A reader posted a question this week asking what to do if a student, in this case a kindergartner, crawled on the floor and under tables after being sent to time-out. Playing, straying, and not sitting quietly in time-out can happen regardless of grade level.
And this problem can be especially frustrating. It pulls the teacher [...]
Much of your classroom management success is dependent upon your ability to avoid making big mistakes. Make them often enough, or repeatedly, and you’ll lose control of your classroom quickly.
Before long, you’ll begin to believe teaching in a chaotic environment is just part of the job.
It’s not. At least, it doesn’t have to be. The [...]
Your classroom management plan doesn’t have to be complex to be effective. Four rules and three consequences will usually do the trick. Indeed, there is no magic in the plan itself.
It’s the stuff in between, the strategery (see Will Ferrell), that determines whether classroom management is successful or not.
Time-out is an excellent example. Undoubtedly the [...]
One of the biggest classroom management mistakes teachers make is that they take disrespectful behavior personally. To quote Tom Hagen speaking to Sonny Corleone in the classic movie The Godfather, “This is business, not personal.”
When you take disrespectful behavior personally, two things are likely to happen:
You will desire to get [...]
Confidence is an important trait in a teacher, but so is humility. Although I don’t subscribe to the belief that a teacher never truly arrives or can never reach a high level of excellence, I do believe in the continual need to be self-aware of one’s mistakes and open to new ideas. A dose of [...]
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