Classroom Management Quotes

What it takes to do a job will not be learned from management courses. It is principally a matter of experience, the proper attitude, and common sense — none of which can be taught in a classroom... Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.

We are more than role models for our students; we are leaders and teachers of both an academic curriculum and a social curriculum.

It is said, in a fire, everyone runs away from it save for the fireman who run towards it. When dealing with students, be the fireman.

Rules and consequences are not the best tools for classroom management. Giving students goals and rewards is more effective. It’s about putting systems in place that actively incentivize good behavior and passively decentivize bad behavior. In this way, as a teacher you can spend less time on managing behaviors and more time on educating and leading.

They are a testament not only to the Afghans' hunger for literacy, but also to their willingness to pour scarce resources into this effort, even during a time of war. I have seen children studying in classrooms set up inside animal sheds, windowless basements, garages, and even an abandoned public toilet. We ourselves have run schools out of refugee tents, shipping containers, and the shells of bombed-out Soviet armored personnel carriers. The thirst for education over there is limitless. The Afghans want their children to go to school because literacy represents what neither we not anyone else has so far managed to offer them: hope, progress, and the possibility of controlling their own destiny.

A classroom needs to feel like a safe place for both students and teachers. In order for creativity and higher level thinking to be present in the classrooms, a feeling of safety must first be present in the classrooms.

I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as educational experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group...If a child in their classrooms does not succeed with his peer group, then it would seem to many that both child and teacher have failed. Have they? If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed with his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth.

Good classroom management is the art of dealing with problems positively and looking for solutions together so that everyone is involved and willing to find a remedy.

You don't treat the so-called little people poorly, because we don't have any little people here! The trainers, the managers, the secretaries, the people who work in the dorms and cafeterias and classroom buildings are all professionals, and they're all important or they wouldn't be working for Michigan football.

To key to classroom behavior management is to have a structured system in place whereby good behaviors are actively and abundantly rewarded, and bad behaviors are promptly and efficiently punished. Rewards should be like the air, ever present and always lingering. Punishment should be like a thunderstorm that is obvious and inconvenient yet quick, temporary and not abusive. The predominant theme of classroom management should be good behaviors and continuous rewards.

The key to classroom behavior management is to have a structured system in place whereby good behaviors are actively and abundantly rewarded, and bad behaviors are promptly and efficiently punished. Rewards should be like the air, ever present and always lingering. Punishment should be like a thunderstorm that is obvious and inconvenient yet quick, temporary and not abusive. The predominant theme of classroom management should be good behaviors and continuous rewards.

Teachers who have the best managed classrooms are those who spend the first two weeks of class teaching and practicing their procedures and routines (Marzano, Marzano, & Pickering, 2003).

Allowing bullying in the classroom is equivalent to excluding learning from the classroom. If bullying is present in the classroom it causes the classroom to not feel like a safe environment, and people do not learn in unsafe environments - except for those things which they feel will ensure their present safety.

the assistant principal told me how he “loved to read a great novel and discuss the meaning of life.” He smiled, sighed wistfully, and then turned suddenly serious. “But we can’t do that at our school. We have to focus on basic skills and classroom management.

The educational process must again provide the opportunity for students to make choices and live with the consequences of these choices. Teaching is not simply telling people what to believe and do.

How many things would be different in everyone’s surroundings if we hadn’t lived? How a good word many have encouraged some fellow and did something to him that he did it differently and better than he would otherwise. And through him somebody else was saved. How much we contribute to each other, how powerful we each are-and don’t know it.

