Quick Tip for Handling Tattling in the Classroom

Children tattle. It's an age-old nuisance to adults who don't want to get involved in arbitrating the multitude of perceived injustices that seem to occur in kids' lives. In the classroom, it's additionally troublesome because it eats up valuable instruction time, if the teacher is not proactive about reining it in and minimize tattling as much as possible.

Here's what has worked in my classroom. Starting the very first week of school, I introduce the concept of tattling to my students. We talk about what it is, why it's a problem, and how I expect them to handle it while they are students in my classroom.

I tell them about a concept of "T.N.K." This stands for True? Necessary? Kind? We do a little role-playing exercise to show the children how they must stop and ask themselves these three questions before they can tell me something about another student:

• Is what I am about to say true?
• Is it necessary?
• Is it kind?

I take suggestions from the students for situations where they might want to tattle. Through a few brief role-playing scenes, they start to see how they can use the T.N.K. questions to weed out the unnecessary tattles from the truly important information that I, as the teacher, need to know.

The last piece of the puzzle is that students should always feel welcome to tell an adult if a classmate is in danger or being bullied. If someone is hurt or about to be hurt, the students understand that they can always come to me or any other adult on campus.