Imagine: Recess just ended. All of your students just walked back into the classroom. Recess was awesome, kids are excited about four square and soccer and the basketball games they just played, and everybody is talking at once. AND, they won't stop.
This is probably one of the biggest fears for new teachers (I know for me at least it is): How in the world do we control 25+ kids in our classroom?? How do we keep them from blowing up the room in science, running around like crazy children during reading, and going into pandemonium during writing time?
We must learn the art of classroom management.
During this semester, we have been taking a wonderful class called just that. This class is designed to help us understand how to keep all those cute little troublemakers from running around the school like animals. We've learned that it's not just establishing yourself as an authority figure in the classroom - it also involves setting up your classroom for success, implementing good discipline, and creating an environment of freedom and order.
Setup
One of the first things we learned this semester is that the way you setup your classroom can be the difference between success and failure. We have learned that one of the most important parts of education is allowing students to collaborate with their peers. Why is collaboration so important? Because it allows students to work together to come up with solutions to problems presented in class. What researchers are finding is that students need the opportunity to discuss with peers and to think about the question being asked before being presented with the answer. In the "olden days", the popular theory was that students are blank slates just waiting for teaching to pour information into them. However, we now know that students come into the classroom with their own backgrounds, knowledge, ideas, misconceptions, and thoughts about pretty much everything. Therefore, allowing students to work with each other to talk about their ideas before instruction, allows them to share their background knowledge, and prepares them for what they are about to learn.
The traditional way of setting up the classroom is in rows, aka your standard high school/college classroom. I don't know about you, but when I sit in these rows, I get way bored and sometimes end up falling asleep. So, how do kindergarden-fifth grade students handle this boredom?
Well, let me answer that question - they can't! Setting up your classroom in the standard rows is the perfect recipe for failure. You'll have students falling asleep, leaning over trying to talk to their friend 3 rows over, and you can't walk in between those rows very easily. So, you end up tripping over one kids shoes as you try to keep to the kid in that last row who has been sleeping for the last five minutes of class.
And, collaboration when students are setup in these rows is almost nonexistent. Students are not close enough to work together to discuss their ideas about what they are learning, and students will be more tempted to lean over to talk to their neighbor if they are not given those times during instruction to discuss their thoughts. In short: these traditional rows are a no no.
Sooooo, how do we setup our classrooms for success? Welllll, the answer is simple: table groups!
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| My classroom! |
Setting up your classroom in this way allows for lots of student interactions, while providing you the teacher with enough room to walk around and get to each student. Allowing students to sit in table groups also allows you to quickly put them into partners or groups, and makes it easy for students to have discussions with each other, when you give them the opportunity to share. This classroom setup is a great way to allow your students to work together, and helps you as a teacher effectively manage the classroom as a whole.
While the answer is simple, sometimes setting up your classroom in this way can be a daunting task. Because the students are next to each other, how do you keep them from talking to each other all the time?
The answer: good classroom management strategies.
In our classes, we have learned that there are several different techniques teachers can use to establish order and flow in a classroom. The strategies that I find most helpful, and the ones I plan to implement in my future classroom, are positive recognition, positive reinforcement, proximity, and nonverbal cues.
Positive recognition is just what it sounds like - recognizing students for positive things they have done in the classroom. This can be as easy as "I like how Sarah is sitting quietly and doing her work", or "Excellent answer, Jack, that was very good thinking". Using positive recognition in your classroom shows your students in your classroom that you see the good things they are doing, and will increase the likelihood that students will continue that good behavior.
Positive reinforcement is similar to positive recognition, but it involves a little something more - some sort of prize or token to show that a student has done something good. In my current school, Fallsmead, we have students who SOAR in school, or students who are safe, organized, accountable, and responsible. In order to promote these good behaviors, students are rewarded falcon feathers (little sheets of paper with the school falcon on it) when teachers catch students in the act of good behavior. These falcon feathers are handed out at the teacher's discretion, and are generally given out to students who are working hard in class, or who have been especially respectful or kind to other students. I have seen first hand the benefits of positive reinforcement - students get so excited when they are given a falcon feather, and when other students see someone else receive a falcon feather, they seek to do something good in order to receive one as well. While in life, students will not always be given a falcon feather for good deeds, this strategy really does help to promote good behavior while the students are in school, and the hope is that the students will learn through this to do continue those good behaviors on their own, even without the reward. But, the falcon feather is only the first part of this behavior management strategy - in order to get kids motivated to earn those feathers, teachers will store their falcon feathers in a jar, and will pull out feathers at the end of the day so that students chosen get a prize. This part is especially important, because without some sort of "reward" at the end, students come to see those falcon feathers for what they truly are - just pieces of paper. Therefore, including that final prize is especially important to the success of this strategy. In my future classroom/school, I hope to implement some sort of positive reinforcement system, so that I can promote those good behaviors in my classroom as well.
