I Was THAT Kid—Now I Teach Differently

I learned how to spell my name pretty quickly in preschool. So did everyone else in my class.

When you got in trouble in my class, the teacher wrote your name on the board. If you got in trouble again, she put a check mark after it. During recess, you had to walk around the playground one time for your name and an additional lap for each check mark before you could go play with the other kids.

My name only has four letters and appeared daily, so we all picked it up within the first couple of months. (I would also note that my cardiovascular fitness was tip top.) This sort of trend continued into elementary school until I was diagnosed with ADD (what is now called ADHD) and started receiving amphetamines twice a day. I spent a lot of time walking laps, becoming well acquainted with the lead paint chipping patterns in the corners of my classrooms, and was even struck a handful of times by a frustrated teaching assistant.

Like most of us, I don’t have a ton of clear memories from my life prior to age eight; just impressions and bits and pieces. I do remember, though, the feelings of seething anger toward the adults who singled me out for these little punishments. That resentment arose again every Friday, as the “good kids” got to take their turns cashing in classroom currencies for whatever trinket the teacher was doling out from the prize box that week.

Somehow, despite all this, I started my teaching career doing the same sorts of things (minus the corporal punishment, of course). I managed behavior the way I had been managed and the way I saw my mentor teachers doing it in their classrooms. I had time-outs, token economies, Fun Fridays (for students who “earned” it), and notes sent home at the end of the day detailing any unacceptable behavior.

What I quickly realized, though, was that all these systems were about as effective for my students as they were for me. This was particularly true for the kids with the most challenging behavior. I often felt like the ones who really responded to the rewards were the ones who would have been well-behaved regardless of any external motivation. It was disheartening to say the least. Honestly, though, I didn’t know what else to do. I had never seen anyone do anything else.

Near the end of my second year of teaching, I was afforded the opportunity to observe in my county’s demonstration preschool class. The other kindergarten teachers and I shuffled into a little room with a two-way mirror and watched the teacher, Kim Hughes, lead a morning whole group lesson and then transition the kids into centers. If my memories of life at age six are hazy, my memory of that 30 minutes is etched into my brain for eternity. I have observed over 1,000 classrooms since that day and am still yet to see anything quite like it.

This was an inclusive classroom with 18 kids, half of whom had IEPs. Some had been expelled from other centers for being behavior problems. The whole group time I watched, though, could not have gone more smoothly. The children were engaged and compliant. The sort of tiny hiccups that come as part and parcel of working with four-year-olds were handled with such grace and ease, I almost didn’t notice them. We then had the opportunity to debrief with Kim, and I remember one of my co-teachers, when she asked if we had any questions, stuttering out, “How?! Just, how?”

Kim didn’t talk to us then about the rewards she had promised the kids or what would happen if they didn’t do what she wanted. She talked about relationships. She talked about really connecting with these little people that co-created her classroom community with her. She talked about supporting them, teaching them how to be in that space, and giving them every opportunity throughout the day to fully participate and shine in the way that she knew they could.

This opportunity completely altered the trajectory of my teaching practice. I shifted from thinking about how to get children to do things in the moment to thinking about their long-term motivations. I stopped thinking about how to get them to sit still because I wanted them to do so and started thinking about how I could get them to internalize the reasons that they should sit still.

My early successes with this approach led to a greater hunger to learn about motivation and what causes children to act the way they do. Some of the things I tried in my classroom worked incredibly well. Others were disasters. Over time, I was able to keep the good while weeding out the bad. It took years, but I eventually had a classroom that my five-year-old self could have thrived in--where my struggles to sit still and quiet would have been met with support and care rather than frustration and punishment.

At this point, I knew a lot of what worked for me, but I still had questions about the why. Why were some of the things I was doing so effective when other teachers around me continued to struggle? Questions like this led me back to school. I completed my master’s and doctorate degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I continue to work on projects dedicated to helping young children and families.

During my doctoral work I spent hundreds of hours observing in Pre-K-3^rd grade classrooms. These observations suggested that many teachers were struggling with the same issues I was during my own teaching career. They wanted desperately to motivate children, but were doing it in ways that led to short-term success at the expense of long-term outcomes. They could get everyone sitting still and quiet in September, but by February, the wheels were coming off.

I began presenting some of the things I had learned to my project’s partner schools. These presentations, along with some follow-up coaching, led to big changes. The teachers at those schools told two friends, and they told two friends, and they told two friends. Fast-forward a few years more and I’ve had the opportunity to present to and work with over 10,000 educators, administrators, parents, and policy makers.

Throughout this time, I’ve worked to refine my ideas and sought new ways to explain them. At this point, 25 years into my journey in this field, I finally feel like I have something worth writing down: a distillation of my framework for navigating challenging behavior. The result is Thinking Outside the Prize Box, a journey through my stumbles and successes, filled with humor and lessons learned. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.