Classroom Management: Strategies and Guidelines

Classroom Management Strategies

• Classroom management includes the wide variety of skills and techniques used to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive, on task, and academically productive.
• Effective classroom-management minimizes negative behaviors and maximizes behaviors that facilitate or enhance learning.

Model Ideal Behavior

• Model behavior you want to see from students.
• Modeling can effectively teach students how to act in different situations.
• Model behaviors through mock conversations, be sure to:
  • Use polite language
  • Maintain eye contact
  • Keep phones put away
  • Allow people to speak uninterrupted
  • Raise concerns in a respectful way

Establish Guidelines

• Generate more buy-in with students by encouraging them to help build classroom rules.

Document Rules

• Keep mutually-respected guidelines in mind and do not let them go forgotten.
• Treat the rules that the class generates like a syllabus, by printing them, distributing them, and going over them.
• Writing established rules down in front of the class can help emphasize that you respect their ideas and intend to adhere to them.
• When a student breaks a rule, it will be easier to point out where they went wrong using the document.

Avoid Punishing the Class

• Address isolated behavior issues instead of punishing an entire class, as the latter can hurt relationships with students who are on-task.
• Call out specific students in a friendly manner, instead of saying:
  • "Stop talking and disrupting other students!", try "Do you have a question?"
  • "Pay attention and stop fooling around while I'm talking!", try "Do you need help focusing?"
• This approach keeps a friendly disposition, while acknowledging poor behavior.

Encourage Initiative

• Help students grow and inject variety into lessons by allowing students to work ahead and deliver short presentations to share take-away points.
• Ask eager learners to get ahead from time to time.
• When reading a specific chapter in a textbook, propose that they read the following chapter too.
• Students can deliver presentations to preview the next chapter.

Offer Praise

• Improve academic and behavioral performance by praising students for jobs well done.
• When sincere and referencing specific examples of effort/accomplishment, praise can:
  • Inspire the class
  • Improve self-esteem
  • Reinforce rules and values
• Praising the use of specific tactics can ensure the student continues to use these tactics.
• Praise can motivate other students.

Use Non-Verbal Communication

• Improve focus and lesson processing by complementing words with actions and visual aids during content delivery.
• Differentiated instruction strategies and techniques are rooted in communication methods.
• Allow delivery of non-spoken content through running learning stations, which are divided sections of the classroom through which students rotate.
• Examples of non-spoken content are videos, infographics, and physical objects such as counting coins.

Hold Parties

• Motivation can be maintained by throwing occasional classroom parties to acknowledge students’ hard work.
• Parties should be happy with snacks and a selection of group games, even if it is for just 20 or 30 minutes.
• Clarify that you are holding the party to reward them, and future parties can be earned by demonstrating ideal behavior and collectively scoring high on assessments.

Give Tangible Rewards

• As a motivational and behavior-reinforcement technique, reward specific students at the end of each lesson in front of the class.

Make Positive Letters and Phone Calls

• Pleasantly surprise parents by making positive phone calls and sending complimentary letters home to help keep students happy in and out of class.
• Academic effort or behavioral progress can lead to a trickle-down effect through contacting parents.
• Parents will congratulate their kids, and their kids will come to class eager to earn more positive feedback.
• Parents can be enticed to grow more invested in a child's learning through positive contact, opening the door to at-home lessons, a mainstay element of culturally-responsive teaching.

Build Excitement for Content

• Hook the student interest from the get-go by starting lessons through previewing particularly-exciting parts.
• Go through an agenda of the day's highlights as students settle, which could include:
  • Group tasks
  • Engaging bits of content
  • Anything else to pique curiosity
• Some example topics would be:
• How to talk like you’re a teacher (sentence structure)
• Why you don’t know anyone who’s won the lottery (probability)
• What all the presidents of the United States have had in common (social analysis)

Free Study Time

• Target students who struggle to process content in silence by providing a range of activities during free study time.
• Divide the class into clearly-sectioned solo and team activities, separated into:
  • Audio books
  • Designated quiet space
  • Curriculum aligned group games
  • Group work zones
• Free study time can overall contribute to classroom engagement and benefit diverse learners.

