Using the Mistaken Goal Chart In the Classroom

Since I wrote about the mistaken goal chart last week, I thought this week I would give my dear readers an example of how I have used it. Plus, I have been wanting to write more about my classroom/gym experience using positive discipline, so here goes.

I was teaching a one-hour 5 year old gymnastics class with 8 kids in it. Mostly, it is super easy to get kids to behave in gymnastics because they love to be there and naturally stay right on track. With the littler kids, though, there is often the problem of distractabiltiy in a gym where 6 thousand things are going on all around them. But for a 5 year old class like this, usually just calling the kids name snaps him back into the task at hand, and that's often all the discipline I have to do.

Most of my class management occurs before the kids even get there. I try to streamline the process of moving from bars to beam to floor to vault so that there is little time between activities in which to misbehave. I enlist the kids help for setting up, give them little tasks while moving between activities (like walking on toes), and try to minimize waiting in lines. Those things keep kids moving and having fun, so they don't even think of doing anything inappropriate.

I also use my energy level to keep kids focused. If a coach sits or stands still or stops talking and encouraging and laughing, the laws of physics state that the coach becomes a black hole and all the energy of the class will be sucked away. So I move constantly, touching everyone, giving constant feedback, laughing and joking and enjoying myself, and that keeps the kids energy where it belongs: in their cartwheels.

But I have had a few challenging students who required more support from me to behave well, and that's where the mistaken goal chart comes into the story. In this particular 5 year old class, I had a little boy who was a terror. He constantly irritated the other kids, would do one cartwheel and then stop, would wander away from the class, would try to get my attention every second, etc. He was one of those kids that gets talked about in the break room. Coaches try to teach classes he isn't in. He had several older brothers who also ran wild over the gym waiting area while the little one was in class, and they all drove the secretary mad. I asked around about his family because I never ever saw a parent with whom to discuss his behavior. I was told that he didn't have a dad, and his mom was almost completely uninvolved in his life. Basically, he was being raised by his older brothers who were still kids themselves.

Knowing something about his life did two things. First, it made me feel sympathetic to him instead of angry and annoyed. Second, it made me think about the whys of his behavior instead of just the what. So, I used the mistaken goal chart. I noticed that I mostly felt annoyed and irritated by him, so that's a clue that his mistaken goal might be undue attention. From what I understood about his home life, it seemed to fit. Why wouldn't a child who didn't get enough adult attention try to get it from every adult he came into contact with? And if he was being taught all his social skills by other kids, it seemed reasonable that he was using a poor method that wasn't getting results. I wondered about what school must be like for him; I would be willing to bet that his teachers think of him as a trouble maker (just like the coaches at the gym). He was probably getting mostly negative attention there too.

So I decided that I wouldn't wait for him to misbehave or ask for attention. I would just give him tons of physical contact and kind words from the beginning and see what happened. I would also continue to stop him from irritating other students, but I would worry less about how much gymnastics he was learning and focus for a while on what kind of experience he was getting from me (one of the few adults he ever interacted with).

I asked him if he would like it if I carried him from activity to activity. Yes, he said, with a lit up face, he would love this. Most 5 year old boys want to play roughly with me, but they aren't usually cuddlers, so I took this as proof that he desperately needed adult contact. I hugged him when I saw him. I touched his hair when I passed by him in line. I spent time picking him up and throwing him into the foam pit (I did the same to the other kids, since they all love this). I spoke with him before and after class. I waved at him on the playground when I saw him during his brother's classes. I carried him from beam to bars to vault to floor. I treated him like a darling child that I couldn't get enough of. And an amazing thing happened. He became a darling child that I couldn't get enough of.

His behavior improved A LOT. He stayed on task; he begged for attention less; he kept his hands off the other students; he stayed where he was supposed to stay. He blossomed when some love and affection was showered on him, not as a reward for good behavior, but as his due as a child.

Had I not consulted the mistaken goal chart, I would still have addressed his behavior using positive discipline. But I wouldn't have been fixing the problem he really had. I could have made him the line leader, but his problem wasn't that he felt a lack of power. I could have found him a smaller class with less going on in the gym at that time, but his problem wasn't over-stimulation. By using the chart to find his real problem, the misbehavior melted away. Jane Nelson really is right when she says that "children behave better when they feel better."

