Book Review: Teaching with Love and Logic: Taking Control of the Classroom (2nd Ed., 2016)

What I loved about this book is that it offers an educational psychology that positions the teacher as a consultant regarding classroom management (really, student behavior management).

While I hadn't read it before this summer, it's been a classic in the field for some time--and I recommend that you should read it too, if you haven't yet, and if only to be in conversation with it.

In essence, the core principles of the love and logic classroom--and school--are:

• mutual dignity and respect
• sincere empathy
• shared thinking
• shared control within limits
• healthy relationships

Instead of drill-seargent-ish immediate consequences, students are encouraged to see their challenges, see the limits in which teachers can address them, and share in the process of determining reasonable consequences. And instead of acting as helicopters, teachers are encouraged to defer consequences and discussions, to share control of student management with the student, and, most importantly, to build relationships as the foundation of this shared model.

If anything here is the paradigm shift in classroom management, it's that relationships aren't for certain teaching styles or teacher personalities, or that they are a nice thing to build in to your classroom--instead, they are within reach and, actually, essential for every teacher to cultivate proactively, and especially with the most challenging students.

The book offers particular methods and strategies, not just theories, for building such relationships, and especially when a teacher finds it challenging to do so. Through noticing six unique and positive things about each student and sharing those progressively with the student (the "one-sentence intervention"), or through offering sincere (not sarcastic) empathy along with limits and consequences (consequences+empathy=learning), do students invest that much more--and even if it's just for their teachers (another verbal strategy). 

So much of what I intuited to be true about good classroom management--and good strategies for working with challenging students--was validated by this book. For example, in a chapter on mutual respect and building relationships, It was affirming to read that asking students to leave a classroom could be the most humiliating thing in the world and should be avoided. Students want to avoid deflating their self-concepts at all costs (by presenting as not knowing something) and will go out of their way to preserve their self-concepts, and even if it means sabotaging their academic success (I won't try hard, pay attention, etc....because I can't risk failure). Instead, the authors argue, students should be told to leave only when it is absolutely necessary to do so--as a "short-term recovery"--to preserve the learning environment for other students, and such a request should be done within the scope of a positive relationship (walking over to the student, asking quietly, using a secret signal, framing it as a break).

I was also reassured in learning that sharing control with students means offering a very limited set of choices (e.g. 2), or allowing students to solve a problem or formulate a consequence through empathy before offering recommendations.

Ultimately, the core principles listed above are enacted in a classroom through clear, explicit expectations.

Here's a sample of a teacher's "How I Run My Love & Logic Classroom" expectations:

• I will treat you with respect so that you will know how to treat me
• Feel free to do anything that doesn't cause a problem for anyone else 
• If you cause a problem, I will ask you to solve it
• If you can't solve the problem, or choose not to, I will do something 
• What I do will depend on the special person and the special situation
• If you feel something is unfair, whisper to me, "I'm not sure that's fair," and we will talk. 

Finally, of related note in this work is the use of a "love and logic" approach by parents when broaching a teacher, and conversely, a teacher or administrator using the approach when seeing a parent's offensive by seeing their pain (and even grieving for their shattered dreams). 

Ultimately, this book is about compassion. As it turns out, the research shows that leading with empathy, in all aspects of a school, will go a long way towards students' actual academic success. Slow down the thinking--and allow the healing of whatever hurt to occur so that learning can happen.