
However, you have an incredible amount of leverage and power at your disposal if you know how and where to get it. When things aren’t going well, there is always a reason that can be determined and corrected.
In the case of ineffective accountability, the culprit is nearly always one or more of the above. The trick is to identify the problem, select the appropriate remedy, and then apply the solution.
The change in fortune will be almost immediate.
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