10 ways to raise a wild child. Not everyone wants to raise wild, free thinking children. But for those of you who do, here's my tips: 1. Create safe space for them to be outside for a least an hour a day. Preferable barefoot & muddy. 2. Provide them with toys made of natural materials. Silks, wood, wool, etc...Toys that encourage them to use their imagination. If you're looking for ideas, Google: 'Waldorf Toys'. Avoid noisy plastic toys. Yea, maybe they'll learn their alphabet from the talking toys, but at the expense of their own unique thoughts. Plastic toys that talk and iPads in cribs should be illegal. Seriously! 3. Limit screen time. If you think you can manage video game time and your kids will be the rare ones that don't get addicted, then go for it. I'm not that good so we just avoid them completely. There's no cable in our house and no video games. The result is that my kids like being outside cause it's boring inside...hah! Best plan ever! No kid is going to remember that great day of video games or TV. Send them outside! 4. Feed them foods that support life. Fluoride free water, GMO free organic foods, snacks free of harsh preservatives and refined sugars. Good oils that support healthy brain development. Eat to live! 5. Don't helicopter parent. Stay connected and tuned into their needs and safety, but don't hover. Kids like adults need space to roam and explore without the constant voice of an adult telling them what to do. Give them freedom! 6. Read to them. Kids don't do what they are told, they do what they see. If you're on your phone all the time, they will likely be doing the same thing some day. If you're reading, writing and creating your art (painting, cooking...whatever your art is) they will likely want to join you. It's like Emilie Buchwald said, "Children become readers in the laps of their parents (or guardians)." - it's so true! 7. Let them speak their truth. Don't assume that because they are young that you know more than them. They were born into a different time than you. Give them room to respectfully speak their mind and not feel like you're going to attack them. You'll be surprised what you might learn. 8. Freedom to learn. I realize that not everyone can homeschool, but damn, if you can, do it! Our current schools system is far from the best ever. Our kids deserve better. We simply can't expect our children to all learn the same things in the same way. Not every kid is the same. The current system does not support the unique gifts of our children. How can they with so many kids in one classroom. It's no fault of the teachers, they are doing the best they can. Too many kids and not enough parent involvement. If you send your kids to school and expect they are getting all they need, you are sadly mistaken. Don't let the public school system raise your kids, it's not their job, it's yours! 9. Skip the fear based parenting tactics. It may work short term. But the long term results will be devastating to the child's ability to be open and truthful with you. Children need guidance, but scaring them into listening is just lazy. Find new ways to get through to your kids. Be creative! 10. There's no perfect way to be a parent, but there's a million ways to be a good one. Just because every other parent is doing it, doesn't mean it's right for you and your child. Don't let other people's opinions and judgments influence how you're going to treat your kid. Be brave enough to question everything until you find what works for you. Don't be lazy! Fight your urge to be passive about the things that matter. Don't give up on your kid. This is the most important work you'll ever do. Give it everything you have.

getting the students to comprehend and achieve. There is no one right way to do this. Just like classroom management, there is no one right procedure for getting the students to do what you want them to do. There are many options, but they are based on core information.

Students want a safe, predictable, and nurturing environment—one that is consistent. Students like well-managed classes because no one yells at them, and learning takes place. Effective teachers spend the first two weeks teaching students to be in control of their own actions in a consistent classroom environment.

In the classroom, it was almost certainly the case that the women were managing a double bind that we face constantly: conform to traditional gender expectations, stay quiet and be liked, or violate those expectations and risk the penalties, including the penalty of being called puritanical, aggressive, and"humorless.

When people seek the help of a professional, they usually have certain expectations about how a competent one looks and behaves.

Student diversity in classrooms increases the need for diversity in teaching approaches.

It's always a kind of liberation to leave the classroom during a lesson, even just for a few minutes. As if you have managed to steal a little time for yourself, to take a break from reality

Conversations about grading weren’t like conversations about classroom management or assessment design, which teachers approached with openness and in deference to research. Instead, teachers talked about grading in a language of morals about the “real world” and beliefs about students; grading seemed to tap directly into the deepest sense of who teachers were in their classroom.

Though teachers pride themselves on having developed bionic hearing (the phrase “I heard that” is a common part of many teachers’ vocabularies), sometimes it is better to conceal such super-human powers.

In order for students to develop self-regulation skills, they need experience making choices. Unfortunately, some schools are in the business of issuing mandates that reduce choice in an effort to curtail misbehavior.

Establishing a pattern of reactive consequences can have disastrous effects on classroom efficiency and morale. Rather, a proactive strategy helps to give students an opportunity to demonstrate a positive contribution to the classroom community.

