(UK based)

I completed my placements and am entering into my first year of teaching in August. I hated behaviour management strategies on placement and it all felt horrific. For clarity, I'm not one of the anarchists who believe in "necessary hierarchies," or "authority once it has demonstrated its necessity,". I do not believe my position as a teacher needs to be a hierarchical one.

However, I will need to demonstrate level of behaviour management both in line with whatever the school policy is and in accordance with generally accepted principles ("start off really strict," etc.)

I'm thinking of a particular instance during placement when I made a decision and the teacher said I should have been strict and sanctioned a pupil, but I didn't even think to do that because I didn't even view it as negative behaviour. I did a riddle at the beginning of every class, and I decided that M could get a sticker even if he didn't word the answer correctly, but the answer still worked. J protested, and said something like, "Oh, come on man!" And I shrugged and said, "That's my decision, sorry,"

The teacher told me he spoke to me disrespectfully and I should have issued a sanction. I don't think about these sorts of things as being negative behaviours, mainly because I don't naturally demand respect as an authority figure.

Does anyone have any effective behaviour management strategies (other than just building relationships and keeping lessons engaging) for when there is behaviour that disrupts learning?

I have a question for other teachers of middle or high school. I am striving to run a classroom that is not dictated, to the best of my ability, by rewards or punishments. In the last few years, (been teaching for 12 years) I've noticed a significant increase in cell phone disruptions. I'd say in most classes about a quarter of students simply cannot stay off their phones, which is a problem because I teach a subject that requires significant attention and concentration in order to flourish. Does anybody have any strategies to manage cellphone use without resorting to punishment or coercion?

HELLO EVERYONE...I AM A STUDENT WORKING ON A PROJECT OF TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT ON TEACHERS PERFORMANCE . PLEASE FILL OUT THIS GOOGLE FORM AND SHARE YOUR OPINION ABOUT THE STUDY.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4l4mZNgJZy2J9r6ve7UFaXTh-qcb64KZnLyUQ3jri8ujKmQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Fellow anarchist educators, what are your recommended readings/resources for new anarchist educators?

About a year ago, I began a career shift into education, first with tutoring, and now starting down the road to becoming a public school teacher. (Currently working as a para providing small group math intervention at an inner city middle school; I will be starting my masters in education this fall)

As the new semester starts, I've found myself reflecting on my frustrations with the more conventional teaching model template in our provided materials/trainings. (Emphasis on template- the materials are merely a suggested way of presenting the material. I am given almost complete freedom in how I want to teach.) Going forward, I want to start incorporating elements of anarchist education models into my teaching, both for my own sanity and to allow my students to have more agency (and therefore engagement) in their own education.

So, I ask my fellow educators here, what readings have you found most instructive on bringing anarchist practice to the classroom? General theory and more practical advice on operating within existing education systems are equally appreciated.

Hello all,

I'm a lecturer in my (US) university's math department. I've also recently started considering that I might be an anarchist. My question is, within the bounds of what administration is likely to allow, how would an anarchist educator handle cheating?

​

Ideally, there wouldn't be grades as we know them today, so cheating would not be such a problem. But our world is not ideal yet. How do you folks handle cheating?

Hello! I just finished my masters education thesis on "How youth participatory action research/youth participatory evaluation can prefigure an anarchic and liberatory society". It's like 85 pages. Are there any good academic and non academic political publications that might be interested in something like this?

I try to make it as student-centered as possible. Lots of choice.

Other teachers don't understand what I do or how I do it. But downtown loves my test scores....even though I don't follow the curriculum.

Thanks for having this sub!

For those who are interested, I’ve begun r/PublicSchoolReform. You are welcome to come and join the community. I will begin a mod search soon. I hope that our two subreddits may soon consider each-other allies.

When curricula say "There were pros and cons to X," such statements often serve to mask the asymmetry of the distribution of benefits and harms relating to X. For example, I once saw a teacher list the "pros and cons" of industrial capitalism, where most of the pros were concentrated in the hands of the owning class, while the cons were spread over the working class, the environment, and truly society at large. Thus, the curriculum has students thinking of everything as a "fair trade" or even "an important sacrifice everyone in society shared," rather than as acts by one class that actively harmed another class.

This ties in with my previous post regarding Shay's Rebellion, which is that framing is really important to cultivating (or suppressing) class consciousness

I leant a grade 11 student a copy of Anarchism and other Essays after a long discussion this morning when I was supplying in another class. I see him in an advisor period every two weeks so I’ll see how far he has gotten. He sounded really excited about it.

I'm going to be an officer in our faculty senate for a couple of years. I'm not really enthusiastic about this; I only agreed because no one else who was asked would, and a few of the other options would have been far worse. Our faculty senate has been extraordinarily unproductive for years. It fact, it has been manipulated and reorganized to be so by some members of the faculty who want to recast the university in a neoliberal, top-down corporatist model that breaks up academic disciplines and eliminates the humanities in favor of vocational B.S. degrees (in both sense of that abbreviation in some cases).

I can think of some things I'd like to do, with the first being having us work together to state what our real mission as a university and university faculty should be and then committing to that. I'm also thinking of asking the faculty senate talk about and create "policies" providing real support (and not just words) for such things as ungrading and DEI initiatives. If you were in a position like this, what would you do?

The other day, I was thinking about how US history curricula, even those which encourage debate and open discussion, tend to uniformly conclude that the Articles of Confederation were doomed to "failure," focusing on the inability of the government to suppress Shay's Rebellion as evidence that a more centralized government was necessary. This, to me, is an obvious case of the victors writing history, as the idea that the US should exist as it does today is, to many, a foregone conclusion, and, as such, the ability to keep the empire country united at all costs is fundamentally necessary.

It was only when I was reading the 1786 Letter from Henry Knox to George Washington Concerning Shay’s Rebellion that I began to recognize how uniquely propagandistic this chapter of the curriculum is. The supposed "failure" of the Articles was that the owning-class had no means by which to secure their private ownership of land as a redistributionist revolution began to form. Thus, US history students are being asked to relate to the interests of the owning-class when the subject is framed as it is.