Teacher Restraint
Putting Your Reactions To Rest
There are hundreds of decisions made by the teacher every school day.
Allthese decisions have an impact on those in the classroom. Restraint
is important in making good teaching decisions. Teachers can improve
their decisions in the classroom by increasing their restraint of their
own anger to students’ negative reactions. The learning atmosphere in a
classroom can be exciting and motivating when the leader is a good model
of behavioral restraint. Restraint is a modeled skill that teaches the
students how to handle many types of social situations.
Restraint is a pre-existing decision, made by the teacher, to act as
an’enlightened one’ during any classroom encounter. This decision
includes conquering the urge of reacting with anger to students’
negative responses. The teacher decides to respond to the students
according to the ‘Platinum Rule’. This rule is to treat others as they
want to be treated. When a teacher treats students the way that they
want to be treated students’ hidden needs can be fulfilled and learning
encouraged. Students’ need for learning is often unreached because of
unmet personal and social needs. Such needs are love, self-worth and
confidence in self. To help those who perceive learning as less
important than their unfulfilled
needs, teachers might try any of the following:
* Have a 90 second talk with each student each week. Listen for the
student’s unfulfilled needs. Once the need becomes known, teach the
student how to ask others to help them satisfy this need. Resource
people, such as school psychologist or school counselor, can give the
teacher ideas of
how to help.
* Respond to unusual negative reactions, by students, with an
absence of personal affect. Don’t take the students’ reactions
personally, but take them as reactions in search of fulfilling a need.
This restraint will release the teacher to respond to the students’
needs before responding to their actions.
* Tell the truth to the students in advance. Consequences for
inappropriate and appropriate behavior should be explained in
advance.Consequences should reflect the teacher’s objective of peace in
the classroom. Consequences for appropriate classroom behavior should
be emphasized.
* Immediately prior to administering consequences to the
student, the teacher could tell a scenario where the worst happened or
best happened when another student chose to react negatively or
respond positively
in a similar situation. Humor could be appropriate in the scenario.
Enlightened teachers help their students through weakness to
power, through danger to security, through indifference to love, and
through resentment to forgiveness. Teachers put their reactions to rest
when they show restraint through responding to student need’s first and
then to their actions.
– Randy Brister