Hands on top...*

This whole post might be off, but I don't think so. | Source 

Everyone has a Thing in education they just can't abide.

I've worked with teachers who disagree with numbering students or allowing bathroom breaks outside of lunch and recess. There's the much maligned clip chart. I personally lose my stuffing when teachers keep students out of Music because they're missing work in class.

But there's something else that's creeping up right behind that as my number one classroom no-no.

Attention Getters.

You know, the Power Teaching "Class" - "Yes" or the sing-songy call and response, "One, two, three. Eyes on me!" - "One, two, eyes on you!" There's a million of them, as many as there are really great teachers who use them.

I certainly don't want to disparage the teachers who rely on them. Teachers use what works for them, and we're all individuals, right? Well, yes. Of course. But my problem is the greater culture that they create.

Take for example, the classes that then visit their specialist teachers and are so trained to hear, "Macaroni and cheese," and reply "Everybody freeze." that they literally cannot stop what they are doing and listen without a verbal cue. How is that going to translate to middle school, college, or career? No one's clapping an echo pattern to me to get me to stop talking at the beginning of a meeting. (And if they do, I'm not going to lie, I'm crazy offended at their condescension and will refuse to pay attention for the rest of the meeting. That's probably just me and my response to...authority. But the point stands.)

What about the class that hears the Attention Grabber of Choice and knows that the teacher will repeat it until everyone is quiet?

Or the class that begs substitutes and specialists, custodians and bus drivers to use the classroom cue, because "that's what our teacher does and we know to listen."

When we as teachers rely solely on a simple trick like an Attention Getter, we miss the teaching part. We assume that the students are learning to read the situations in which we cue them, and will gradually not need the cues. And some students will - probably the ones who don't need the cues as much in the first place - but others won't. Without explicit instruction in the how and why of Attention Getting, and in my humble opinion, the release of Attention Getter Management to students, we're all just Pavlov in front of a class of hungry dogs.

"But Sarah, we need a way to get attention in our classrooms," you say. Of course you do. And I'm not suggesting that you give up your "Holy moly-guacamole" at all. I merely hope that you'll use more than one strategy for getting attention when you need it. Try waiting it out. Or use a bell or special glasses sometimes.

But most of all, realize that you could be subverting a learning opportunity. When you rely on an Attention Grabber, you are responsible for managing the student behavior. That leads to students learning to wait for a cue that they are behaving inappropriately for the situation, rather than learning to manage their behavior themselves.

"But Sarah, I teach elementary school. These kids are just learning to be people," you counter. I teach elementary school too. I'm lucky enough to see everyone in the school, and let me be frank: it's completely and totally obvious which classes are expected to manage themselves and internalize behavior cues, and which ones only know one teacher-directed way to attend to what is going on around them.

It might seem easier to have magic words in your classroom. Especially if they work more often than not. But looking around our world today, we need to work a little harder to make sure our kids know what is okay without reminders and prompting. It's a little thing that would have bigger repercussions than we could imagine.

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*Students would put their hands on top of their heads and answer, "That means stop." This one is probably my least favorite of all of them.