Make Restroom Breaks Work for You

When I first started teaching, I never would have thought that one of my biggest challenges would be restroom use -- I mean students wanting to use the restroom, not my own restroom use (although admittedly that is a challenge, since we have to set our bladders on strict timers -- teachers know what I'm talking about).

In middle school, we have a limited amount of time with each class, and every moment is critical. We want students to use their passing periods to take care of personal business rather than leave class to do so. But year after year, this has been a ridiculously huge battle for me. I know I'm not alone, because I just read something I found on Pinterest about teachers' biggest pet peeves, and students asking to go to the bathroom during class was a popular one.

If ya gotta go...

Now, I know many teachers who take a hard-line stance: Absolutely no restroom during class! They have it posted on their classroom doors, and they puff out their chests and snap their fingers as they proclaim themselves bathroom goddesses. Maybe that works for them, but it doesn't work for me. One year I had two students wet themselves during class -- and I wasn't even being strict. In one case, I didn't even know the student needed to go; she shyly raised her hand, and by the time I took the four steps over to her desk, she had peed her pants. In the other case, when the student asked to go right in the middle of direct instruction, I said, "Now is not a good time; can you wait a few minutes?" She nodded; then the next time she raised her hand it was to tell me she had had an accident.

There is no way I want accidents like those happening in my classroom, so I am not about to take a militaristic stance on restroom breaks. But it is quite the conundrum. In middle school, we want to teach students responsibility, time management, respect of rules, maturity, and so forth, but we do not want to seem cruel and uncaring, we want our students' basic needs met so that they can learn, and we do not want to upset parents.

Never-ending battle

My worst experience in the bathroom battle was not the year of the accidents; it was just this past school year in my last class of the day. Let me just explain that I had two pre-AP classes and one on-level class. In the pre-AP classes, students rarely asked to use the restroom during class; but in that on-level class, it was ridiculous -- kids asking to go every few minutes, from the beginning of class to the end. To make matters worse, there were three students in that class with medical conditions and nurse's orders to let them go any time they ask (plus another girl who loudly protested that her mom told her she could just walk out if a teacher didn't let her go). In middle school (as I'm sure it is in elementary), this is a recipe for restroom disaster because when you let one student go, half the class immediately "needs" to go. It got so bad sometimes that I often found myself fed up, saying, "No! That's it! Fifteen people have asked to go to the bathroom in the last five minutes, and I'm not having it. No more restroom!" And that, of course, is unfair to the quiet little girl who never asks but now has to go.

Before you ask, I'll tell you that, yes, there were rules and parameters for classtime restroom use. If someone asked me right in the middle of direct instruction, while I was giving explanations for an activity, or during a quiz, I would say, "Now is not a good time; you need to wait ___ minutes" (except for those three girls with medical conditions, who I had to let go no matter what; meanwhile the other students were like, "Why are you letting her go, and not me?"). They also had restroom passes that were good for a certain amount of uses per nine week term. But even if they lost theirs or ran out of spaces on theirs, I wasn't about to have kids wetting their pants in class, so I would let them go if I deemed it a genuine emergency. It's all a judgment call that is so difficult to make when you want to make the most of class time but don't want angry calls from parents who think you're inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on their babies.

A solution

By March (and I kicked myself for not thinking of this earlier in the year), I had had enough and came up with a plan. I thought, if so many students are going to want to go to the restroom during class, I am going to make it worthwhile. I created STAAR-style test questions using excerpts and brief reading passages. If you want to use class time to go to the bathroom, sure, I'll let you go -- but first, you are going to read this passage and answer the question!

Boom! This did two things for me:
* It allowed me to stop fighting the bathroom battle.
* It gave me a couple of minutes of one-on-one intervention time with students. Let's be honest -- the kids who ask to go the most are usually your low kids. So now these kids were getting some extra reading comprehension practice each time they asked to go.

The way it worked was: A student would ask to use the restroom. If the timing was acceptable, I would say yes, and I would drop a test-question slip on her desk. She would read the passage and answer the question, underlining her text evidence. When she was done, I would go over it with her. If she got it right, she got immediate passage to the restroom. If she got it wrong, I would work on it with her, guiding her toward the correct answer and discussing why her answer was incorrect. Then she could go to the restroom. Some of my lowest students were getting this "intervention" a few times a week.

Positive results

You may be wondering how students reacted to this. It became routine. They knew to expect it. Many of them actually liked it, and for a brief period I had to deal with a few students asking to go to the restroom just so they could do one of the practice passages. Crazy, I know. But what better way to make use of the overabundance of "Can I go to the bathroom" askers?

Now, I cannot be sure if this practice had anything to do with the final STAAR results, but here are some of my observations:
* One of my dyslexic students who routinely scored low on district assessments passed the reading STAAR this time.
* Another one of my dyslexic students did not pass, but she nearly doubled her raw score compared to the previous year.
* One of the most frequent restroom users passed the reading STAAR for the very first time.
* Another frequent restroom user passed the reading STAAR and exceeded growth over last year.
* Others, whether they met standard or not, met or exceeded growth, some of them doubling last year's raw score.

How you can do this

Creating the passage slips took time, but it was easy, considering all of the resources available for finding reading passages. I used newsela.com for nonfiction passages and our literature textbook for fiction passages. Plus, I've had a lot of practice creating STAAR-style questions. I created 25 or so questions and made multiple copies of each, so my stack of slips lasted the rest of the school year. Now, if you would like an easy alternative, I created a set for TeachersPayTeachers. For this, I had to write all of my own passages to avoid copyright infringement, and I created 45 slips. If you would like to check out the product, click on the picture below: