A Cat in the Doghouse

How to use nonverbal communication
to establish relationships with your students.

The Course

Learn how to create a happier, safer classroom. This course will give you a basic understanding of behavioral styles from high accommodators (i.e., dogs) to low accommodators (i.e., cats). Anyone who has ever owned a cat and a dog instinctively know the differences between their personalities.

In A Cat in the Doghouse, this animal analogy is applied to people so we understand why “cats” (low accommodators) are so difficult to work with – and yet their loyalty, once gained, is often greater than a dog’s loyalty would be. This program centers on how a leader forms relationships to operate with influence instead of power.

“*Before the students care what you know,*
*they need to know that you care.”*
– Michael Grinder

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Course Details

Reflect on your own cat and dog tendencies.
Increase your flexibility.
Manage your classroom more effectively and easily.
The manual for this course is A Cat in the Doghouse

Topics of study include

Reflecting on your own cat and dog tendencies
Recognizing cat and dog-ness in others
Increasing one’s flexibility to be genuine with dogs and intrigue the cats.
Managing classroom’s more effectively
Increasing one’s tolerance of the independent nature of the cat
Utilizing the team spirit of the dog.

Expected outcomes

How to build relationships
How to get the cats to respect you.
When to use influence and power.
How to feel sane during difficult times.
How to be proactive and reduce big surprises.
How to use CATNIP to draw cat students to you.

“Michael Grinder has given us the management skills needed to successfully reach the hard-to-reach students — we have to reach them to teach them.”
–Pearl Nitsche, Educational Consultant

A personal note from Michael Grinder

I was not surprised to find statistics showing that in the first three years of teaching, more educators drop out than students. We have to retool our management styles so that teachers are more effective in forming relationships with our hard-to-reach students.

When developing A Cat in the Doghouse, I noticed an interesting “side-effect.” Many teachers practicing these skills have higher job satisfaction once they realized that the cat students often have the potential to be more successful than the dog students.

Another profound insight from my over forty years of doing this work — management by influence is less likely to be miscommunicated cross-culturally than management by power.

I wrote A Cat in the Doghouse so that by being proactive, we can anticipate inappropriate cat behavior. We can then manage by influence with a calm understanding that “power, when used judiciously, is appropriate as a backup.”

A Cat in the Doghouse willingly suffers the disadvantages of generalizations so we are able to look at our own classroom more objectively. We develop more realistic expectations of our students, ultimately becoming more successful teachers. It’s a win-win for both teacher and our students.

Let’s be honest, as a group, we teachers are more dog-like than cat-like … working with cats in the classroom is an opportunity to develop more facets and become more charismatic by fully developing both our dog part and cat parts. Because I coach teachers and consult with administrators, I know how tireless and caring teachers are … it is to you that I dedicate A Cat in the Doghouse.