Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 55: Least invasive intervention
High behavioral expectations

The goal of behavioral interventions is to get 100 percent of students on task, attentive, and positively engaged in the best possible lesson. Ironically, constant, time-consuming interventions intended to ensure that everyone is with you can sometimes make it all but impossible to teach. When instruction comes to a halt, whether it is because of a disruption or because of the response to the disruption by the teacher, the result is that no one is on task because when the teacher is not teaching there usually is no task. And during the hiatus that can result from an interruption many students will find something else to pay attention to—their minds will wander; they will turn to look out the window, they will turn to a friend and raise an eyebrow. When instruction finally restarts, they are more distracted and less attentive, so the trick is to fix any problems or disruptions using the least invasive intervention and ensure that everyone can keep working.

Let's say I am teaching but Roberta has flopped her head down on her desk and, eyes closed, is either asleep or feigning sleep. I am keenly aware of the importance of fixing the situation. Not only will Roberta miss out on the lesson if I allow her to sleep—thus compounding whatever has caused her to be tired with a gap in her learning—but her action is a statement to other students that they, too, might put their heads down and sleep if they're tired or are just not “feeling it” that day. I should make sure after class that Roberta is all right if I have doubts—it's possible there are issues that require support, but let's also not rush to assume that; there's also a chance that Roberta is simply tired, as teenagers often are, and that this is a moment for loving accountability. If I allow Roberta to take a nap it won't be the last time this happens: I will soon have a classroom where, when it suits them, some number of my students will flop their heads down—some in silent judgment of school or society or adults or my teaching and some just because they can. Or because it's become the norm.

Let's say that, knowing all this, I stop my lesson on the Great Depression and speak to Roberta: “Roberta, what we're studying today is really important for you to know about. We're going to be writing essays about it, but you'll also talk about this era constantly in college; please pick your head up and stay with us.” Even in the best-case scenario—Roberta raising her head and getting back to work right away—my interaction took several seconds, and, during that time, there was no further discussion of the Great Depression. It's not just that learning stopped; engagement stopped, and sharp minds are now looking for a substitute.

It could even be that now I'll have other fires to fight. “Jane, there are no cell phones allowed in this class,” I say to my student who took one out during the hiatus. “Carlos, I need you paying attention.” Each time I stop to correct one student, I risk losing another. I may never catch up.

It's going to be a struggle from here to get the momentum back. Attention residue, which I discuss in Chapter One, means that part of what students thought about while the task was interrupted will remain on their minds when the interruption is over. And if the stops are frequent, we'll never reach the kind of uninterrupted flow state that characterizes instruction at its best.

And of course there are all the questions about how Roberta will feel to have everyone looking at her. Yes, she needs to be awake and engaged in class. But having everyone staring at her hardly helps her concentrate. And it may make her resent me or even refuse to sit up.

So how would an expert teacher handle this? Would they intervene with Roberta? Almost assuredly. She may not feel that way at the moment but ten years from now she will wish she had not slept through classes. And if asked, her parents would be unlikely to say, “Please let my child sleep through classes.”

The goal might be the same, then, but the how would be very different. The teacher would seek to make the correction as invisible as possible and, perhaps more important, they would make the correction while still teaching. They would put a premium on privacy. They might walk by while still teaching and put a gentle hand on Roberta's elbow but direct their gaze out toward the class (rather than down at Roberta) while they did this, to give Roberta as much privacy as possible to recover her attention. If Roberta was still slow to react, they might whisper to her in a tiny pause, “Make sure you’re sitting up please, Roberta.” If that didn't work, they might find a plausible moment to ask the class to engage in some other task such as a Turn and Talk—“Please take 30 seconds to review the definition of the Civilian Conservation Corps with your partner. Go!”—and then make a brief, low-key intervention: “Roberta, I can tell you're tired, but class is too important for me to allow you to sleep. Open to a clean sheet of paper. Your heading should say ’Great Depression.’ I'll be back to check on you in thirty seconds.”

They would be calm and steady. But most of all, they would be as fast as possible in order to keep the thread of instruction alive for the other twenty-nine students in the classroom. And therein lies the secret: if you can manage to correct noninvasively, you are likely to be able to set and reinforce expectations successfully and consistently.

Six Interventions

In watching great classroom managers, my team and I have made a list of six useful interventions, ranked in order of invasiveness from least to most. The goal, generally speaking, is to be as near to the top of this list as possible as often as possible.

