Hi and welcome to Hallway Pedagogy. Over the last 20 years as a teacher some of the most useful lessons I’ve received in teaching practice have been during casual and quick interactions in passing periods. It is ‘in the thick of it’ that teachers share best practices and then apply them immediately – and we all grow as professions. So here is my attempt to share some of my best practices, in 5 minutes or less.

Today I’m going to talk about redirecting off task students. A number of years ago I made a small change to my language which made a big difference in my practice. Instead of saying “Jakub – get back to work”. I started saying “Hey Jakub – what can I do to help you get started”?

This small change also meant that I was leaving an opening for students who needed help to ask. Off task students with learning differences may, legitimately, have no idea what the instructions were or need clarification. By asking “what can I do to help” – I am offering support to all students. Let’s get real, a good percentage of them are just distracted or not doing their work – but I don’t always know the difference and many needs and disabilities are invisible. They also change from day to day, a student may be struggling with a difficult home situation or a new mental health challenge, and no matter how much I try to build relationships with students I can’t know what is going on in each of their lives each day. This way I am simply not making any assumptions.

Which leads me to the risk of teaching to my own biases about kids. To research for this video I read a great review of literature from 2018 – you can find the citation in the comments below if you are interested. This review showed the effects of teacher bias and expectations on the amount of eye contact or smiling a teacher gives to a particular student, the amount of support, and wide-spread evidence of racial bias in classrooms. We all make judgements about students, just like we all have biases. But you can protect yourself from expressing those biases by controlling your language.

And don’t think the kids won’t notice. They are hyperaware of how you treat the other students in the classroom. One study in 2017 found that 61% of teachers agreed that there was a “teacher’s pet” in the classroom, while 85% of the students, in those same classrooms, identified a “pet”.

Besides which: a stock, positively leaning phase just helps keep the tone light and supportive. On the days that are long, when you haven’t slept enough or gotten your coffee or exercise – a phrase like “what can I do to help you” is going to hold less of your frustration. You just can’t say that phrase in anger.