After reading Confessions of a Bad Teacher, I wrote an article called “Why So Many of America’s Teachers Are Leaving the Profession,” which had received over 1450 likes and over 50 comments in the HuffPost50. My next article in HuffPost Education was called Secure Attachment: Do Good Teachers Need It? about the same book and Matthew Hertenstein’s The Tell.
As my third period students filed in the door for physics class, one of the 8th graders whispered to me, “They did it again. Ms. Morgan (name changed) cried in class.” I wondered what happened this time. Ms. Morgan and I were both new teachers at the public middle school and shared nearly all the same 150 students who appeared 36 or so at a time in our classrooms. While I was older than her, we were both teaching in public middle school for the first time. How did a small group of students know what to do to crush Ms. Morgan and bring her repeatedly to tears? Why did they “go after” her repeatedly and why did a small math mistake ruin her whole day?
While reading Matthew Hertenstein’s The Tell “about the power of prediction based on observations of brief samples of others’ behavior,” I was thinking about teachers and classroom management. Some teachers can control a class of students and some cannot. Children seem to be able to size up teachers in an instant, just as adults can sense from laboratory studies and photos who is more aggressive, what is someone’s sexual orientation and other personal things in mere moments. Learning teacher’s tells could help them to do better in classroom evaluations from supervisors but could it also help with management?
READ THE FULL ARTICLE on the Huffington Post Education section.
Comment below about what you think about Teachers and Travelers and secure attachment!