Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Guest Post: The Student Whisperer

This is a re-post from November 11, 2010 to accompany the post on discipline directly below it here.  I am re-posting it to revisit Harry's comments and invite yours in response to this and to the discipline video below.

Do you ever watch the Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic channel? That guy, Cesar Millan, is absolutely amazing with dogs (although it's not uncommon that he gets bitten or clothes ripped). What he stresses is that dogs should be in a calm-submissive state and the humans (the pack leaders) should maintain a calm-assertive state with respect to the dogs.

That seems to me to be the ideal for school discipline and classroom management, too. With Cesar, it's never a dog problem but a people problem, despite the fact that some dogs are bred to be vicious, etc. As he says in the show, he rehabilitates dogs, he trains people.

It strikes me that student discipline is probably much the same way, if only the faculty had the kind of near-magical powers with students that the Dog Whisperer has with dogs. And the data from Discipline Manager backs that up. Looking at the data from a typical middle school, half the faculty had fewer than 15 discipline referrals while the top four had over 100. Are those top four having difficulty maintaining a calm-assertive state?

At the same time, some faculty do have near-magical abilities with students.  At least they seem magical to the rest of the staff. In an ideal world, they could mentor the teachers needing the help, but those teachers have their own classes to teach. Where do they find the time?

So, some teachers have known classroom management problems. Principals want to improve their skills for the benefit of students, to make the principal's job easier and to possibly save the teacher's job.

What do you think of a Student Whisperer service? We send a Flip video recorder (cheap) to be set up in the teacher's classroom for a day, and then the teacher returns it in the provided mailer to the Student Whisperer, one of those really remarkable teachers. Just like Cesar Millan, the Student Whisperer can figure out what the teacher is doing wrong almost instantly, just by viewing the video. It would be inexpensive for schools because the Student Whisperer doesn't need to travel, just look at some video. The video could be private between the teacher and Student Whisperer so the teacher doesn't have to worry about being exposed to the principal and colleagues, and there would be no retained record of the students in class.

What do you think?

Posted at 11:40 AM Keywords: by Harry Tennant , Student Whisperer , discipline 0 Comments