Latest / New Teacher Talk / Ep 182: How to "Call Out" a Student with Love and Care

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Ep 182: How to "Call Out" a Student with Love and Care · New Teacher Talk

My name is Bianca Tolentino,
and I'm a ninth grade English teacher in Southern
California.
Today,
I'm going to talk about calling students out with love and
care.
At the end,
I'll be sharing a resource from Learning for Justice that
can also help support your development in this.
First things first, what is a callout?
Well,
you may have heard of this term before in pop culture,
but what it boils down to is that a callout is a criticism.
Now, in the classroom,
we are the biggest advocates and discipliners that enforce
the expectations that we have for our students.
And in the classroom,
that also means that we have the attention on us at all
times.
When we are criticizing a student,
when we are redirecting behavior,
that means that it's not just that student that's listening
to us, but everyone else is too.
That means that we have to address our callouts with tact
and care.
These callouts can be anything from addressing behavior
that needs to be changed immediately to addressing speech
like bigotry or bullying or hate speech that may pop up in
the classroom.
Over time in pop culture,
callouts are usually seen as things that you do or things
that you say to bring people down in order to take down
maybe an entity or a person that isn't doing something
right.
But really, at the core of a callout is accountability.
You expected somebody to do something and they didn't.
And in the classroom, I operate on a philosophy of love.
I must always approach a callout with the idea that I love
the person that I am addressing the problems to.
And to be very explicit about my philosophy,
I chose this profession because I believe in the best of
people.
I believe that learning is the best way that we can create
more people who are caring and empathetic and who are going
to bring about the best of society.
But we also know that that kind of good change,
that kind of changing the world mindset comes from small,
consistent, and persistent redirection.
It's one of the most energy taxing things about being a
teacher.
The fact that I care so much about my students in my
classroom and the way that the classroom is run is
exhausting.
And I want to affirm that as a part of the experience for
you, especially as a new teacher.
Still,
that is a professional commitment that I know that I have
put myself to is the well-being of my students and the well
-being of their learning environment.
So please make sure that you are approaching these students
both as who they are,
which are children who are still developing as people who
are still learning things like executive function and
impulse control and all of the other things that students
will still be developing as, you know, children.
Now,
I believe that a call-out is a sincere form of showing students
love because at its core,
learning is a cycle of accountability.
Accountability is how lessons are truly learned.
Because when you're accountable,
you are being held to a standard that you have previously
either set up or maintained, right?
You were supposed to use what you know to act accordingly.
And a call-out is when you notice that that behavior is not
aligning with what has been established before.
A classroom is an ever changing system that needs
consistent monitoring to maintain its equilibrium.
Again,
calling back to the fact that being in the classroom is
exhausting.
A part of that is making sure that the system runs smoothly
and calling out those moments of disruption,
calling out those moments where the equilibrium is no
longer being maintained.
It's necessary.
Now, to be honest with you,
when I was first starting out in teaching,
I remember being scared of the idea of a power struggle.
I was not a confrontational person before I started
teaching,
and I knew one of the things I had to work on was my
ability to advocate.
And that is how I look at it when I am doing my call-outs.
It is a form of advocacy.
In my authority,
I also have the most power to protect the students who are
most vulnerable in those situations.
That did mean I had to learn how to properly address
negative student behavior when I hear it and sense it right
away.
This is especially important because students need to see
you advocate for proper behavior in the classroom,
both small and large.
That is another form of consistency that students need
modeled.
They need to see us be the empathetic advocates that they
should also want to be.
One of the resources that I personally still use to this
day is learning for Justices Speak Up at School guidebook,
where they have a framework on how to address those moments
of bigotry that you hear in the moment.
This really helped somebody like me who wasn't used to
confrontation.
I wasn't used to knowing what it looked like in order to
advocate for difficult things, or well,
at least I did not know the flow of it explicitly.
I already know that I advocate every single day.
I know that this is a part of my job,
but sometimes we need to explicitly list it out for us.
Now,
the four components of the Speak Up at School framework are
interrupt, question, educate, and echo.
In interruption,
you must speak up against every bigoted and prejudiced
remark.
Every single time you see something, say something.
The interruption is important because you are showing the
students what is happening right now is not okay.
That is the point of an interruption.
So you must stop the behavior immediately.
Then you can question the behavior.
Now, sometimes when you're in the moment,
if you need to move on from something,
if you're addressing a behavior,
this might not be the time to bring up a question because
you want to redirect that energy.
But if a student had said something,
especially if it was something steeped in bigotry,
you have to question them because you need to show them
that what they said was not okay.
It is something to question.
It is something to be interrogated.
It's not something to just let slide because if you don't
question it,
that means you must accept it as a part of the normal in
some way.
The next part of it is educate.
And this is especially important if this is the first time
you've ever heard the bigotry happen inside of your
classroom.
This is a moment for you to bring up why you don't say
certain things or why certain beliefs are harmful.
