Classroom Management – Helping Teachers Grow

Developing your classroom management system can be a challenging task for the new teacher.  With so many different demands on your time, teachers often don’t dedicate the time and focus to their classroom management system that they should.  Throw coaching, beginning teacher meetings, and local school meetings into the mix, and you’ve got one stressed-out teacher.  It’s no wonder nearly a third of our new teachers are quitting the profession before three years.

How do you develop your classroom system?  What should be done to become more effective at managing the challenging classroom?

Take the time to write down the most challenging moments you have in your class.  Focus on the day-to-day issues that come up in your class, the issues that, if removed, would help you be much more effective in the classroom.  Things that come to mind for me are:

• students shouting out answers instead of raising their hands
• students constantly calling my name
• students habitually coming in late to class
• students always needing to go to the bathroom
• students being disrespectful to each other and the teacher
• students not doing their homework
• students not bringing the necessary materials to class
• students not following directions

Your list might look like mine, or it might be its own separate beast!  What’s important is that you recognize the moments when your energy is taken away from instruction and you end up feeling less effective in the classroom.

Look at your list.  Can you generalize any of these issues into broader categories?  Like, for instance, students shouting out my name or students shouting out answers can be categorized under something like “Not Following Directions.”  Try to combine your list of issues into four or five general categories.

Now, look at your new list.  Would it be possible for you to teach your students how to act appropriately within each category?  Can you teach your students what it means to be on time?  Can you teach your students how to raise their hands?  Can you teach your students to not call each other names?

Sure you can!  You’re a teacher, right!

Once you’ve taught the expected classroom behaviors, develop a reward or consequence (I prefer rewards) for meeting (or not meeting) your expectations.  Make sure your students see the reward as a reward.  I love reading, but “rewarding” my students with silent reading time just wouldn’t work.  It’s too much a part of my regular class “work” to be seen as a reward.  But eating lunch in the classroom with the TV on might be a reward.  Free time for five minutes at the end of class might be a reward.  Teachers vs. students kickball game might be a reward.  Whatever you develop as a reward, make sure the students are willing to work for it and would be bummed without it.

Then all that’s left is for you to consistently enforce your new classroom management system.  Sounds easy, right?  It’s this consistent part that is the most difficult part for 90% of teachers without a classroom management system.  It’s easy to be consistent on Monday mornings, but if you’re not consistent throughout the week, even five minutes before class is out on Friday, the students will know it and feel the inherent unfairness of your management.

Good luck with developing your classroom management system.  I hope this helps.  You are always welcome to email me or leave a comment if you have any questions at all about managing your classroom.

Darren B.

What a great schedule we have as teachers, no?

Weekends off.  Holidays off.  Summers off!

I love the teacher schedule, especially since I have two little girls, 9 and 5, that love having their daddy around.  I can get home early enough to enjoy a bit of the evening together before we transition to the night time wrap-up.

But the weekends.  Man, the weekends are the best.  Not only do we have this great break to recharge at the end of a week, but we are given this great time frame, within which we can organize our teaching.  Start something on Monday, reinforce and practice all week, assess by the end of the week, and then reevaluate for the start of the next week.

I hope you take the time to recharge from and reevaluate your week this weekend.  Don’t think too much about teaching.  Teachers are notorious for not leaving their work at work.  Take that physical as well as mental break and relax a bit this weekend.  Do something nice just for yourself.  Spoil yourself.

After all, you deserve it!

Darren B.

Do you ever feel like you’re constantly playing good cop, bad cop with your students.  Just like those Law and Order shows where one of the cops yells and threatens and harasses a suspect, and then the other cop makes friendly and seems helpful and connects with the suspect.

Both approaches are designed to connect with the suspect.  One works through fear of consequences while the other tries to build a sense of shared connection.  Both work for different reasons for different people and situations.

Kinda like teaching.  Some students respond better to the fear of consequences while others respond best to that shared connection between the teacher and the student.  And some students respond to both at different times.

Are you able to play the good cop, bad cop role in your classroom?  I don’t mean you should yell, threaten, or harass your students.  In fact, I feel that a teacher should never ever need to yell or threaten his or her students.  But sometimes interacting with a student requires a stronger, firmer energetic response than trying to personally connect.

Experienced teachers often understand these different situations and are able to adjust smoothly.  New teachers will need to develop these skills…

…and soon.

Darren B.

Once upon a time there was a teacher who wanted to change the world.

Sound familiar? Many of us who entered the teaching profession truly felt like we could change the world.

And some of us do!  Every day in a thousand tiny ways, each of us working with the young people in our schools changes the world.  We give a smile where few had been given.  We reassure at just the right moments.  We help guide and grow our students, hopefully empowering them to be better, smarter, stronger, more capable than they were when they first walked through our doors.

But this doesn’t always happen, does it?

Little things get in the way of teaching.  Sometimes big things get in the way of teaching.  Sometimes these “things” create such obstacles to good teaching that good people are driven out of the profession.  I think all of us who have been teaching for any period of time know of someone who has left teaching because the reality of the job wasn’t what they’d been expecting.

Remember your first days in the classroom?  The nervousness, the anxiety, the outright fear that enveloped many of us thinking about those first moments facing a classroom full of young people for the first time.  My heart starts racing just thinking of those days.

Luckily those days are far behind me now.  I was able to somehow make it through those difficult early years of teaching and slide somewhat gracefully into the status of a veteran teacher.  Before I knew it, principals were sending me new teachers to mentor, drawing on my years of experience in order to help grow the next generation of teachers.

Just recently my school has been hit with a couple of scandals.  Two recently hired teachers ended up being entirely unworthy to serve in our fine profession.  Luckily their less than appropriate nature was uncovered before any damage had been done to our students.  But it got me thinking.  Why are these individuals getting hired?  And then I realized.  Both of these people were last minute hires- hired either a day before the school year started or hired well-into the school year.   These people were something of a last minute vacancy filling hire.

For the first time in my career, I understand the grave effects of our teacher shortage.  As fewer and fewer of our young people enter the teaching profession, schools are forced to accept less than ideal candidates.  This isn’t to say that every new hire is less valuable than those who were hired before.  But it does say something about the talent pool out there hoping to get into teaching.

It is clear to me that more needs to be done to nurture and retain those teachers who are already in this great profession.  Each of us needs to step up and share what we know will help other teachers, struggling teachers, in order to ease their burdens and elevate our profession.

Working together we can all help those teachers who are strong candidates but who might be missing one element of effective teaching, might be missing that one tool in their toolbox that would enable them to be a great teacher rather than a struggling teacher.

Can you envision a school of empowered and powerful teachers, working to their ability and helping all our students grow?

I know I can.  And I’m going to do my part to help.

Won’t you?

DarrenB