Why educators struggle with this and what to do about it
When I first started teaching, I thought I needed to know everything. I thought I had to be in control of everything. I had to make all the decisions and manage every little thing in my classroom. After all, I was the adult in a room full of children. I should know better. I should know more. I should be able to handle a bunch of 4- and 5-year-olds, shouldn’t I?!
That didn’t work out so well.
My first year teaching, I had a child with anger issues. He would throw chairs, and not the light, mostly plastic chairs in preschools. These were the heavy metal and hard plastic public school chairs. I had another child who just wandered around the room all day. It did not matter what we were doing. This little boy just wandered. And then there was the not so little boy who could read at a third grade level, but had zero comprehension and couldn’t follow two-step directions.
I also had a runner. If the door to the hall was open, he bolted. He would run down the hallway. He would run to the playground door. And he escaped. Several times. One day, we were lining up to go to lunch, and the chair thrower was having a tantrum, screaming and throwing chairs. I was trying to get everyone lined up to go to lunch, but when the chair thrower started screaming, the rest of the class started cowering on the other side of the room. I did my best to quickly get everyone lined up on the opposite side of the room from the chair thrower. At this point, the runner got up, and instead of getting into line with everyone else, he ran down the line, smacking each child on the head as he bolted out the door.
HELP!!! 
I had 26 children in my class and no assistant.
I did not feel in control at all, and I desperately wanted and needed help. I wanted to feel like what I was doing was OK. How could I meet the needs of the 20 other children while dealing with the six who were constantly challenging me and distracting everyone else?
My solution: control everything.
I chose the table toys the children could use. I chose which center they could play in. I chose when they could move to another center. I chose the materials they could use in the art center and what projects they could make. I chose where they could sit at the tables and on the carpet. I chose their class jobs.
I chose everything.
It was EXHAUSTING!!! And I still did not have control. I was constantly frustrated. I didn’t understand why I got so much pushback from so many children.
For our small group activities, I insisted that everyone was working at the tables at the same time. I was the only adult in the room. I had four tables. I planned four different activities for the children to rotate through. I made sure three of the activities were either games or something I thought the children could complete independently or with a partner. One table was the “teacher table” where the children would work with me and I could differentiate the activity. I ended up spending more time monitoring the three so-called independent tables than I did working at the teacher table.
I had super fun activities planned. I used the element of surprise in my activities. I used lots of funny voices during read-alouds. But I wasn’t having fun.
Most of my day was spent on behavior management. My most frequently used words were “No” and “Stop.”
Something’s got to give!
For four years, I managed my classroom like this. I was not having fun. I did not enjoy managing behaviors all day long. But I did not know any different. No one told me there was a better way.
Want to know what happened next? Read the full story here.
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