I'm So Excited, and I Just Can't Hide It

I am so excited about my new job that I had to blog it. I will be teaching the gymnastics methods class to future P.E. teachers at a local college. I will get to redesign the course myself! This will be amazing experience for me, since I want to teach at a community college in the future (though in a totally different field). You guys who know me, know that I am really passionate about changing some of the ways that gymnastics is taught to make it more accessible to all kinds of kids, not just the wildly talented ones. This is my chance to spread my way of teaching. I am so pumped!

Observations about Gymnastics

I quit my gymnastics job to be home with Livy this summer, and it was incredibly hard for me to leave. I'm sure every competent person feels that their workplace cannot get along without them when they leave (no matter how well they usually do get along), but I felt it doubly because I am taking the only bit of outside perspective away with me. I did not do gymnastics as a child, and I think that has given me some advantages, as well as the obvious disadvantages. I do not immediately think of the way I was taught a skill; I have an easier time breaking out of the traditions and finding new and better ways to teach. I am not attached to the reputation of our gym in the same way; as long as the girls are learning and having a good time, I am not too concerned whether people think the gym has gone down since the good old days. The best advantage for me, though, is that I came into gymnastics with the attitudes about sports that I picked up from basketball, softball, and martial arts. They are much healthier attitudes.

Here's the way other sports work: There are several different levels. There are kids who play just recreationally. There are kids who compete on school teams or private teams who work a bit harder. There are people who are going to do this professionally, or at least at the Olympics. Not in gymnastics. The attitude is that if you are not going to work really hard and strive to be the best, there is no point in even competing. The competition can't be just for fun. There are recreational gymnasts, and there are competitive gymnasts who are super good. There is no room for people in between. There are teams of mediocre gymnasts, of course, but then people say, "Why even compete?" It's ridiculous.

Then there is the body image problem. In order to be really good at gymnastics in the modern world, you have to be a man, or at least you have to starve yourself completely until you don't get your period and your ribs stick out. Most kids at the level I teach do not do this. But the coaches once did, cause they were good back in the glory days. There is an unspoken (usually) criticism in the gym of hips and breasts and any amount of fat. When the rumor gets around that someone is throwing up in the bathroom after lunch every day, I am the one of the few who thinks that is horrific and scary and a sign that the child needs help. It's not that the other coaches don't care; they just see that kind of thing as normal. Talk about being too fat is bantered around by the girls all the time. It kills me to hear a 12 year old with amazing muscles and lines say that she is just so fat, and she is never going to have another cookie. Of course, she does have another cookie sometime- the child is 12 - and then she hates herself for it. Perhaps this body crisis is happening in adolescent girls everywhere, but I think sports should make girls feel better about their bodies, not worse. In soccer, you have to be really fat before it harms your athletic performance and before it shows in your uniform, and even then, I don't think it would be said behind your back (by some of your coaches) that you are too fat for soccer. But in gymnastics, even the normal body changes of puberty ruin your performance, not to mention if you gain some fat, and if you gain any weight, start to grow mosquito bites for breasts or get a waist, everyone knows. Leotards display every tiny imperfection and sign of impeding adulthood.

I would like for there to be team gymnastics for girls in the middle, the ones who are talented, but not extremely. I would like them to compete and enjoy the thrill of a meet, just like girls in other sports do. I would like to take girls who can do the skills, but who are too old, too fat, too dainty looking, too flighty, too immature, just like every other sport does. I was able to bring a little bit of this philosophy into my workplace. I was the advocate for the teenager who wanted to start competing at a fairly low level (Why not? Does it matter if she goes much farther?). I was the one who insists that the girls are lovely and perfect when they complain about how fat and yucky they are. I am the one who thinks it is my fault when a child can't get a skill, not hers; I just need to find a different way to teach it. I hope I had a good effect on our gym because of my outsider's perspective on the sport, and I will miss trying to inject what I consider sanity into a sport that sometimes lacks it.