Archive for the ‘Classroom Management’ Category
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As I was going through some old paperwork a couple of weeks ago, I came across the binder that I used with my band three years ago. I remember that was a difficult year because the classes were terribly large. My first period brass class had somewhere around 60 students, and my second period woodwind class had just over 70 students. As you might imagine, this posed a number of classroom management issues from time to time and really had the potential to wear me out. In the very front of that binder, I found a pre-class checklist that I had come up with and was flooded with memories. I think most of these questions will, if applied on a …
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I have written extensively in the past about classroom management and I admit I have glossed over some things while belaboring other points way beyond the point of exhaustion. Below are a few of the common classroom management pieces of advice and a handful of simple tricks to use in effort to make those things happen. Try one or two and see if things become easier…
- Work on your pacing
- Slow down your rate of speech; kids don’t comprehend information as fast as we do
- Be silent more often; silence allows kids to reflect more on what has been said
- Communicate urgency without getting frantic
- Be in control of what you say and how you say it
- Don’t argue with
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Five years ago, I wrote a series of seven articles called “Questions That Will Save Your Career” that still remain among the most visited articles on this site. When I wrote those, I had successfully completed my 5th year in education. This summer, after 10 years, I am revisiting some of these older concepts. Today, I revisit How Do I Keep My Students Quiet?
- How Do I Keep My Students Quiet?
- How Do I Keep My Students Engaged?
- How Do I Keep My Students Interested?
- How Do I Keep My Students Learning?
- How Do I Keep My Students Away From Me?
- How Do I Keep My School Administration Happy?
- How Do I Keep My Sanity?
- 10 Years of Teaching: How
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Inspiring students to be motivated and engaged in the learning process is an essential part of managing a classroom. Teaching students while calmly and effectively managing disruptive behavior is a vital skill for every educator.
Experimenting with new behavior management methods can help determine what works best for you and your students. Their unique personalities and challenges make every class different; a technique that proves effective for one student may not work well for her classmates.
Here are five tips you can try in your classroom. The more tools you have in your toolbox, the more effective you’ll be at managing a variety of classroom behaviors.
1. Post the Classroom Rules
- Students don’t always know what behavior is or is
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This guest post is contributed by Carrie Oakley, who writes on the topic of online colleges. Carrie welcomes your comments at her email id: carrie.oakley1983(AT)gmail(DOT)com.
It’s one of the most underrated professions in the world – most people assume that you don’t need any special skills to be a teacher, yet few realize that it takes a great deal of effort and ability to handle a classroom full of students. You not only have to be thoroughly knowledgeable in the subject you’re handling, you also need to know how to control a class and maintain discipline and order in it. In short, to be a good teacher, you also need the following classroom management skills:
- Authority
Some teachers command authority through the way they look
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The results to my most recent Twitter poll (what is your classroom management secret weapon?) can be seen over at Miss Cal.Q.L8′s blog.
Be sure to go check out 27 Classroom Management Secret Weapons. While you’re at it, subscribe to her blog and leave some comments….
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Okay okay. So I’m a band director. Why would anyone listen to me anyway. I’m just an elective teacher.
My friend JD2718 emailed me and told me about some stuff that he does in his math class. So even if you ignore my advice about classroom management, maybe some of his advice about keeping students engaged will apply to you. Hop on over and check out Teaching off topic 3.
By the way, I have ADD so my kids know that if they ask me a question about my dogs or what I did over the weekend or pretty much anything else, I’ll get off topic. But even when I do stay focused, I find ways to bring some off-topic …
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Reader Appreciation Month didn’t quite turn out the way I had envisioned it would. That is primarily my fault. As I sit here, I realize there are some things that I used to do with blogging that I don’t do any longer. I have decided it’s time for me to change some things. You may or may not notice the changes as I begin implementing them. If you do, great. If not, then perhaps it is simply a change to the way I approach blogging. Whatever the case, it’ll be good.
How can I apply this to my classroom?
How many times do we get into the habit of being so familiar with the subject matter that it no longer …
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When I began turning my band around during my second year, I received some of the best advice ever from one of my former band directors. He noted that he had observed three Rehearsal Skills that were lacking in most bad bands. These same three Rehearsal Skills are present in most great bands. The three skills are:
- Do not turn and talk to your neighbor when you are not playing.
This eliminates the “but we were talking about the music” part of the “DO NOT TALK” equation. - Sit still and quiet when the band director is working with another section.
I don’t have any idea how many times kids got up without asking to during my first two years. This
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I am a huge fan of simplicity. For that matter, I love the idea of having no classroom rules. However, I know some people don’t operate that way.
Great teachers can be found in both camps. But whether or not we feel it necessary to tie our students down with rules, the greatest commonality between all great teachers is that they have clear, concise, and comprehensive expectations for their students and they communicate them in such a way that every student is aware of what is right and wrong.
My school has a list of something like 12 school-wide classroom rules. That is way overboard for me, but I dutifully posted them on the wall in the classroom as I’ve …
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