Visual for Tattling Vs Telling in the Classroom

How to stop tattling in the Classroom

Tattling in the classroom can be a serious classroom management challenge. It can also spread like wildfire so that you're spending too much class time dealing with tattling while the rest of the class spins out of control. One of my favorite ways to deal with tattling is teaching my students the different between tattling vs telling. Usually what I ask my students is, "Are you telling me to get someone in trouble or because someone needs my help?". However, I don't want to have to stop and ask that question every time, so instead I made this visual for helping them decide whether they are telling or tattling on their own!

I simply took a garden glove and painted the fingers different colors, and labeled them with reasons they are allowed to tell me about someone else. Just in case you can't read it, the things that they most definitely should tell me about right away are: someone bleeding, something on fire, someone doing something dangerous, someone throwing up or if there's a stranger. When I introduce the glove, I give them tattling vs telling examples for each one.    

I call it "My 5" and after the lesson, when a child comes up to tattle tell me something, I can hold out 5 fingers and say "Is it one of my 5?" and chances are the child will go right back to their seat as they realize that no, it's not really something they need to tell me about. Eventually I don't even have to say anything, I just hold up 5 fingers and they get the message! I learned about this glove from my mentor teacher during student teaching, and it's worked fabulously in my classroom!

If I have a student who still needs to tell me about things they see others doing, then I provide a notebook for them to jot down their "tells". Some students are in that very concrete sense of justice phase and need to know that people can't just break even minor rules with no consequences. I had a student with autism once for whom this was very problematic. She needed to know that I would deal with every infraction and that the other students couldn't get away with things. On the other hand, I needed to get through lessons without hearing about how "Joey didn't put all his crayons away!". In cases like that, I let them know that sometimes I have to deal with things later in the day and not during lessons. I promise to read the book and deal with the issues, but they might not see me talking to the other students because sometimes I do that in private. This has worked for those students who need to feel like justice will always prevail, plus its fun to see what they write down! 

These 2 ideas for dealing with tattling in the classroom will improve your classroom management so that you can spend your valuable class times on teaching rather than responding to tattles!