My Biggest Mistakes as a Teacher: Part 1

My first and biggest regret as a teacher happened during my first year teaching. I had entered the school year convinced I was going to change the world – or at the very least, the lives of my 3rd graders.

The school year started off relatively smoothly. I had been warned by the 2nd grade teachers to keep an eye out for sneaky behavior from a couple of my students, but I was confident that my teaching methods would win these students over. Plus, I didn’t think it would be fair to the students to start the year off with assumptions about their behavior. I spent a lot of time at the beginning of the school year focused on building relationships with my students, and building a positive classroom community using things like ice breakers and team builders. It seemed to work.

Of course, like every teacher in a high poverty setting, I had some behavior problems to deal with. But the problems were minor. I didn’t see any of the sneaky behavior that the 2nd grade teachers had warned me about. I figured it was because I was an awesome teacher that really knew her students.

And then came…let’s call her Vanessa.

She was put in my classroom around November, and right away I knew we were going to have problems. She was always respectful to me, but the very first day in my classroom she accused some of my girls of saying some truly awful things to her that I just KNEW couldn’t be true. Most of my girls were sweet, helpful, respectful students that I trusted. And Vanessa was new, and hadn’t proven herself to be trustworthy yet. I talked to the girls that had been accused and was convinced that Vanessa was lying to me.

The accusations from Vanessa continued. And then the girls in my class started to tell me about the horrible things Vanessa was saying to them. Vanessa denied them all, but I didn’t trust her and she knew it. She usually ended up in our classroom “Safe Spot” or next door in our “Buddy Room” (part of our school’s behavior policy). This same pattern continued for weeks, where I blamed Vanessa for all of the problems occurring.

Then, one day, my class was taking a bathroom break. I didn’t want Vanessa in the bathroom unsupervised, so I had her stand by me while the rest of the class took their bathroom break. The light in the girls bathroom went off, and I stepped in to investigate.

“Vanessa did it,” one of the girls immediately claimed. I looked around the bathroom at the rest of girls. They all nodded in agreement.

“Are y’all sure?” I asked. “You actually SAW with your own eyes Vanessa turning off the lights?”

All 5 of the girls in the bathroom claimed to have seen Vanessa turn off the lights.

I left the bathroom in shock. I knew Vanessa hadn’t done it, because she had been standing right next to me the entire bathroom break. Every single one of the girls in the bathroom had lied to me to get Vanessa in trouble.

This was my absolute worst moment as a teacher – I didn’t know how to even begin to rectify this group bullying situation that I had helped create. For weeks I had been blaming Vanessa for any problem that arose between the girls, and for weeks she had been accused of all sorts of things that she might not have done. I was at a complete loss and felt heartbroken for the pain I had caused Vanessa.

It was time to finally figure out what the truth was. While the rest of the class was at P.E., I took all of the girls involved to our Recovery Room (kind of like an in-school suspension room) to talk to the behavior specialist. Together, we figured out what had happened and what should be done moving forward.

Turns out that most of the girls in my class (with the exception of 2) had some share of the blame, but the ringleader of the group was one of the girls the 2nd grade teachers had warned me about. Let’s call her Christina.

Christina had taken a disliking to Vanessa from the very beginning, and had encouraged the girls in my class to gang up on her. Anytime anything bad happened, she wanted them to automatically blame Vanessa. Eventually they started making up lies about things she had said or done to get her into even more trouble.

Vanessa wasn’t completely innocent in this either. She had said some things she shouldn’t have, and made up lies about the other girls as well. However, I could hardly blame her for trying to defend herself when the entire class, including her teacher, was against her.

We scheduled a meeting with Vanessa, her mom, myself, and my principal (who was very supportive of me considering my huge failure). I explained the situation to Vanessa’s mom, apologized for my part in it, and explained what I would be doing differently in the future. Vanessa’s mom was extremely kind to me considering the situation. (She also explained that Vanessa had been in a similar situation before, which led me to believe Vanessa was probably more to blame than we thought, because what 3rd grader has this sort of group bullying situation happen to them more than once?)

After talking to Vanessa’s mom, I called the parents of each of the other girls involved and explained what had happened, and what would the consequences would be if this behavior continued.

In the end, everything eventually worked itself out, and I had minimal problems moving forward. Most of the girls who were involved (other than the ringleader Christina) felt truly terrible. They weren’t used to getting in “trouble” because they were well-behaved, respectful students, and many of them made every effort to mend things with Vanessa. However, I learned some very valuable lessons from this experience.

1. I needed to take time to do relationship building activities any time I got a new student.
I took the time to to team building activities and build a positive classroom environment at the beginning of the school year, but I needed to incorporate these things throughout the school year as well, especially when I got a new student. I created these Ice Breaker Cards for Building A Positive Classroom All Year that I used throughout the school year to help get students to talk to each other and find things they had in common.

I also created a new classroom job for my classroom – the New Student Helper. This student was responsible for being a friend to any new student we had. Since my school had a very mobile population, this job became an extremely important one. (Read more about how I managed my Classroom Jobs here.)

2. I needed to take time to figure out the truth.
This seems obvious, but when teaching elementary students you are bombarded with so many tattlers that it is impossible to take the time to deal with everything and still have time to teach. But from this point forward, I made an effort to always hear both sides of the story, especially if any consequence was being issued. Had I taken the time to really hear Vanessa’s side of the story early on, many problems could have been prevented.

On a side note, I sometimes wonder if I should have taken the 2nd grade teachers’ warnings to heart about Christina. If I had, I would have been on the look out for sneaky behavior like this. However, I still believe that it’s best to start the school year without any assumptions about how students will behave instead of assuming that they will cause problems.

3. I needed to get parents involved earlier.
If I had talked with Vanessa’s mom earlier, instead of waiting until I absolutely HAD to talk to her, many of these problems could probably have been prevented. This also would have been a good opportunity for me to truly hear Vanessa’s side of the story.

Once I got the parents in involved – Vanessa’s mom, as well as the parents of the other girls, many of the problems went away. Instead of trying to solve all of the problems myself and failing, I needed to include the people that knew these students the best – their parents.

This experience really humbled me. I was so sure that I was such a great teacher with great relationships with my students that my students would never dream of lying to me. This huge oversight really shook me up. I lost confidence in myself. In the long run, however, the lessons it taught me were invaluable.