I walked out of the classroom and felt like dancing and singing. It all gave me hope. It gave me a little bit of joy. And I kept trying to find the little pieces of joy in my life. That's the only way I managed to make it through all of that death and change

model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators. While the choices in Google Maps and avionics software appear cut and dried, others are far more problematic. The value-added model in Washington, D.C., schools, to return to that example, evaluates teachers largely on the basis of students’ test scores, while ignoring how much the teachers engage the students, work on specific skills, deal with classroom management, or help students with personal and family problems. It’s overly simple, sacrificing accuracy and insight for efficiency.

research suggests that all students are motivated to learn, as long as there are clear expectations, the tasks and activities have value, and the learning environment promotes intrinsic motivation (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 1995; Eccles & Wigfield, 1985; Feather, 1982; Kovalik & Olsen, 2005).

I guess that's what my dad did. Stopped agreeing with reality. I could do it for as long as it took me to get from my classroom to the office. He managed it for sixteen years. He must have had more mental discipline than me. Or maybe it wasn't that much of an effort to pretend that I didn't exist.

Zero-tolerance discipline policies, specifically the controversial category of willful defiance, have become a routine way by which to punish and marginalize Black girls in learning spaces when they directly confront adults or indirectly complicate the teacher’s ability to manage the classroom—not necessarily actions that pose a threat to the physical safety of anyone on campus.

I continued to find it much easier to assimilate knowledge within the structured military environment than at college, for at training sites such as Mare Island, outside influences were kept to a minimum.  All I had to do was make my bunk in the morning, show up at the appointed classrooms, and focus on the subject at hand.  Others took care of the daily routine of life while we hit the books.

Terrible as this is, there’s worse news. An article in the New York Times points out a statistic that should make our nation’s leaders tremble… suspension rates, kindergarten through high school, have nearly doubled from the early 1970s through 2006. Whatever is happening with our test scores, something else, something catastrophic, is going on in our schools. As countless teachers across America can testify, disruptive kids are hijacking our classrooms.

Fortunately, new platforms and technology have made homeschooling manageable on many fronts. Parents can do everything from accessing first-rate courses online to finding support from other parents in the same situation. The best part is that they can completely tailor the experience to the learning style and interest of their children and give them the attention that they would never get in the classroom. The results are striking. Twenty-five percent of homeschooled children are at least one grade ahead of their traditionally schooled peers. The homeschooled population, as a whole, scores exceptionally higher on academic achievement tests.5 This shift is perhaps the best glimpse of the future of education—mass customization alongside personalized attention. Like banking, it will return to a human-scale model based on relationships and personal needs, and it will be where much of the disruption in the economy and labor market occurs in the next few decades.

I am criticizing the professionalization of teaching children because these young human beings are not cogs in a machine, And I am trying to identify the root of the problem for all those wonderful adults who went into teaching thinking that they could commit to nurturing the lives of many children only to end up having the system squash their excellent motives. Our current school system replicates factories and requires classroom managers more than teachers. Teachers are appreciably frustrated.

The larger problem here is that many teachers are so desperate to keep their classrooms in order that they will do anything to maintain it. This is understandable—an “End justifies the means” mentality is at the heart of many explanations of how children are handled these days. Given some of the practically impossible situations confronting teachers today, it seems reasonable. But let’s be honest. It might be explicable. It might be effective. But it is not good teaching. We can do better. I know this because I’ve been there. I’ve fallen into the same trap. The simple truth is that most classrooms today are managed by one thing and one thing only: fear.

Microassaults involve misusing power and privilege in subtle ways to marginalize students and create different outcomes based on race or class. In the classroom, a microassault might look like giving a more severe punishment to a student of color than his White classmate who was engaged in the same behavior. Or it might look like overemphasizing military-like behavior management strategies for students of color. With younger children, it looks like excluding them from fun activities as punishment for minor infractions. Microinsults involve being insensitive to culturally and linguistically diverse students and trivializing their racial and cultural identity such as not learning to pronounce a student’s name or giving the student an anglicized name to make it easier on the teacher. Continually confusing two students of the same race and casually brushing it off as “they all look alike.” Microinvalidations involve actions that negate or nullify a person of color’s experiences or realities such as ignoring each student’s rich funds of knowledge. They are also expressed when we don’t want to acknowledge the realities of structural racialization or implicit bias. It takes the form of trivializing and dismissing students’ experiences, telling them they are being too sensitive or accusing them of “playing the race card.”

