Classroom Management Success: Getting Students To Follow Your Instructions Article

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Classroom Management Success: Getting Students to Follow Your Instructions

The first thing we can do to maximise the chances of having a student follow instructions is to make sure they actually know what we mean when we speak to them.

Author: Rob Plevin

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Have you ever asked a student to get on with their work only to turn round 5 minutes later and see that they’ve totally ignored you? And when you ask them why they aren’t doing as you asked they say “I didn’t hear you” or “I didn’t know what you meant.” It’s frustrating isn’t it?

The problem here is that the teacher has unwittingly left themselves open to argument by not ensuring that their message was clearly understood in the first place and this gives the student a nice excuse for not doing as they have been asked. Needs-focused classroom management is about preventing problems from occurring and that means removing any opportunities for confrontation and any excuses to behave inappropriately. A very simple way of eliminating this opportunity is to simply get them to confirm that they heard you in the first place.

“Darren, what did I just ask you to do?”
“Kyle, tell me what I just said please.”
“John, repeat the instructions please so I know you heard me.”

Once they’ve told you, they can’t ever come back at you with “I didn’t understand” or “I didn’t hear you” and you have successfully eliminated one source of potential problems.

The second aspect of cutting out arguments associated with the instructions we give our students concerns the way in which we actually communicate them. On our live courses we use various activities to illustrate the importance of congruence – making sure that the messages we give through our facial expressions, body language and voice tone/pitch/volume clearly match the words we use and help convey our message without being misinterpreted.

It is difficult to be aware and maintain control of body language, facial expressions etc. when dealing with confrontation but the way we speak to an angry or frustrated student is at least as important as the actual words we use and has a tremendous impact on the outcome.

A pupil will read everything about our approach, our stance and the way we look at them before we actually start to speak and if we get any of these crucial aspects wrong they will have decided to listen, switch off or retaliate before we even open our mouths.

It is the silent messages we unconsciously give that are often at the root of students either ignoring or arguing with us.

Are we giving them the message that we’re tired and worn out? If we do there’s a good chance they’ll either ignore us or push a little harder to tip us over the edge when we ask them to do something they’d rather not.

Are we giving them the message that we’re angry with them? If we do they might well turn against us completely. Tough pupils might retaliate there and then while quieter pupils might hold a grudge and seek retribution at a later date. In either case, they are unlikely to behave as we would like.

The way we give instructions has a massive impact on how students respond to them. We can give the impression that we are a pushover, a threat or a leader depending on the silent
messages we give out. If you find your students aren’t responding to your instructions in the way you’d like this might be a good area to reflect on.

Thirdly, instructions need to be clear and unambiguous. The clearer the directions, the more chance there is that they will do what we want and the less chance there is for arguments due to misinterpretation.

"John, you need to stop tapping your pen, sit properly on your chair and look
this way." ...will have more chance of getting the desired outcome than...

"John, stop it!"

A request like this immediately leaves us open to questions...

"Stop what?"

...and then before we know it, an argument has developed...

“I wasn’t doing anything! You’re always picking on me!” Etc. etc.

Once they’ve drawn you into a ‘battle-of-wills’ your lesson is lost.

Here’s another simple example...

“Get on with your work quietly”

The word ‘quietly’ means different things to different people so straight away we have opened the door to more confrontation. For one student it means whispering while for another it means talking in their normal speaking voice. Another pupil might take this as meaning there is no real rule on noise levels at all. In each case, a pupil who is challenged for making too much noise will almost certainly protest that they are “working quietly”. It’s not surprising that vague instructions like this don’t always result in the behaviour we want to see and are often a source of arguments.

To make sure the students keep within the noise levels we want we would need to clarify what we mean by ‘quietly’. Younger children might need a tangible representation of the word – they could be shown a ruler and told to use their ’30cm voices’ or their ‘partner voices’ instead of their ‘yard voices’. For older students we might simply clarify our instruction by demonstrating the volume we are referring to.

Bottom line: Explain very clearly what you want a pupil to do, ask them to do it in the right manner and there is more chance they will actually do it – without arguing. 

About Author

Rob Plevin is the author of Magic Classroom Management and the originator of the Needs-Focused Approach to behaviour management - a step-by-step, easy-to-follow system for preventing and dealing with behaviour problems. Behaviour Needs deliver training in the UK and overseas to teachers, parents, youth workers, lecturers and social workers and also provide a full range of resources for teachers through the website: www.classroom-management.org . A full schedule of courses and speaking events can be seen at www.behaviourneeds.com

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Classroom Management Success: Getting Students to Follow Your Instructions