Forty Percent of Your Job

Years ago I was working in my room as two teacher colleagues were visiting in the hallway venting about distruptive students and how some teachers deal with them. I was not trying to evesdrop, but the conversation was animated enough that I couldn't help but hear a portion of it, and I heard something by the vetran teacher that profoundly effected me.

The veteran teacher of the two said, "Some teachers will say, 'I don't want to teach behavior, I just want to do my job and teach.' The problem with that is that forty percent of teaching includes helping the students manage themselves in the classroom, so when a teacher says, 'I just want to teach,' they're really saying, 'I just want to do sixty percent of my job.'"

Very true.

There is a balance between teaching content and teaching the students. Certainly one needs to know the content being taught, but the skills needed to teach (like providing practice, monitoring and adjusting teaching, engaging students, managing off-task behavior) also need to be in place. Ignoring the background or self-mangement skills of the students will kill even the best lesson. A teacher can also waste teaching time because he or she does not know the content well. The bottom line is that students will benefit far more by learning the skills they need to survive in a classroom than with just learning the content. If the teacher can't teach them how to behave in the classroom, they won't learn the content anyway.