Intervention 1: Nonverbal Intervention

First on the list is a nonverbal intervention. I observed this during a recent lesson taught by Ashley Hinton. As Ashley taught her students to write descriptive paragraphs, she constantly made micro corrections with either a hand gesture or intentional modeling of the action she expected students to take. As she did this, she never broke the thread of her engaging teaching; distracted students were corrected in privacy and at no cost to the lesson.

You can watch Ashley do this in the video Ashley Hinton: Nonverbal Montage. Notice how Ashley addresses minor issues with subtle and well-timed nonverbal interventions while they're still small and can be fixed with a tiny adjustment—small problem equals small solution and, in this case, no disruption. This also makes it easy for Ashley to stay positive in her tone as she makes her corrections. In addition, Ashley Circulates (technique 25) constantly while she makes her corrections. Always on the move, she's able to approach a student to give a bit more clarity to her corrections without other students noticing. Her gestures are consistent—she focuses on just two or three expectations that she wants to see—and, of course, she keeps teaching.

It's important to remember that a nonverbal intervention is not inherently noninvasive, even if it looks that way when Ashley does it. To be noninvasive, you have to keep teaching and keep moving, embedding corrections in the larger flow of class. I was recently watching a teacher struggling to use nonverbals to address behavior in her classroom. The reason? She failed to continue teaching while making nonverbal corrections. She broke off her discussion and walked two rows to her left as the class watched her intently. She stopped and made a dramatic gesture to a student to sit up and stared at him waiting for him to follow her directions. At this point, with no instruction going on, everyone was staring at her and the student in question. Despite the nonverbal nature of the interaction, her intervention failed the “noninvasive” test.

Last, nonverbals work best when they are consistent and limited in scope. To begin using nonverbals, I might choose the one or two most common low-level distractions in my classrooms and develop a consistent nonverbal for each. If there are only a few signals, you can use them, and your students can process them without distracting any of you from the content of the lesson. For her part, Ashley Hinton chose to use gestures to remind her students to track the speaker with their eyes (see technique 48, Habits of Attention) to put their hands down when a classmate was talking, and to sit attentively.

Intervention 2: Positive Group Correction

Slightly more invasive but still with a very small footprint is positive group correction—a quick, verbal reminder offered to the entire group, advising them to take a specific action. Like a nonverbal intervention, a positive group correction is ideal for catching off-task behavior early. The word “positive” comes from the concept that this intervention always describes the solution (a positive) rather than the problem (a negative). “Group” refers to the fact that it's directed to the entire class as opposed to specific students. Because the goal is to be noninvasive, this form of correction tends to be very short and preserves economy of language. “Check that you're sitting up straight” (or “Check your SLANT,” if you use the acronym) is a classic. About a second, and you're back to teaching. If you need to boost the level of accountability with specific students, you might do that nonverbally at the same time; that is, you might say, “I need to see everyone writing,” while you briefly focus on an individual student who needs a bit more support with some eye contact and perhaps a slight nod of your head. The idea is that, in speaking to the group, it also corrects those students whom you might not see.

Of course, while you can establish nonverbal accountability for individuals, you keep noncompliers off the public stage. Saying a student's name usually causes people to look at him, and this can cause resentment or sometimes reward (i.e. being looked at is what the student wants). If you make the effort to show that you are trying to solve something without “calling a student out” and while preserving their privacy, the result is usually positive.

Intervention 3: Anonymous Individual Correction

The next intervention, an anonymous individual correction, is similar to a positive group correction in that it describes the solution; however, it makes it explicit that there are people (as yet anonymous) who have not yet met expectations. You might combine it with a positive group correction to make it sound like this: “Eyes up here, please [positive group correction]. I need two more sets of eyes [anonymous individual correction].”

As with the positive group correction, you can supplement an anonymous individual correction with nonverbals, especially eye contact and a quick nod, to establish directly and privately whom you are expecting to fix the situation fast. The combination of verbal group accountability and nonverbal individual accountability can be especially effective.

Laura Baxter does a nice job of this in Laura Baxter: Orange Row. Twice she pauses briefly to remind students that their focus needs improving or they need to face forward, but she's always calm and keeps the individuals she's referring to anonymous, although in one case you can see there's some subtle eye contact—subtle enough that you don't see classmates turning around to see who is causing the problem. Her economy of language is also great.

Intervention 4: Private Individual Correction (PIC)

The next level of intervention is a private individual correction. When you have to name names, you can still make use of privacy. And when you need to take more time with a student, you can make it less invasive by asking the class to work independently, or by making your intervention at a time when it's easy to be offstage.

