Classroom Management – Helping Teachers Grow

I often have new teachers or college students come to my classroom to observe. These observations have never unnerved me. In fact, I like them! I like showing others how I run my class and how my students respond to my methods.

Very often, at the end of class as the students are shuffling out, the observer comes to me and makes some comment like, “You sure have some great students.” or “What well-behaved kids!” or something along those lines.

What these observers often fail to realize is that unless they are the lucky ones who get to observe my class at the beginning of the year, they don’t see 90% of what made that class a good class. So much has happened from the very first day of school that has made that classroom setting possible.

Strong veteran teachers know this and have built their systems to reinforce these expectations from the start.

So what can a new teacher do?

Build trust. Simply stated, building trust between you and your students will take you and your class far closer to your goals than almost any other element.

How do you build this trust?

It’s so simple, you’ll kick yourself if you’ve not got this in your growing bag of tricks already! Here’s the short list:

• Ask a student who he or she lives with, remember this, and frequently ask them how their [mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandparent, etc] is.
• Shake hands, slap “fives” or bump fists. This simple act of connection goes a long way to telling a student you care about him or her. You sometimes have to teach the student how to complete these acts. I had a young girl who wanted to treat the fist bump as a chance for playing bloody knuckles. I told her gently, “Hey, this isn’t boxing. This is a chance to connect.” Teach the limp fish hand-shaker how to shake hands firmly. Come up with a special high five for different students.
• Post yourself at your door between classes and ask different students, “What’s new?” And then listen to what they say. File away their responses into your working memory. Draw upon that information for future interactions.
• Utilize the “soft moments” to ask individual students questions about who they are and what they’re thinking. These soft moments happen in many different situations and will be the subject of an entire post all by itself. Simply stated, a soft moment is any time that you are not directly delivering instruction. Students might be changing classes, moving between exercises, coming back from lunch, headed to a bathroom break. These moments let you connect in a public setting but still on an individual basis.
• Ask a student about their pets. If they’ve got a pet, you’ve just been delivered an easy way to connect!

The more you remember about a student and the more you ask a student about these facts you remember, the more your students will trust you. A classroom built on trust and maintained throughout the year will perform far greater than a classroom built on threats and consequences.

Darren B.