Proximity and nonverbal cues are different kinds of strategies from the two above. While all of these promote good behavior, proximity and nonverbal cues are generally used to limit the amount of bad/disruptive behavior in the classroom. Teachers use proximity by walking closer to a student or group of students who are off-task or being distracting. Often times, just the close presence of a teacher is enough to make a kid be quiet, but sometimes teachers also need to give a small tap to indicate their presence and that they want the students to stop talking. I've seen this used many, many times in the classroom, both by college professors and elementary school teachers, and this is another strategy I will use in my classroom.
Nonverbal cues are used in the classroom, as well as pretty much everywhere else on the planet. You know that look you get from your mom when you just said something you shouldn't have - the piercing glare that makes you want to hide and never come out. Well, teacher's use the same thing - although some of us aren't moms so we will need to work on perfecting that glare to produce the desired effect. Teachers can also shake their heads, raise their eyebrows, turn off the lights, stand quietly at the front of the room, and put a finger to their lips to tell the class what they want, without uttering a single word. Often times, nonverbal cues are especially helpful if it's just one or two students who need to get refocused. Catch the eye of an off-task student, raise your eyebrow, and that student will almost always get quiet and focused. This strategy is especially helpful, because other students are not always aware that you are using it. As a teacher, I don't want to be the kind of teacher who calls out students all the time and makes them feel horrible about themselves. Using nonverbal cues is a clear but subtle way of communicating to your students what you want them to do, and this is another strategy I will definitely be incorporating into my future classroom. (I have the raised eyebrow down, but I definitely need to work on my piercing stare).
And finally, in order to make your classroom a place of order, you need to learn the tricks of the trade. And, thankfully, my mentor teacher uses many different strategies of gaining students' attention, so I am well on my way to collecting many strategies for keeping my classroom under control. Most of these ways are simple and direct, and I am so glad that I have been able to see these different strategies in action, and have gotten the opportunity to practice them myself.
Some of the little tricks I have learned so far are:
- Use a count down. If you start counting down from 10, or 5, or 3, students quickly realize that you expect quiet once you reach 1. My mentor and I use this strategy frequently, and it is amazing to see a group of 30 students talking excitedly amongst themselves get quiet in 5 seconds.
- "Look at the floor, look at the ceiling, look to the right, look to the left, look at (me, the promethean, the overhead, etc)." (One of my mentor's tricks). While this strategy sounds silly, it really does work! While not every student actually looks in each of the directions every time, the students know that once we reach the "look at me" part, they should be quiet and looking where they have been instructed.
- "I like how..." This strategy is probably one of the easiest to implement. This strategy simply involves seeing a student(s) who is following directions, and verbally saying something like "I like how Susie has her math book out and is ready to go". Saying something like this almost immediately causes a chain reaction - Susie is happy she was recognized for her attentiveness, and the other students in the class rush to do the same. I've seen this work countless times, and it is definitely something that I will be using in my future classroom.
There are so many more tricks of the trade out there, and I am excited to continue to learn them so that I can use them in my future classroom. I know that as a first year teacher, I am going to be overwhelmed often. Sometimes, I might lose control of the classroom, and my kids might be talking and talking and I have no idea how to stop them. However, I hope that by implementing some of the strategies I have learned so far and others that I will learn down the road, I will be able to create a classroom environment of order and respect. By implementing these strategies early on, and setting goals and expectations right from the start, I hope that I will be able to establish myself as the authority and teacher in my classroom, so that I can have an awesome first year!
And, to wrap this up, a fitting quote from my behavior management teacher:
"It needs to be a nuisance for a student to be a nuisance to you."
Haha. Love it.
