Teacher Tips! (Pre-School thru High School): 

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I hope you glean some insight after reading these articles for educators!  I update this page regularly, so come back often!   I post excellent tips and solutions for common discipline challenges in your classroom! 

In addition, feel free to visit my Blottblog - (just click on the tab at the top of this page) - I post blogs addressing the most common issues discussed in my classes. 

If you don't find the topic you are looking for, please let me know!  You can email me at brandilott@blottcom.com.


Blessings to you! 
B

What IS Love and Logic for Teachers?

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Love and Logic® is a method of working with students which was developed by educational expert Jim Fay, child psychiatrist Foster W. Cline, M.D. and Charles Fay, Ph.D. Love and Logic has many tools for educators, principals and districts that promote healthy parent/teacher and teacher/student relationships and positive school wide discipline. And yes, Love and Logic works along with all other school discipline programs. It actually makes them work better!

Love and Logic HELPS educators, administrators, and counselors:

  • Set limits in the classroom without anger
  • Provide underachievers hope and willingness when the going gets tough
  • Raise the odds for kids to stay in school
  • Build strong connections between home and school
  • Improve attendance
  • Manage disruptive students
  • Make teaching and learning more fun and productive
  • Immediately handle disruptive students
  • Get and keep students' attention
  • Build positive student-teacher relationships
  • Help students own and solve their own problems
  • Bully proof children, diffuse power struggles, and handle difficult people

  Love and Logic WORKS because:

  • When adults take care of themselves, they hand the problem back to the student who created it.
  • When the student has to solve the problem, they have to think.
  • When students have to think, they learn that decisions have consequences.
  • When students have to deal with consequences, they learn to think.
  • When we allow the student to deal with the consequences, they learn to think before they cause a problem.
  • When the student learns to ask themselves, "How is my behavior going to affect me?" they have learned self control.

The Delayed or
"Anticipatory" Consequence
                                        Why it works...

by Jim Fay, Love and Logic Founder

Immediate consequences work really well with rats, pigeons, mice, and monkeys.  In real-world classrooms, they typically create more problems than they solve.

Problems with Immediate Consequences:

1. Most of us have great difficulty thinking of an immediate consequence while we are teaching.

2. We “own” the problem rather than handing it back to the child. In other words, we are forced to do more thinking than the child.

3. We are forced to react while we and the child are upset.

4. We don’t have time to anticipate how the child, his/her parents, our administrators, and others will react to our response.

5. We don’t have time to put together a reasonable plan and a support team to help us carry it out.

6. We often end up making threats we can’t back up.

7. We generally fail to deliver a strong dose of empathy before providing the consequences.

8. Every day we live in fear that some kid will do something that we won’t know how to handle with an immediate consequence.

Take care of yourself, and give yourself a break! Here’s how:

The next time a student does something inappropriate, experiment with saying, “Oh no. This is so sad. I’m going to have to do something about this! But not now…later. Try not to worry about it.”

The Love and Logic Anticipatory Consequence allows you time to “anticipate” whose support you might need, how the child might try to react, and how to make sure that you can actually follow through with a logical consequence. This Love and Logic technique also allows the child to “anticipate” or worry about a wide array of possible consequences. The Love and Logic Anticipatory Consequence technique gains its power from this basic principle of conditioning.  When one stimulus consistently predicts a second, the first stimulus gains the same emotional properties as the second. Stated simply: When “try not to worry about it” consistently predicts something the child really must worry about, “try not to worry about it” becomes a consequence in and of itself…an “Anticipatory” Consequence.

CHORES in the CLASSROOM?

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By Dr. Charles Fay, Love and Logic
The most successful teachers create a sense of family in their classroom. Some of them do this out of great gut-level instinct. Others understand the scientific research on human emotional needs. We all need to feel safe, to feel connected to a group, to feel needed, and to feel loved.

Student chores are an essential component of developing this sense of classroom family.
One teacher commented:
Years ago, I discovered on accident how important chores are. Because I was getting old and lazy, I decided to put my students to work on the tasks I didn't like doing.

They all had jobs such as organizing the books, erasing the board, getting markers, throwing away junk that fell on the floor, etc. One day, a heated argument erupted between two of my tougher students. When I asked what was going on, one replied, "He's doing my job!"

In the book Teaching With Love and Logic, Dave Funk comments on his own growth as a teacher:

I realized that every time I did something for kids that they could do for themselves, I was limiting them in the long run.

Chores aren't punishments! They're opportunities for students to feel great about themselves!

Nothing LOGICAL about this...

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By Jim Fay, Love and Logic Founder

What a disturbing call! On the other end of the line was a teacher who was fed up with her not-so-love-and-logic school. "Our principal is really confused. She says that we have a Love and Logic school but the kids are out of control."

She continued, "Kids who don't like what the teacher does demand to see her. They even call her by her first name. She rescues them. We teachers are not allowed to provide consequences for kids for their bad behaviors. Our principal says this won't leave them feeling loved."

"WOW! THAT DOESN'T SOUND LIKE A LOVE AND LOGIC SCHOOL!" I replied. "Give me an example."

"School assemblies are chaos," she lamented. "Teachers would like to remove kids who misbehave. We think that if they miss the assembly they could learn from the experience. But our principal says that this won't leave them feeling loved. She says that no child is ever to miss an assembly."

The teachers have the right idea. Allowing kids to misbehave without consequences actually shows them that we fail to love them enough to set and enforce limits.

Yes, holding kids accountable for their actions is one of the highest levels of love. This prepares them for the real world.

Sadly, it appears this is not happening in that school.

If you are reading this as a parent, remind your school that you support teachers holding kids accountable for their actions…as long as they do it in a loving way.
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Twenty-three
    Classroom Interventions

by Jim Fay, Love and Logic Founder
These easy-to-use classroom management techniques allow teachers to maintain classroom control while they effectively handle even the most troublesome classroom behaviors.

1. Give the student the “evil eye”.
2. Walk toward the student.
3. Stand close to the student.
4. Eye contact and a shake of the head indicating “No”.
5. A gentle hand upon the shoulder of the student.
6. A statement indicating disfavor.
7. Change the student’s location.
8. Statement of misplaced behavior.
9. Using an I-message.
10. Teacher sets limits by describing what he/she allows/does, or provides, without telling the students what to do about it.
11. Provide choices.
12. Removing the student from the group to time-out.
13. Requiring student to fill in a form during time-out before he/she can return to the group.
14. Student is excused to the office for a short “cooling off” period. No counseling is requested of the administrator.
15. Give the student an appointment to talk about the problem.
16. Restricting the student from the area of his/her infraction until a new plan of action is identified and written out by the student.
17. Student is restricted from the area of the infraction until the adults feel that another try is in order. The student then returns to the area on a day to day basis.
18. Providing a natural or logical consequence with empathy.
19. Student makes an “informational telephone call” to his/her parents to describe the problem and his/her plans for improvement. Teacher calls first without student’s knowledge to alert parent and seek support.
20. Student writes an “informational letter” to parents describing his/her actions or problems with plans for improvement. Letter is to be signed and returned and is the student’s ticket to return to class.
21. An appointment is made with the administrator for consultation. The teacher, administrator, and student form a team to discuss possible solutions.
22. A parent conference is held. This includes parent, teacher, administrator, and student.
23. Student is suspended from school until a parent conference is held.