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Now when I start saying rewards and penalties, I hope you start
thinking of what we do with classroom management, because
while we try to be positive as much as possible, 98% of what we
do in classroom management is rewards and punishments.
Right?
And it stems from our belief that students possess the traits
we want them to exhibit, and we just need the right combination
of rewards and punishments to draw it out of them.
Folks, the next time you experience the student you are
thinking of when I talked about problem behaviors, I want you to
remember Amy standing over there because when you ask them
to make a change, and you ask them, and you ask them,
and you reward them, and you punish them,
and they keep doing it, it's like Amy said.
She's still going to be here at four o'clock.
It's not going to happen and it doesn't have anything to do with
the rewards and the punishments.
It has everything to do with her inability to do it.
She was motivated, right?
It didn't matter, so why do your efforts fail?
Because you're operating on trait theory.
Stop it.
Alright?
This is not about traits.
This is about developing skills.
People who do not respond to you have not been taught the basic
skills of respect, discipline, and responsibility, and until
you teach them those skills, you will continue to have those same
problems, and these students will continue to exhibit
minimal amounts of character, and you can change that.
But it's about your perspective.
Perspective.
It's critically important.
Again, two words today.
The first one is perspective.
If you walk out of here, and you remember perspective,
I can feel good because I've done something worthwhile.
Let me talk about perspective in another way.
I already gave away I was a track and field coach, so I like
track and field examples so I'm going to use one here.
Anybody hear of *** Fosbury before?
A few people, okay.
*** Fosbury revolutionized the high jump, and he set
a world record in the Olympics as he did it.
If you look at the black and white picture up there,
you see the old way to high jump.
People jumped and they stayed upright.
Part of the reason is they have to land on their feet.
Do you see a pad there?
No.
So you don't want to land like these folks are going to land.
Okay?
But they didn't think of the need to do it any differently.
If you can see this picture, I don't know how clear
it is on your handout, probably not too much,
but this guy standing here next to this bar.
This bar is at his nose level.
Can you imagine someone who can jump high enough upright to jump
over a bar that's at somebody's nose level?
Wow, that's a phenomenal jump, however, that's not what we
think of when we think of the high jump, is it?
Even if you've never participated in it,
don't know much about track and field, you probably recognize
this as a high jump.
That is called the Fosbury Flop.
It's named after the man who revolutionized the event,
and you know why he did it?
Because he had a different perspective than everyone else.
When he started high jumping, he came to a realization.
It's not about just getting your whole body over the bar
all at once.
It's about getting your body over the bar eventually,
and that makes all the difference because the energy
that it takes to get this head some two feet over the bar
could be used to help you jump higher if you only
clear the bar by this much.
He changed the event so much that even if you don't know who
*** Fosbury is, you've seen his work.
Perspective matters.
Perspective can change everything,
and that's your proof.
You don't have to take my word for it.
Alright, so how do we do this?
I said we start with self-respect,
now let's talk about why.
First, because the very worst problems that we see when we
talk about violence, when we talk about the most horrendous
kind of problems we can think of, they tend to stem
from a lack of self-respect.
Read the research, you'll see it backed up.
Students who do terrible things to others or themselves
do not respect themselves.
Alright?
But think about the second point.
If you don't respect yourself, if you have a very low opinion
of who you are and what influence you can have
over your life, why would you listen to anybody?
Why would you try to do something you don't want to do?
You wouldn't, right?
It's just human nature.
If you don't think you can make a difference, you stop trying.
How many of you teach at the secondary level?
Middle grades?
So now we're getting to most of this room.
Students run into road blocks, especially in school,
in some early years and they haunt them for years.
I'd like to tell a story about my oldest son who is now
in sixth grade.
He really seemed to be smart, everything just clicked,
and he got in first grade and he was recognizing the words
he was supposed to recognize, and everything was really cool,
and then he had to start putting them together to read,
and he couldn't do it.
I was an English teacher, and I'm in education, and so this
troubled me greatly, and so I kept working with him
and working with him, and asking the teacher for suggestions,
and we kept trying to figure things out, and he couldn't
do it, and he got frustrated.
And the more we tried to have him do it the more frustrated
he became, and he got to a point where when we said we were going
to do reading he would cry, and I didn't know what to do.
Well, we were kind of fortunate because my wife has an aunt
who has taught first grade for more than 30 years,
and she kept giving us ideas and giving us ideas and giving us
ideas, and one of them finally worked, and he got it.
He started to read, and by the end of first grade,
he was reading the way his teacher expected him to
and in fact better than that, and he was saying,
hey Dad, can I take a flashlight to bed so I can read?
And I said oh, thank you.
But you know what, most kids don't have that.
Most kids don't have that kind of experience and that kind of
dedication from their parents, and you have these students
in your classes, and when they run into a road block,
nobody removes it, and they hit it, and they hit it,
and they hit it, and they hit it, and it hurts so much that
they stop trying because we all know that it's less painful
to stop trying than to try and still fail.
Why do your students continue exhibiting these behaviors?
Starting to get the idea?
They have to develop their self-respect.
Question, go ahead.
(female speaker). Is it a student's
fault if they have low self-respect?
(Dr. Kestner). No, but at some point,
you have to do something.
(female speaker). But where is that?
Is that 16?
Is that 17?
(Dr. Kestner). There's no age.
(female speaker). You get to a point,
I understand what you're saying, but you get to a point where you
can help a student and you can tell them yes, you can do this.
Yes, you can do this.
Let's keep trying.
Let's try different ways, but they keep saying, no I can't.
(Dr. Kestner). And we're going to talk
about exactly how to deal with that student today.
So, excellent question.
We're going to talk exactly about how to deal
with that student, to get that student to try.