Classroom Management 101: Avoiding Power Struggles

I remember asking a Behavior Classroom teacher how he managed to be so good at what he did. I worked with him several times, and he had some very challenging adolescents that he worked with on a daily basis, but he made it look so easy. He said “The most important thing to do when working with these guys is to avoid getting sucked into power struggles.” This may be the most important piece of teaching advice I ever received, aside from “If you make them fall in love with you, they’ll do anything for you—even learn.”

“The typical power struggle occurs when the teacher makes a request and a student refuses to comply.” The classic scenario occurs when you ask a student to do (or stop doing) something, and the student says, “Make me.”

You of course don’t want to look weak in front of your whole class, so you make your demand again (and probably start digging into your repertoire of dirty looks and pull out your “I mean business” tone of voice).

By now the whole class is on the edge of their seats, waiting with breathless anticipation to see what will happen next, and since the student doesn’t want to look bad in front of their peers…

Who is going to win? If you guessed “nobody”, you are correct. Does this mean your only option is to let students do whatever they want in class? No, of course not. But this brings us back to an important Ken Peterson idea that I remember from graduate school: Problem Ownership.

The person having the problem, is the student, not YOU. You, the teacher, have the luxury of solving behavior problems in your class at a time that is convenient for YOU, not the student’s schedule, because it isn’t really YOUR problem. If the student wants/needs to solve it sooner, the onus is on them to do so, because it’s THEIR problem.

For example, everyone in class is working on an assignment, except one student, Mike, who’s over causing some sort of minor disruption. You notice he’s off-task, so you wander over to where he’s sitting.

Teacher: “Hey Mike, you need to get to work now.”

Mike: “Make me.”

Teacher: “We’ll talk about this after class.”

“We’ll talk later” is YOUR magic line in avoiding power struggles. It’s really hard for the student to continue arguing with you once you use it. (About the only thing they could say is, “No, let’s talk now,” and all you have to do is repeat yourself. If they continued, they’d just look crazy. Then at a time that’s more convenient for you, you can go have that heart to heart chat about what’s REALLY going on.

Why does this work? Since you’ll be together for 180 days, not all problems are urgent, and can be dealt with at a time of your choosing. You’re still dealing with the problem, but at a time when you’re both calm, and when there isn’t an audience. Basically, it means if you encounter a situation in the middle of class, you DO NOT have to drop everything to deal with it right then and there. There’s no rule in teaching (or life) that says you have to deal with a student’s personal problems in front of the entire class during third period on Wednesday. This vastly eliminates the odds that you’ll get sucked into a lame power struggle with a student (and even if you do, at least you won’t have a rapt audience).

If you have a student who seems to enjoy argument and debate, and you’re anticipating having to deal with this person often, you can deputize the rest of the class by saying something like this:

"There will often be consequences given for disruptive behavior this year. However, the consequences will almost always be given privately, and I will almost never discuss one person's consequence with any other person in this class. As a result, although it may look as if I am ignoring inappropriate behavior, consequences are usually given later for two reasons: I am not going to give up our learning time, and I am not interested in embarrassing or being embarrassed by anyone in front of everyone else."

For those of you teaching (or raising) teenagers, this last bit is really important:

“When my daughter was a teenager, her last word during a disagreement was often a snooty ‘whatever.’ Although I would get annoyed at her insolence, I came to realize that almost always her ‘whatever’ was followed by grudging compliance. I had actually won! She was doing what I asked, although not happily. The challenge for me was to stay focused on the outcome without getting trapped by my anger at her attitude. The same dynamic holds when working with difficult students.”

Sometimes getting what you want is far more important than having the last word. Quoted material from: Allen Mendler, Defusing Power Struggles: It's Not About Getting the Last Word (November 12, 2012), Edutopia