The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of

Teachers in general face common problems of practice. Their professional success depends on their ability to motivate an involuntary group of students to learn what the teacher is teaching. In an effort to accomplish this, teachers invest heavily in developing a teaching persona that enables them to establish a relationship with students and lure them to learn. Once they have worked out a personal approach for managing the instruction of students within the walls of their classroom, they are likely to resist vigorously any effort by reformers or administrators or any other intruders to transform their approach to teaching. Teacher resistance to fundamental instructional reform is grounded in a deep personal investment in the way they teach and a sense that tinkering with this approach could threaten their very ability to manage a class (much less teach a particular curriculum) effectively.

As already suggested, when the individual first learns who it is that he must now accept a his own, he is likely, at the very least, to feel some ambivalence; for these others will not only be patently stigmatized, and thus not like the normal person he knows himself to be, but ma also have other attributes with which he finds it difficult to associate himself. What may end up as a freemasonry may begin with a shudder. A newly blind girl on a visit to The Lighthouse [probably the Chicago Lighthouse, one of the oldest social service agencies in Chicago serving the blind or visually impaired] directly from leaving the hospital provides an illustration: „My questions about a guide dog were politely turned aside. Another sighted worker took me in tow to show me around. We visited the Braille library; the classrooms; the clubrooms where the blind members of the music and dramatic groups meet; the recreation hall where on festive occasion the blind play together; the cafeteria, where all the blind gather to eat together; the huge workshops where the blind earn a subsistence income by making mops and brooms, weaving rugs, caning chairs. As we moved from room to room, I could hear the shuffling of feet, the muted voices, the tap-tap-tapping of canes. Here was the safe, segregated world of the sightless — a completely different world, I was assured by the social worker, from the one I had just left…. I was expected to join this world. To give up my profession and to earn my living making mops. The Lighthouse would be happy to teach me how to make mops. I was to spend the rest of my life making mops with other blind people, eating with other blind people, dancing with other blind people. I became nauseated with fear, as the picture grew in my mind. Never had I come upon such destructive segregation.“ (p.37)

And here are some thoughts for parents. If you’re lucky enough to have control over where your child goes to school, whether by scouting out a magnet school, moving to a neighborhood whose public schools you like, or sending your kids to private or parochial school, you can look for a school that prizes independent interests and emphasizes autonomy conducts group activities in moderation and in small, carefully managed groups values kindness, caring, empathy, good citizenship insists on orderly classrooms and hallways is organized into small, quiet classes chooses teachers who seem to understand the shy/serious/introverted/sensitive temperament focuses its academic/athletic/extracurricular activities on subjects that are particularly interesting to your child strongly enforces an anti-bullying program emphasizes a tolerant, down-to-earth culture attracts like-minded peers, for example intellectual kids, or artistic or athletic ones, depending on your child’s preference

To implement these changes, the school initially followed a more typical, top-down strategy of reform: the state sent in a consultant to implement changes. “It was an outsider who came in and talked about the civil rights movement and did touchy feely group discussions,” Guthertz recalls. “Someone else came in and for one day taught behavior management strategies that focused on controlling and penalizing students versus making changes in teaching practices that would engage and support them. That blew up at the school. The administration got rid of that program.” The issues that come with this kind of approach to school reform—“do what the district, state, or consultants say”—have been a recurring theme in the long careers of Guthertz, Roth, and McKamey. “It comes off as an attempt to hijack the effort by the teachers to think about education,” McKamey comments. “It’s the deepest disrespect. The teacher has been teaching for ten years and someone is going to come in and say, ‘I’m going to show you something.’ Most of these people have never taught in the classroom.