You need to do the education part because this is the part
that reminds students that they are in the room with other
human beings,
that they are in a room where their words matter,
where their actions matter.
And lastly, of course,
a call out is stronger when there are more people involved,
especially if you are not always the first one to call
somebody out.
Sometimes the power that you have as a teacher is simply
through the echo,
which is the last component of this framework.
It usually happens, you know,
when other students also notice that behavior is disrupting
the ecosystem that you've set up.
It is powerful to be the voice that echoes the interruption
because you were showing the student that originally
disrupted the classroom that this person is not alone in
calling them out.
If the whole environment is being disrupted by this one
person's actions,
it is also beneficial for other people in the environment
to call that out, to speak up against it.
Now,
I'm going to give you two examples from my own classroom
and pointing out the moments where I use this framework to
help me as well.
So the first call out that I want to talk about was a
behavior call out.
So first thing,
a student was displaying aggressive horseplay behavior with
his friends during an activity when the class was walking
around.
So everyone was moving, we had the chairs pushed in,
we wanted to make sure there was enough space for everyone.
He was creating large grand gestures that were getting
close to hitting other students.
And I had to tell him multiple times to stop.
And I noticed that there was a ring of students around him,
like there's literally students did not want to be near him
because of his actions.
So I had to interrupt first.
And instead of questioning,
I went to interrupting and then pointing out what his
behavior is doing pointing out the consequence.
I said, hey, student,
you're literally about to hurt people around you.
Pay attention to who's around you, please.
So it gave him that moment to pause because in the
interruption,
in him noticing that I needed to speak to him,
he was snapped out of that moment of horseplay.
And in that time, he was able to look around.
He realized it was just him.
It was just his friend.
And everyone was looking at him and he noticed the space
around him.
He was able to have that moment of reflection because of
the interruption.
And in that moment, when I decided to tell him, hey,
you're going to hurt the people around you,
that is also educating him of the consequences of his
actions.
And I also went back to focusing on the positive aspect of
it,
which is let's maintain the equilibrium of the classroom.
Pay attention to who's around you.
You do not want to hurt anybody else.
It is not about him and his behavior and why he is a good
or bad person.
It is about the fact that there are other people who are
not involved in what he is doing that are now having to
face a consequence that they did not choose because of an
action he was doing.
It helps center the classroom and the other students rather
than your emotions or your expectations of what that
student should be acting like.
Another call out that comes to mind is a hate speech call
out.
There was a student that was using the R-slur in my class
really loudly.
I immediately interrupted my lesson to address it.
I told him, there's no reason to use that word.
There's plenty of others available to you.
Now, in that moment, the student was starting to argue.
He said, why can't I use it?
I just wanted to say that it was stupid.
And that is when I was able to start educating him because
I didn't have to question why he used the word, right?
He just told me he was trying to say that something was
stupid.
So I had the opportunity to educate him on the background
on the R-slur,
how it used to be used to clinically isolate people of a
certain cognitive ability.
People were treated sub-humanly when this word was applied
to them.
And I told him,
your desire for using a word is not greater than the pain
it causes to other people,
especially those who have had that word used against them.
In that moment, I was able to educate him that one,
not only is this word used as a slur,
so it's literally a word whose only job is to be
derogatory, is to be one used for pain, one to dehumanize,
but that other people in the classroom,
when they hear him use that word,
it shows them that he cares more about his feeling and his
ability to say certain things than to simply be a decent
human being with character.
And I knew that that student in particular was not trying
to be harmful in what he was saying.
He wasn't even trying to be shocking in what he was saying.
He wanted to use a word with the same amount of punch,
with the same amount of energy as the R-slur.
And we were able to talk about that afterwards.
We were able to address that afterwards.
Now, did that fix him saying the slur all the time?
No, but it was a really good first moment.
It was a really good first interruption because he did
significantly drop the use of it throughout the school
year.
And that's what we want to see, right?
We want to see those slow but sure moments of growth for
our students.
So to conclude again,
call-outs come from those clear expectations,
the ones that you've already established from the beginning
of the year,
the ones you were already reinforcing as you were coming
back into the classroom,
the ones that you were reminding students of every single
day.
That is where this all comes from.
It comes from the love that you have for your students,
the love that you have for making sure that their learning
environment is democratic so that they can all learn and
they all have the opportunity to better themselves in their
learning.
So I encourage both you and your students to have the grace
as you are readjusting and as you are developing these
skills or maybe you're re-sharpening them after you come
back from winter break, give yourselves grace.
And sometimes that grace looks like trying again and again
without holding anger or resentment towards yourself or
your students when you are simply trying to learn.
We are all going through our own learning pits.
We are all trying to climb our own mountains,
but at the end of it all,
that accountability that you get to enforce as the teacher
in the classroom is a powerful tool in making sure that
your students feel safe and that you maintain an
environment where every student can and will learn.
Sending you lots of energy for the second leg of the school
year.
And I hope you find tons of moments of joy to share with
your students this week.
Thanks for listening to today's New Teacher Talk episode.
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