Plan A and Plan B are completely different. Plan A is the more traditional,
impose-your-authority approach to handling unmet expectations. Although also dealing with unmet expectations,
Plan B is not about imposing anything.
It is about cooperating with skills on prioritized, unmet expectations
in order to help students to learn the skills that they are lacking, which
Greene argues leads to the unmet expectations in the first place. I feel like very little of my teaching
training dealt with classroom management.
Because of that, I think when I first started teaching, it was easier to
rely on Plan A and to yell at unruly study halls or to impose detentions. Plan B reminds me more of what a lot of
schools—my own included—are doing now with restorative justice practices like
circles. Those involve both the teachers
and the students voicing concerns and making plans for the future.