Many college courses in the humanities focus on discussion over lecture. Students read course material ahead of time and have a discussion in class. Harvard Business School took this to the extreme by pioneering case-based learning more than a hundred years ago, and many business schools have since followed suit. There are no lectures there, not even in subjects like accounting or finance. Students read a ten-to twenty-page description of a particular company’s or person’s circumstance—called a “case”—on their own time and then participate in a discussion/debate in class (where attendance is mandatory). Professors are there to facilitate the discussion, not to dominate it. I can tell you from personal experience that despite there being eighty students in the room, you cannot zone out. Your brain is actively processing what your peers are saying while you try to come to your own conclusions so that you can contribute during the entire eighty-minute session. The time goes by faster than you want it to; students are more engaged than in any traditional classroom I’ve ever been a part of. Most importantly, the ideas that you and your peers collectively generate stick. To this day, comments and ways of thinking about a problem that my peers shared with me (or that I shared during class) nearly ten years ago come back to me as I try to help manage the growth and opportunities surrounding the Khan Academy.

The gulf between science and education has been harmful. A look at the science reveals that the methods commonly used to teach children are inconsistent with basic facts about human cognition and development and so make learning to read more difficult than it should be. They inadvertently place many children at risk for reading failure. They discriminate against poorer children who could have become successful readers. Many children who do manage to learn to read under these conditions wind up disinterested in the activity. In short, what happens in classrooms isn't adequate for many children, and this shows in the quality of this country's literacy achievement. Reading is under pressure for other reasons, but educational theories and practices may accelerate its marginalization.

The impersonal and evaluative nature of middle schools fails to support adolescents’ increasing need for relatedness. In addition, many middle schools emphasize managing and controlling student behavior over supporting students’ need for autonomy.

a time when students would benefit developmentally from close relationships with teachers, the size and structure of middle schools often does not facilitate a sense of connectedness and may instead lead to greater feelings of alienation. In middle schools, students have multiple teachers and spend limited time each day with any one teacher. Furthermore, the emphasis in many middle schools is on management and control rather than on supporting students’ social and emotional needs. This can make it even more difficult for teachers and students to develop these connections.

The Importance of Becoming Metacognitively Sophisticated as a Learner Whatever the reasons for our not developing accurate mental models of ourselves as learners, the importance of becoming sophisticated as a learner cannot be overemphasized. Increasingly, coping with the changes that characterize today’s world—technological changes, job and career changes, and changes in how much of formal and informal education happens in the classroom versus at a computer terminal, coupled with the range of information and procedures that need to be acquired—requires that we learn how to learn. Also, because more and more of our learning will be what Whitten, Rabinowitz, and Whitten (2006) have labeled unsupervised learning, we need, in effect, to know how to manage our own learning activities. To become effective in managing one’s own learning requires not only some understanding of the complex and unintuitive processes that underlie one’s encoding, retention, and retrieval of information and skills, but also, in my opinion, avoiding certain attribution errors. In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977) refers to the tendency, in explaining the behaviors of others, to overvalue the role of personality characteristics and undervalue the role of situational factors. That is, behaviors tend to be overattributed to a behaving individual’s or group’s characteristics and underattributed to situational constraints and influences. In the case of human metacognitive processes, there is both a parallel error and an error that I see as essentially the opposite. The parallel error is to overattribute the degree to which students and others learn or remember to innate ability. Differences in ability between individuals are overappreciated, whereas differences in effort, encoding activities, and whether the prior learning that is a foundation for the new learning in question has been acquired are underappreciated.

Most Christian teachers would profess to believe that their students are made in the image of God. . .Classroom practices, however, often reveal that students are not treated accordingly. They are not challenged to think through issues and carefully examine the various positions relevant to the issue. Instead they are simply given information as correct answers to be remembered and reproduced on a test or in some other written form. Rather than create an art project that reveals something about the way they view the world, they are given specific instructions for completing each step of the project and criticized, for example, if the trees are not green. While verbally teaching Johnny that he is an important person, a teacher may employ a learning model or classroom discipline system that clearly treats him as on object to be shaped and controlled by a system. . . (p18)

The Responsive Classroom approach creates an ideal environment for learning--every teacher should know about it.