Write Group Contracts

• Student group work runs smoothly and effectively by writing contracts that contain guidelines for everyone to sign.
• Base group contracts on expectations that students have for each other.
• Discuss ideal group member habits, and encourage students to come up with consequences for violating expectations after writing the contract.
• Students are empowered to hold each other accountable by signing a fresh version of the contract before each group task and project.

Assign Open-Ended Projects

• Students can demonstrate knowledge in ways that inherently suit them when they tackle open-ended projects that dont demand a specific product.
• Start by giving the class a list of broad project ideas, asking each student to choose one.
• Provide a rubric that clearly defines expectations, which enticingly challenges students.
• Students will work and learn at their own paces and engage actively with appropriate content.
• Students may look forward to taking on new projects and demonstrate knowledge as effectively as possible.

Informal Assesments

• Avoiding standard marks on informal and formative assessments is recommended.
• Rather than give a big “F” in red ink, state if a student did or did not meet expectations.
• Provide struggling students with a clear path to improve by pairing classmates who didn’t meet expectations with those who did, giving them a review and practice activity.
• Encourage strugglers to communicate when they are confident they understand key concepts.
• Provide a new assessment, allowing them to prove their competency.

Interview Students

• To learn how to improve management, interview students who aren’t academically engaged or displaying prosocial behavior.
• Pull students aside for a few minutes and ask what helps them focus, who they work well with, their favorite types of lessons/activities, and which exercises help them remember key lesson points.
• Limit classroom disruptions based answers to create activities and approaches that engage students.

Address Bad Behavior Quickly

• Quickly addressing bad behavior helps ensure negative feelings don't fester.
• Avoid hesitation when addressing bad behavior, especially when students break a documented rule.
• Addressing bad behavior quickly can help avoid facing more poor behavior and difficult conversations.
• Talking to the student in private is often best, and punishing students in front of peers has "limited value."

Peer Teaching

• Engage and educate disruptive and struggling students through peer teaching.
• Benefit students who suffer from both low confidence and poor interpersonal skills through peer teaching activities like pairing students together as reading buddies.

Basic Principles of Classroom Management

• Provide opportunities for reflection and application to create learning opportunities based on real tasks and rich environments.
• Students learn best when their minds are engaged and moving through experimentation with the real world.
• The best kind of discipline is self-discipline.
• Using harsher discipline for engaging and misbehaving students is often seen, mostly by new teachers.

Factors of Out of Control Classrooms

• Factors that contribute to out-of-control classrooms:
  • The teacher does not know the subject
  • The teacher does not care
  • The teacher is not organized
  • The teacher has not provided an effective learning environment and structure

Why Students Misbehave

• Factors of misbehavior:
  • Fear: fear of the material, of the teacher, or of fellow students by being struck, embarrassed, and/or excluded.
  • Flight: students remove themselves from the interactions in the classroom because they feel uncomfortable in it.
  • Avoiding difficult situations by pretending to be absorbed in taking notes, staying silent, or stating they understand the material when they don't.
  • Stress: finding being in the classroom situation stressful, which causes them to disengage

Teacher Reaction

• Teachers can ensure students participate, feel comfortable asking questions/seeking clarification, and interacting with peers, by not assuming that students who appear to be working/stay quiet are a non-issue..
• Disruptive students can intimidate teachers through confrontation/aggression and openly hostile behavior to peers/teachers as a way of asserting control.
• The teacher's reaction of anger/punishment makes situations worse.

Common Behavior

• Boredom: Students look around the room when bored due to work that is too easy/hard, or lacks relevance.
• Positioning yourself to see most students, re-envisioning/revising the assignment, and learning how and why this is taking place can help the situation.
• Frustration: Students become silent or do not contribute due to work that is too difficult/easy.
• Move about the work area, create groups of students with different abilities, and give praise/support by asking questions during frustration.
• Low Self-Esteem: Students shut down due to past failures.
• Helping students through asking questions, supporting individual students, and spending extra time with them can help.

Rest of the Year

• Classroom management can be summed up as firm, fair, and friendly.
  • Firmness implies strength, organization, resilience, and leadership, rather than rigidity
  • Fairness implies equal respect for all kinds of learners and learning styles
  • Friendliness implies a readiness and joy of learning and association with knowledge, engagement with the process, and appreciation of each other