The Kid Whisperer: How to have students manage their own classroom

I've read your book, and I have a question about student jobs. Is it a bad idea to make sure every student has some kind of job? I want each of them to have the opportunity to "prove" that they are responsible by keeping their job. Also, can some students have more than one job?

Answer: There are three main reasons for doing student jobs the Behavioral Leadership way. Here they are in the order of importance:

1. To make the teacher’s life easier
2. To give away control in a healthy way
3. To teach valuable lessons about life

Speaking generally, the way most teachers do student jobs accomplishes none of these goals. In fact, very often, it does the opposite of all three of these goals. The main reason for this is that a teacher may be a pleasant and very tolerant person who is willing to allow things to be at least slightly dysfunctional in their room, especially in the name of making things fair and equal.

By contrast, Behavioral Leadership Job Procedures are created by me. I developed them by stealing what other teachers were doing and then making them better. I’m not very pleasant or tolerant of disorder, so I need everything to run optimally. I’m also lazy, so I need students to manage the classroom for me.

So, here are the answers to your excellent questions:

Making sure every student has a job doesn’t work. First, you don’t have time to manage this (see #1). Second, even if you could, what good would that do? It would involve forcing kids to do work and needlessly taking control away from them instead of giving it to them (#2). Finally, making sure every kid has a job by creating a bunch of schedules would teach your students terrible and untrue lessons about life (#3).

It would teach them that everyone is entitled to a job, that you can keep jobs even if you do them poorly or don’t do them at all, and that it’s a boss’s job to seek you out and give you a job.

Do you know any young adult (perhaps one living in their parents’ basement) who you think might have grown up in schools that manage jobs this way?

Maybe it’s best to not trick kids into thinking that the world works one way, when it really works in the opposite way.

By contrast, wanting every kid to be able to prove that they are responsible by keeping their job is a great idea and it absolutely will not happen if we give every kid a chance to have every job and we schedule who gets the jobs. If you do this, they will learn the opposite:

“Why do I have this job? Because it’s October. Why do I still have this job? Because it’s still October. I am entitled to this job until it is no longer October.”

Better to do it the Behavioral Leadership way: After a developmentally appropriate amount of time during which the teacher does the job (prompting for cleanup, taking attendance, being in charge of passing out papers, etc.), the first job-holder is offered a job. If she accepts, she has that job for as long as she does it perfectly. If she does it less than perfectly, she will no longer have the job (see below).

Besides all of the previously mentioned benefits, perhaps the most important one is that, as long as you create lots of jobs for kids to do, managing jobs this way makes it so the most effective kids have the most jobs most of the time, so that your classroom will be effectively managed by kids, not by you.

Here’s how I fire kids who fail to do their job perfectly:

Kid Whisperer (with calm empathy): Oh, man. You’re fired.

Kid: No! I have a right to this job!

Kid Whisperer: Oh, man. I don’t argue. You can hire anyone else who has not had that job already.

As a teacher, I had well-run classrooms that I did not have to manage, I developed resilient kids, and I was able to do my job effectively while having time to teach lessons. All of this was done while teaching kids valuable, useful lessons about life.

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