Extra Management Tips
Sending kids out of the room gives away your power
It may solve things in the short term, but you are sending the message that you are not the authority figure that they need to be concerned about. This makes it harder to discipline a student the next time they need redirection in your room. There are absolutely circumstances where a student needs to be sent to administration, but the occurrence should be rare.
Prioritize the correct relationship with students
The teacher/student relationship is inherently unequal. The teacher is the authority figure and is tasked with the well-being of the student. For that reason, a peer-to-peer type of relationship is to be avoided at all costs with the students. This type of relationship can be very foreign to some teachers, particularly younger ones. A more experienced mentor teacher can be very valuable to model appropriate interactions and boundaries with students.
Remove yourself from the discipline process
When providing feedback and consequences to a student, the teacher should remember that overt displays of emotion can be an incentive in themselves. Seeing a teacher grow angry can be a reward in its own right and reinforce disruptive behavior. Remaining calm and enforcing classroom discipline in an almost clinical manner will allow students to separate the teacher from the discipline, and preserve their relationship with the teacher. The adult is not the rules. The rules are the rules. The adult is there to help students follow the rules.
Kids should never have to guess what the expectations are
Kids should know the expectations and consequences for decisions they're making. There is enormous security in knowing what is coming next.
Don't back yourself into a corner
If a teacher says something will happen, it needs to happen. Teachers should never threaten consequences that they’re not immediately prepared to follow through on. Defining specific consequences for actions and then not following through, teaches the kids that the classroom expectations are negotiable. This invites argument and resistance when consequences are levied, in the belief that they can be mitigated. As a teacher, that’s a place you don’t want to be. If you say you’ll do something, you need to do it.
Avoid punishing the class for an individual's behavior
When teachers give consequences to a group for the behavior of an individual, it is often done with the intent to create social pressure from the group to attempt to push the offending party into compliance. There is a school of thought that seeks to utilize the social pressure present in all groups to ensure compliance with the social mores. This is an unavoidable aspect of being human, but should be leveraged by a teacher rarely, if at all. It is very easy to set up or abet a bullying situation when utilizing social pressure.
Teach in a normal tone and voice
Curriculum is often written in a more formal register, and when read verbatim can sound very alien and foreign to young people, especially those who may not have complete familiarity with the language. For this reason, every effort should be made to avoid reading directly from the text when delivering instruction. Instead, attempt to utilize the written information as a base, and deliver it in a normal speaking voice, or at least with the tone and cadence that you normally interact with the kids. Please note that this advice does NOT apply to fiction read-alouds, in which weird voices are absolutely encouraged.
Don't attempt to talk over students
Strategic use of silence until kids are quiet can be very effective. It’s important to send the message that you are not going to compete with the students for the right to talk.
Keep the schedule that you set
Similar to tip 5, if you say something will happen at a certain time, do your absolute best to make sure it does. This includes lesson wrap ups, quizzes, tests, and transitions.
Utilize hand signals and other non-verbal communications
Having a hand signal for the class to quiet down both saves your voice, and ensures that kids are paying attention to you. Setting up non-verbal communications between the teacher and the class can also save a lot of time. For example, instead of having students come up and ask to go to the bathroom, teach them to hold up three fingers and wait for the gesture of acknowledgement from the teacher.
Address behavior quickly
The younger a student is, the quicker the response after behavior needs to be. Waiting even a half hour for a kindergartener can render the intervention after the fact almost meaningless. This space increases dramatically as students age, but it is important to remember the developmental level of the student when deciding when to levy consequences.
Teaching rules over procedure is good, but be prepared for the trade off
We touched on this before but it is an important enough concept that it bears repeating here. Teaching rules is a less effective use of teacher time than teaching routines based on those rules. This requires a heavy investment of time at the beginning of the year, and the amount of time spent teaching and practicing classroom routines instead of covering academics can sometimes scare teachers and administrators away from this approach. Don’t be afraid. Once the routines are in place, the rest of the year will flow much more smoothly than you are accustomed to.
Confidence is based on past success
In order for students to try, they have to be willing to fail. If their previous failures have been met with perceived derision or scorn, they will be unwilling to try again. Remember that the students you have in front of you may not have been successful in the academic or behavioral realms before.
Don't be fair
Being fair is an impossibility. Giving everyone the same thing is not fair. Fair is based on need, and need changes too rapidly and too subtly for a teacher to always get it right. Instead of chasing being fair, be consistent.
Catch them doing something right
A teacher should look for opportunities to notice and call attention to students for doing the right thing. Not every student desires or is motivated by public praise from an adult, and for some students that can actually be counterproductive. For these students, praise and reinforcement can be delivered in private. Catching students doing the right thing helps enormously when building a positive classroom and schoolwide environment.
"That's not fair," ends the discussion
Whenever you are engaging with a student, be on the lookout for this phrase. When a student busts this out, it means that they have run out of points they are trying to make and have nowhere left to jump. At this point, there is nothing more to be gained by continuing to engage. This is true for adults as well. Allow this phrase to be a signal that the argument is over, and should be ended.