Classroom Management

After spring break I thought a lot about classroom management. I wanted to make sure that after a week off of school, students were still held to the same expectations and were following routines that were set at the beginning of the year. Therefore, I’ve been trying to find a couple strategies that I can try in my classroom after the break to ensure that the classroom is still following Edtopia  listed multiple strategies that I was interested in trying out in the classroom.

I can sense that my students are beginning to get bored with repetition and are especially antsy near the end of the year. It doesn’t help that we are doing a lot of test preparation right now as well. One of the first things the article suggests, and what stood out to me the most, is “Follow the first step of hypnosis”. The idea being that it is much easier for students to focus on something they’re already doing rather than being told to do something different with multiple steps involved. Often times I have students freeze and give multi-step directions, hoping for the best. The idea with the hypnosis technique is that you can give students an easy in. For example, I have started doing a countdown and ask students to point their eyes towards me. I give no further directions until I see 100% compliance. Then I give further directions about what I need next. This strategy has been working a lot better because normally when I do a countdown from five, students are already looking at me so to say “point your eyes toward me” is an easy in that doesn’t waste much time. That way they are also ready to hear next steps from me and aren’t distracted by anything else.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that after lunch and recess, my students tend to be extremely energized. The quiet, calm feeling from the morning seems to go out the door after lunch and it takes extra energy on my part to instill that same sense of calm. Even just coming through the classroom door, students have a sense of energy that wasn’t there in the morning. I liked number 5 on Edtopia and wanted to try it out. The author had each child line up outside the door before entering and answer a content related question before being allowed through the door. I really liked this idea because it could be a good way to review content before MCA’s, it would be a calm way to enter the classroom and each of them can independently get started on the prompt on the board without getting distracted by each other. If they don’t follow these expectations exactly, they get sent to the back of the line which annoys them so this typically works out well. Based on this tip, I’ve noticed that students are excited to anticipate what the question might be as they come up the stairs, are less likely to get distracted by each other in the classroom and naturally calm themselves down. It has become less taxing on my part to calm them down.

While I have been focusing on incorporating these two strategies into my classroom, it takes time. According to Harry Wong’s research in effective classroom management, teachers should use a three-step approach for teaching classroom procedures. This includes explaining, rehearsing, and reinforcing (repetition) until students have it be a habit or routine (The First Days of School). So, before I started the line up and ask questions routine, I explained to students what it would look like, why we are doing it and expectations on following the routine. After explaining, we rehearsed what it would look like and repeated it every day until we got in a routine of doing it. What I liked about using this article to inform instruction is that it’s never too late to introduce new routines and have a classroom reset. While it is helpful for it to happen within the first  months of schools, it works just as effectively near the end months of school too.