That was one of the strategies I suggested a master teacher might try, especially if Roberta had not responded to earlier less invasive efforts to get her on task—“Please take thirty seconds to review the definition of the Civilian Conservation Corps with your partner. Go!”¹¹—And then make a brief intervention that was as private as possible. “Roberta, I can tell you're tired, but class is too important for me to allow you to sleep. Open up your notebook to a clean sheet of paper. Your heading should say ’Great Depression.’ I'll be back to check on you in thirty seconds.”

Here, with your voice dropped to show you are not trying to make something public out of it, the intervention is likely to be more effective, especially if you are careful to describe the solution, not the problem (see technique 52, What to Do) and to emphasize purpose (“This is important for you to learn”) over power (which is why something like “When I ask someone to sit up, I expect to see them do it” is generally ineffective).

You can see Josh Goodrich, then of Oasis South Bank in London, make a private individual correction in the video Josh Goodrich: Let's Get to It. Most of his students are working industriously but one student has just not been able to get himself going. Josh spots him and walks over, dropping his voice to a whisper. “I need to see you writing within ten seconds. Let's get to it, mate.” His tone is calm and steady. His directions are clear. He whispers to preserve privacy and he's quick. You could be sitting two seats away and miss the whole thing.

Balance with Private Individual Precise Praise (PIPP)

We call a private individual correction a PIC for short, and its partner is the PIPP, or private individual precise praise. When you use PIPP, you walk over to a student, just as you would when you make a PIC, but whisper positive feedback instead of criticism. If students come to expect that a private intervention could be either positive or corrective, they will be more open to you as you approach them. You also earn trust for your criticism by balancing it with praise. Most of all, you build a defense against the sort of eavesdropping that students do when they are curious about or take delight in the misfortune of others. In other words, if the content is unpredictable—sometimes positive, sometimes corrective or constructive—the urgent need to listen for the juicy bits of discipline disappears. Frankly, the idea that you might approach Roberta and say, “I thought that answer was outstanding. Keep up the good work” is not terribly intriguing to eavesdroppers. Such positive comments can help to protect the privacy of the student when you need to tell Roberta to sit up.

Intervention 5: Lightning-Quick Public Correction

It would be great if you could make every correction quick and private, but we all know that in a complex place like a classroom it just doesn't work like that. You will be forced, at times, to make corrections or give reminders to individual students during public moments. In those cases, your goals should be to limit the amount of time a student is “onstage” for something negative, to focus on telling the student what to do right rather what he or she did wrong, and then to call everyone's attention to something else, ideally something more positive, and doubly so if it helps build reinforce positive norms. This is called a lightning-quick public correction, and it might sound something like, “Quentin, I need your pencil moving … just like those sharp-looking scholars in my back row!” or “Quentin, I need your pencil moving” and then “Josefina, I can't wait to hear what you're writing about.”

Perhaps the most effective single action for “hiding” a public correction or reminder is whispering it. Even if you're in public. Even if everyone can still hear you. You can see this done effectively in the video Jason Armstrong: Don't Miss It. Jason, in fact, makes two corrections of students who are off task, and both are essentially public and audible. He's standing in front of the class when he makes them, but they feel like private individual corrections because he whispers them. By dropping his voice he is reminding the students he is correcting that he is doing everything he can to keep it as private as he can, that he's sensitive to and respectful of their feelings and does not want to embarrass them. A whisper, even if everyone else can hear it, says, “I am trying to do this without calling too much attention to you.” It creates trust and the illusion of privacy. For this reason a whisper correction is one of the most powerful tools a teacher can use.

Intervention 6: Consequence

The last form of intervention is a consequence. Giving consequences is technical and challenging—enough so that it is the subject of its own technique later in this chapter; however, it's worth noting that many of the elements of noninvasiveness I have discussed (whispering, making the conversation private, etc.) can also be applied to a consequence.

Common Misperceptions

One common misperception about the levels of intervention is that they represent a process or a formula—that you should always progress methodically through each level, trying all six types of correction in sequence before giving a consequence. Although the goal is to be as close to the top of the list as possible, great classroom managers maintain fidelity to what works. Sometimes they go straight to a consequence, sometimes back and forth among the levels; and occasionally they use several interventions with an off-task student. In fact, using levels 1 to 5 implies that students are making (or appear likely to be making) a good-faith effort to comply with expectations when reminded. Behavior that is deliberate and is disruptive most often is behavior that should earn a consequence.

Another common misperception is that ignoring misbehavior—or addressing it by praising students who are behaving—is the least invasive form of intervention. In fact, ignoring misbehavior is the most invasive form of intervention, because the behavior becomes more likely to persist and expand. The goal is to address behavior quickly, while its manifestation is still minimal and the required response still small.