Elevate The Norm

Clay Shumate

Clay Shumate is a certified secondary Social Studies teacher and the writer and editor of Elevate the Norm. He currently teaches in the public schools of West Alabama, on a block schedule that gives him his students for a single semester instead of a full year.

Everything published here is written from that room. The strategies on this site are ones he is running with real ninth graders on a real schedule, with the constraints that come with it — shortened semesters, uneven device access, students arriving at wildly different places. When something works, it is because it survived contact with that. When something does not, that gets written down too.

Credentials and affiliations

The teaching credentials are the ones that matter for what gets written here. The SPJ membership governs how it gets written: Elevate the Norm follows the SPJ Code of Ethics on sourcing, student privacy, independence, and corrections, and the site’s full editorial standards and corrections policy are published rather than assumed.

Navy and gold badge reading Member, Society of Professional Journalists

Classroom and coaching experience

Clay is in his seventh year in the classroom, teaching secondary social studies with lesson planning aligned to his state course of study. His current sections meet in extended blocks, which shapes a lot of what gets written here — a strategy that needs a tidy forty-five minutes is not much use to him either.

Alongside teaching he has coached varsity athletics for over a decade. That background is not incidental to how he runs a classroom. Coaching is where the habit comes from of setting a standard out loud, holding it when it is inconvenient, and expecting more from a kid than the kid currently expects from themselves.

Areas of expertise

  • Project-based learning in secondary classrooms
  • Student agency, autonomy, and meaningful choice
  • Student responsibility and accountability
  • Classroom culture and positive reinforcement systems
  • High expectations paired with genuine support
  • History instruction and social studies curriculum

Educational philosophy

You come in every day with 100% of my respect. Yesterday was yesterday. Today is today.

Respect in his room is issued on day one rather than earned, and it goes both directions. That is not a soft position. A classroom built on positive reinforcement still needs enforcement, and the two are not in tension — students trust recognition exactly as much as they trust consequences, which means both have to be real.

The through-line in his writing is follow-through. Students are not primarily testing rules; they are testing whether an adult does what he said he would do. Accountability, in that framing, is just the practice of matching your actions to your words often enough that teenagers stop having to check. Culture is what accumulates after that, and it takes years rather than weeks.

He treats adolescents as developing young adults rather than as a management problem, which means giving them real responsibility before they have fully proven they can carry it, and then supporting them through the part where they drop it. Some students arrive without anyone in their corner. The classroom is often the first place they get to watch a reliable adult operate at close range.

Elevate the Norm takes its name from that idea: raise up others, extend respect first, and move the normal standard upward rather than lowering it to meet where students currently are.

The Elevate recognition system

Much of what appears on this site began as a recognition system Clay built and self-funds for his own classroom. It runs on three tiers — immediate recognition in the moment, a Student of the Week award, and a Student of the Month award. Winners are selected for improvement against their own baseline rather than for being the strongest student in the room, which is what keeps it winnable for the students who need it most.

How this site is written

Clay writes and edits every article on Elevate the Norm. Claims about research are sourced to published work and cited at the foot of each article. Claims about what happens in a classroom come from his own, and are kept separate from the research rather than blended into it. Student privacy is protected throughout — no student is named, and no classroom outcome is reported that did not happen.

Topics he writes about

Project Based Learning  ·  Classroom Management  ·  Relationships & Culture  ·  Assessment & Feedback  ·  Philosophy

He also publishes free classroom materials — project planning templates, printable posters, and similar — on the teacher resources page, with no email required.

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