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January 4 - February 6, 2022
You’re only a pushover if you don’t do what you say you’re going to do.
Establish a peaceful pace to your classroom by speaking calmly but firmly, taking your time, pausing often, and never moving on until you get exactly what you want from your new students.
Send the message that yours is a classroom of focused, get-down-to-it learning by jumping into academics on the first day—but not with just any lesson. Choose one thing you want your students to understand or know how to do, and teach the heck out of it. Show them something unique, something they haven’t seen or experienced before. Be at your best, and they’ll start the year excited about learning.
When you let things go, even seemingly innocent behaviors, it nudges a tiny speck of a snowball down a steep and bottomless hill.
Whenever your students don’t give you what you want, whether it’s the first day of school or the last, stop them in their tracks, ask for and wait for their attention, and then make them do it again. Do this whenever they fail to live up to your expectations, and before long, pursuing excellence will become a habit they can’t shake.
there is zero correlation between creative talent and the materials and equipment used. The same can be said about an effective classroom management plan. A simple set of rules and consequences handprinted on ordinary poster board is all you need. You see, there is no magic in the plan itself. It has no power to influence behavior. Only you have the power to influence behavior by creating a classroom your students want to be part of and then strictly—obsessively—holding them accountable. Therefore, your plan doesn’t need to be elaborate, complex, or involved. It just needs to be followed.
The Classroom Management Plan I Recommend
Rules: 1. Listen and follow directions. 2. Raise your hand before speaking or leaving your seat.
Keep your hands and feet to yourself. 4. Respect your classmates and your teacher. Consequences: 1st time a rule is broken: Warning 2nd time a rule is broken: Time-Out 3rd time a rule is broken: Letter Home
Create a simple check-off form letter to send home to parents when students reach the third and final consequence. Keep it short and to the point. Refrain from giving your opinion or adding an angry note at the bottom. Just give the facts.
The truth is, you can’t force today’s students into behaving. You can’t strong-arm them into listening to you, following your rules, or even caring what you have to say. You can try, as so many do, but it doesn’t work. Here’s why: It creates an us-against-them mentality.
Let them role-play scenarios. Allow them to be the teacher while you play the part of a student. Gather them around you, encourage questions, let them take an active role. After all, they have more at stake and more to gain from quality classroom management than even you do.
For review, ask your students to show you how to ask a question or how to get up to turn in work or how to attend during lessons. Make them prove they understand. Have them demonstrate what following rules does and doesn’t look like. If you like, depending on the grade level, you can even devise a written test.
The solution is confidence, confidence in knowing that it is indeed best to follow through with your classroom management plan every single time.
Your students must feel the burden of behaving poorly. Because if they don’t, if they don’t feel a sense of regret and a greater desire to follow your classroom rules, then your consequences will be ineffective.
Tell them why.
“Jenny, you have a warning because you broke rule number two and didn’t raise your hand before speaking.”
Be more like a referee, less like a judge.
A referee’s job is to enforce rules,
As soon as you’ve informed the misbehaving student what rule was broken and the consequence, turn your attention back to whatever you were doing without skipping a beat.
The interaction should take no longer than 10-15 seconds.
The truth is, becoming involved too quickly is a mistake. It’s best to observe from a short distance and respond only after the misbehavior has played itself out.
Those few minutes before the morning bell are perfect for improving relationships and for building a natural, trusting bond between you. But you have to get up from your desk to do it. You have to set aside your lesson plans, walk away from your last minute preparations, and give up your most treasured final moments of morning solitude. For wherever your students congregate before school—in the hallway, on the playground, lined up outside your classroom—that’s where you should be. Chatting, listening, smiling . . . just visiting.
FOR REGULAR EDUCATION classroom teachers, giving rewards in exchange for good behavior is a mistake.
But incentives of this nature, which include earning class pizza parties, extra recess, free time, and the like, don’t benefit students in the long run and make classroom management more difficult. This applies to individual students as well as entire classrooms.
focus instead on creating a classroom that nurtures intrinsic motivation, and leave the bribery to the trainers at Sea World.
DISORGANIZED, unkempt, or clutter-filled classroom sends the message to your students that poor behavior and middling work habits are acceptable, regardless of how often or how forcefully you say otherwise. Because if your classroom environment doesn’t match your call for excellence, hard work, and respect, then you might as well be talking to the art projects fading and curling on your walls. Stacked boxes, messy work areas, disorganized and overflowing cabinets, cramped aisles and walkways, papers piled on your desk, various materials and resources jumbled here and there . . . Clearing it
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17. How to Teach Routines
Model how to. Start your lesson seated at a student’s desk—or wherever the routine is to begin—and simply show your class what you want them to do.
Note: Perfection does not mean robotic or militaristic. It simply means performing the routines as taught. You can make them as casual or informal as you wish.
The rules are the rules. That’s just the way it is.
When your students know that you’ll never participate in unspoken deals, bribes, or quid pro quos, then almost magically their behavior changes.
The bottom line is that when you draw a line in the sand and decide that nothing on earth will get you to move it, every student within the four walls of your classroom will be changed because of it.
draw a line in the sand.
pulling students aside to explain their misbehavior is a mistake.
MOST TEACHERS TALK to difficult students too much—because
Make it infrequent.
Make it honest.
Make it meaningful.
Make it a challenge.
“You’re better than that.”
Make it wordless.
Make it a gesture.
Make it free of strings.
Decide to like and enjoy your most difficult students so that when you do talk to them about their behavior, what you say will pack
22. 6 Powerful, Soul-Searching Things You Can Say to Difficult Students
1. “You’re better than that.”
2. “This is not who you are.”
3. “That’s not good enough.”
4. “You can do this.”