You said to get involved with people, that I can’t learn about connections in a vacuum.” I agreed. “So what’s not working?” She pulled a long list from her purse. “This,” Linda said, “is a list I put together of all the involvements I’ve had in the past few months. And nothing’s happening.” I read the list, which looked something like this: Dancing lessons: ballroom, disco, and line Sports: sailing, rollerblading, golf, and tennis Music: opera, modern, and piano lessons Art: ceramics and museums Spiritual: Bible study, worship, and missions Career: Ongoing training, night school to earn an MBA “What are you grinning at?” Linda asked me. I wasn’t even aware I was smiling. I told her, “This is a proud moment for me. I’ve never met a real live renaissance woman.” “Now I’m really confused,” Linda said. I explained, “Linda, this is the most well-rounded, comprehensive, and exhausting list I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine how you can even get up in the mornings. But it’s not solving your problem. “These are all great activities, designed to develop you and help you in your life. But each of them is primarily functional, rather than relational. Their goal is competence in some skill, or recreation, or learning more about God’s creation. But relationship isn’t the goal. These are ‘doing’ things, not ‘connecting’ things.” Linda started to get it. “You know, I’ve noticed that I am talking to people at these activities. But all the talk is about tennis or management theories. I’ve wondered when someone in the classroom was going to ask me about my emotional and spiritual life.” “Don’t hold your breath,” I said.

If you could even find Marx outside of university classrooms (where he was increasingly presented as a humanist philosopher instead of a revolutionary firebrand), it was on Wall Street, where cheeky traders put down Sun Tzu and heralded the long-dead German as a prophet of globalization. Capitalism had certainly yielded immense progress in countries such as China and India. In 1991, when Indian finance minister Manmohan Singh announced plans to liberalize India’s economy, he quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” Over the next twenty-five years, India’s GDP grew by almost 1,000 percent. An even more impressive process unfolded in China, where Deng Xiaoping upturned Mao-era policies to deliver what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and what the rest of the world recognized as state-managed liberalization. China is now as radically unequal as Latin America, but over five hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty during the past thirty years.1

Greg Aloi Singapore Business Process Depending on the business, the business process specialist may be required to do more than assess and provide solutions. Greg Aloi Some companies ask the specialist to implement the solutions, a request that usually requires technical and project management skills. In addition, the specialist may be asked to test the new process to ensure its successful implementation. Greg Aloi Singapore Some companies ask the business process specialist to participate in training employees to use the new solutions effectively. Training may include the development of training materials and the communication of training information in the classroom or online instruction sessions. Greg Aloi This is a way to ensure that everyone gets the same message in the same training.

We need industrious people in the education sector. The job is beyond the four walls of a classroom. Teaching itself is an empire. In it is the job of a healer, a doctor, a businessman, a researcher, a visionary, an accountant, an auditor, a leader, a manager, a designer...the list is so long, it scares the typical teacher.

smile is a subtle message that kindness and politeness are expected in your classroom.

When you smile on the first day of school, it makes your non-negotiable classroom management plan and the realization that a lot is expected go down easier.

Establish a peaceful pace to your classroom by speaking calmly but firmly, taking your time, pausing often, and never moving on until you get exactly what you want from your new students.

When you let things go, even seemingly innocent behaviors, it nudges a tiny speck of a snowball down a steep and bottomless hill. And the farther it gets down the hill, the more difficult it is to push it back up to the top.

Having different behavior expectations based on the importance of an activity doesn’t work because it sends a confusing message to students.

A line of students can indicate: How much they respect their teacher. How much they respect each other. How well they follow directions. How ready they are to receive instruction. The amount of time spent on—or off—task in the classroom.

It is creating a classroom your students love being part of combined with an unwavering commitment to accountability.

smiling is a powerful classroom management strategy you should begin using the first day of school.

