Let’s start with the name, because it isn’t accidental.
The norm isn’t bad. That’s the part people get wrong when they hear a phrase like “elevate the norm” and brace for somebody about to tell them everything in education is broken. It isn’t. Most classrooms in this country are run by decent people doing hard work with what they were given.
But the norm is a floor. Quiet room. Worksheets. Compliance. Bell rings, they leave, you do it again sixth period. It’s survivable, it’s defensible on a walkthrough form, and it is nowhere near what those students are capable of.
Elevating it doesn’t require a new curriculum, a grant, or a consultant. Almost everything on this site costs somewhere between nothing and about eighty dollars a year.
It rests on three things.
What are the three principles this site is built on?
Positive energy, respect, and honesty. In that order, and not as a slogan — as three things you can actually check yourself against in the middle of a class period when something is going sideways.
Here’s what each one means in practice.
Positive energy
This is not the same thing as being upbeat, and it is definitely not pretending a rough day was a good one. Students detect that instantly and it costs you credibility you can’t buy back.
Positive energy means your default move is recognition, not correction.
When a room won’t settle, you have two options. You can address the twenty-nine students who aren’t listening, which is what most of us were trained to do. Or you can find the one who is, make that visible, and let the room draw its own conclusion. Same thirty kids. Completely different result.
There’s real evidence underneath this. Research on teachers’ praise-to-reprimand ratios has found a direct positive relationship between how often teachers recognize positive behavior and how much on-task behavior they get in return — including in middle school classrooms and among students at risk for behavioral difficulties (Caldarella et al., 2020; Caldarella et al., 2023).
That’s the whole mechanism. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a ratio, and you can change your ratio starting Monday.
Respect
Most schools operate on an unspoken deal: students earn respect from adults by behaving. Behave first, get treated well second.
I run it the other way around.
Before I introduce myself on the first day, before I hand out a syllabus, before anything, I tell my students this:
When you walk through that doorframe, you have one hundred percent of my respect. It’s my job to earn yours.
I mean it literally. They start at a hundred. They don’t have to perform for it, and they can’t lose it by having a bad morning.
That sounds soft. It is the single most useful classroom management tool I own — because a student who is already respected has nothing to defend. Most of what we call defiance in a middle or high school classroom is a kid protecting their standing in front of peers. Take away the threat and you take away most of the fight.
Respect is also smaller and less dramatic than people expect. It looks like knowing who your students live with. It looks like waking up the young man asleep at his desk and looking concerned instead of mad — because one of those gets you a student who tells you what’s going on at home, and the other gets you a student who sleeps in the back row tomorrow.
A lot of educators find compassion genuinely difficult, and I don’t say that as an insult. The fear underneath it is real: if they know I’m nice, I’ll lose the room.
Yeah, nah. It has never once cost me the room.
Honesty
The third one is the one that makes the first two work, and it runs in every direction.
Honest with students. When a class blows fifteen seconds of a lesson I built specifically so they could work in groups and move around, I tell them the truth: this one stings a little, I don’t get to do this often, help me keep doing it. Kids can smell a script from across the building. They cannot smell that, because it isn’t one.
Honest with administrators. If you ask me how a unit went and it went badly, I’ll tell you it went badly. That’s the only way the next one is better, and it’s the only reason to trust me when I say something worked.
Honest with parents. Including the ones who are hard to reach, and the mom who showed up to the school in a bathrobe because she works nights and came anyway. That’s a parent showing up. Treat it like one.
Honest on this website. Which means you’ll see what didn’t work here too. There is no shortage of education content promising you ten hacks that will transform your classroom by Friday. This isn’t that. Some of what I’ve tried has flopped, and the flops are usually more instructive than the wins.
Why only three?
Because I’ve seen the poster with ten core values on it, laminated, hanging in the hallway of a school where not one adult could name six of them.
Three is a number you can hold in your head during fourth period when a kid is escalating and you have about two seconds to decide what to do. Am I about to correct, or recognize? Am I treating this person as though they’ve already got my respect? Am I about to tell them something true, or something convenient?
That’s a usable framework. Ten values on a wall is decor.
Does this actually produce results?
I’ll give you what I have, and you’re welcome to check it.
I built a three-tier recognition system called Elevate for my own classroom — immediate recognition, student of the week, student of the month — funded entirely out of pocket at roughly $81 a year. After the first three weeks of running it, I had very few discipline issues that couldn’t be handled inside my own room. Students who slipped up wanted to correct course quickly, because they wanted the recognition.
I learned this in athletics before I ever learned it in a classroom, and what taught me was building the program — not any particular season. You inherit a roster of kids who don’t yet believe the thing is theirs, and you spend a couple of years handing it to them piece by piece until it is. Of the two hundred–plus players who came through, I could count on one hand the ones who didn’t graduate with a 3.0 or better — and I’d know, because I ran grade checks every week. Not because I taught them content. Because they were on the hook for something bigger than themselves and other people were counting on them.
That’s what all three principles are actually building toward. Not a quiet room. A room the students own.
Who writes this
I’m Clay Shumate. I’m a Class A certified 6–12 Social Studies teacher with a History endorsement and an M.Ed. from the University of Montevallo. I’ve taught at Sipsey Valley and Northridge, spent years building a high school soccer program, and I currently teach World History for Greene County Schools in Eutaw, Alabama.
Before teaching, I spent years in retail management, which is where I learned most of what I know about reading people — and why I’m as interested in whether a student can hold a conversation with an adult as I am in whether they can label a map.
Please feel free to trust but verify. You’re welcome to contact any school I’ve worked in.
References
Caldarella, P., Larsen, R. A. A., Williams, L., Downs, K. R., Wills, H. P., & Wehby, J. H. (2020). Effects of teachers’ praise-to-reprimand ratios on elementary students’ on-task behaviour. Educational Psychology, 40(10), 1306–1322. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2020.1711872
Caldarella, P., Larsen, R. A. A., Williams, L., & Wills, H. P. (2023). Effects of middle school teachers’ praise-to-reprimand ratios on students’ classroom behavior. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 25(1), 28–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/10983007211035185