The key to effective classroom management is leverage.
If your students like being part of your classroom, then you have leverage, and accountability will work the way it’s supposed to.
If your students don’t like being in your classroom, then you’ll struggle with classroom management.
It’s that simple.
Because without leverage…
Your consequences will be ineffective.
Your students will be unmotivated.
It’s a lot more difficult to get students to behave.
You will have to rely on bribing, lecturing, reminding, and other minimally effective, energy-sapping methods.
You will be tired, stressed, and frustrated.
Every new school year will find you hoping for a “good” class rather than creating your own.
Done correctly, a teacher’s leverage can become so powerful and so influential that even the toughest students need no more than a glance to curb behavior.
That is no exaggeration.
Regardless of where you teach or who your students are, the power of leverage can transform your students into the class you really want.
How Leverage Is Created
Here is a partial list of some proven ways to create leverage in your classroom:
Be likable.
Build a natural and trusting rapport with students.
Have a clean, organized, and peaceful classroom.
Rally around the pursuit of challenging goals.
Allow freedom within boundaries.
Use meaningful praise.
Show your students what you expect from them.
Keep your cool.
Don’t talk so much.
Transform your students’s limiting beliefs about themselves.
Hold students accountable without causing resentment.
Treat the cause of behavior problems, not the symptoms.
Be a great storyteller.
Use humor.
Protect the rights of your students to learn and enjoy school without interference.
Encourage independence.
See the best in your students.
Have fun together.
Develop maturity and confidence.
Create a classroom that makes sense to students.
Teachers seeking to improve classroom management tend to focus on finding the right combination of rules, consequences, and rewards that will work for them.
These are important, no doubt. But what makes them go, what makes them effective, is leverage.
This should be your focus.
The idea is to create a tsunami of leverage so wide and deep that no student can resist its power.
Every article on this website, from ways to make time-out more effective to how small gestures of praise can make a big impact, either directly or indirectly works to create leverage with students.
Future articles, too, will focus on this irresistible force. Some of the topics listed above have been written about in detail and can be found by exploring the categories along the right side of the page. Others are on the way.
I encourage you to keep reading. Try out the tips, strategies, and techniques revealed every week. Put them into practice.
You’ll discover your influence with students growing right along with your love of teaching and everything—classroom management, motivation, attentiveness, academic performance—becoming much easier.
If you would like a complete guide to transforming students that includes all of the topics on the list and many more, purchase a copy of Dream Class.
Also, if you haven’t done so already, please join us. It’s free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.
Michael,
I have been reading through your blogs which are most helpful. So, thanks for that. Here is my situation. I was a first year teacher last year in a suburban school and this year I was transferred to an urban school. I hear different things from different teachers that work there. But most of them do say, to go into the classroom the first day of school and be strict and stone faced until the students are undercontrol. These are elementary students 4th grade to be exact. I was just currious in what your take on that is. At this point I dont’ know how I should present myself to my students. I guess maybe I just going crazy just trying to think about it with only a day and a half day to go, before I walk into my new room this year…..anything with help.
Hi Ron,
I write about this extensively in Dream Class and mention it in the article 12 Classroom Management Myths You Need To Know About. I think it’s a mistake and a myth that you should present yourself in such an unlikable manner. I believe you should smile, be welcoming, and have some fun with your students on the first day of school. If they like you and like being in your classroom, classroom management is much, much easier. The quicker you can start building influential relationships, the better.
Michael
Hello! I have a somewhat silly question. How can you gauge whether students truly enjoy being in your class and like you? I have struggled with this a great deal. I am an enrichment area teacher and work with children between the ages of five and twelve. As I see all different age groups, I feel a bit discouraged by how excited the Kindergartners seem when they come to my class (students come to my class twice a week for thirty minutes), vs. the fifth graders, who seem to almost be sick of me by now (after having me for five years!) I don’t know if I am misinterpreting their disinterest into thinking that they don’t like me, or if it is just their age group that is generally more disinterested in school than say, Kindergartners 🙂 What are some ways that I can really re-ignite excitement in some of the older elementary students that I have been working with for five years now? (I feel sometimes like my teaching relationship with students is similar to a long-term relationship..after a few years it seems like it takes a lot more effort to keep things interesting and exciting!) Also, sometimes if I try and do something fun with the older grades they take advantage of the situation and misbehave by talking too much or not listening to my instructions. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!
Hi Lindsey,
If your students like you and enjoy being in your classroom, they’ll let you know it enthusiastically. If your fifth-graders seem uninterested, then they are uninterested. Having more fun will certainly help. But if they take advantage of it then you have to work on improving your classroom management. It’s the combination of strong classroom management skills with a commitment to making your classroom a place they look forward to coming to every day that creates a dream classroom, for you and for them. Read through the Calm, Focused, & Happy, the Incentives & Praise, the Rapport & Influence, and the What Effective Teachers Do categories of the archive. I’ve written a ton of articles on this topic–with more to come.
:)Michael