Jennings’ and Greenberg’s Prosocial Classroom Model suggests that teachers’ social-emotional competence and well-being affect the classroom management strategies they use, the relationships they form with students, and their ability to implement SEL programs and practices. These factors, in turn, can contribute to a healthy classroom climate that then leads to students’ own academic and SEL success (from Schonert-Reichel, K. 2017, pp. 137-155).

Educators’ lives are filled with opportunities to develop their own social awareness during student and adult interactions. They participate in work groups, such as co-teaching, professional learning programs, faculty meetings, team meetings, data analysis teams, developing common assessments, lesson-study groups, and curriculum development committees. The checklist in the figure below can be modified to fit any type of group activity. It can be reviewed by the supervisor or coach and the educator prior to the activity. After the activity, the educator can be asked to confidentially self-assess his or skills, thereby increasing self-awareness of his/her relationship skills and self-management skills.

4​Jones’s research (2007, p. 187) indicates that 80 percent of the student misbehavior in classrooms is students talking to their neighbors. Think how much easier classroom management would be if we could do away with this one behavior!

A good relationship between the student and the teacher is a strong motivator for positive behavior and academic achievement.

Impactful relationship is a term we coined for adult relationships that can positively “impact” a student’s academic success, social awareness, self-awareness, decision making, relationship skills, and self-management skills. These relationships result in the student having great respect for a person and valuing this person’s opinions and advice.

Robert Marzano (2007, p. 150) reviewed 100 studies related to classroom management. His metaanalysis found that “teachers who had high-quality relationships with their students had 31 percent fewer discipline problems, rule violations, and related problems over a year’s time than did teachers who did not have high-quality relationships with their students.” That means the outcome is 31% fewer negative interactions and 31% or more positive interactions with students—interactions that can include statements and questions that develop social-emotional learning. For

It is far more effective to arrange classroom furniture and move about the room while teaching in ways that ensures proximity to all students at various points in the lesson. This movement will proactively decrease acting-out behavior, rather than putting teachers in the position of reactively responding to inappropriate behavior. Marzano states that “desk arrangements should provide access to any student within four steps from where the teacher spends most of his time” (2007, p. 121). Students’ social-emotional development can be improved by proactively setting up the room for student academic and behavioral success. As we saw in the cycles of deficit mindset and growth mindset in Chapter 1, the fewer instances when we need to address misbehavior, the more we can affirm appropriate behavior, and the more likely we are to reverse the cycle of deficit mindset. Room arrangement and teacher proximity is an important first step in creating a positive learning environment.

Teachers sometimes view students with disabilities who act out because of their disorder as oppositional and defiant. Teachers who understand the cycle of fear, avoidance, stress, and escape (FASE) understand what “saving FASE” means. Teachers learn not to react to the behavior but to the underlying cause of the behavior. Teachers who understand FASE recognize that all human behavior sends a message. By looking for the message and reframing the behavior as a way of communicating, teachers can see the oppositional behaviors, frequent trips to the nurse, being unprepared for class, and frequent absences as attempts to avoid the shame of underperforming in the classroom (Schultz, 2011, pp. 137-142). For teachers to have success with managing their classrooms, it is imperative for them to understand that the students are not unmotivated or oppositional, but are sending a message about their need for help.

Thus, teachers need to have cultural awareness and to work to understand the different cultures and expectations that students bring to the classroom and, as important, they need to understand the cultures they are creating.

As educators, we can best help our students by working to understand our belief systems as well as those of our students, our teaching team, our school, and the parents and guardians of our students.

Deci and Ryan identified three key human needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness or personal connection. Students feel a sense of relatedness when they perceive that their teachers like, value, and respect them. They feel competent when they work at challenging tasks (Tough, 2013, pp. 74-5). These three feelings are far more effective motivators for students than “a deskful of gold stars and blue ribbons.” Deci and Ryan recognize that throughout the day, teachers convey to their students “deep messages about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity” (quoted by Tough, 2013).

Students who lack social skills are distracted from learning by the tremendous amount of energy they expend trying to fit in. Teachers cite social skills deficits as the most frequent cause of classroom behavior problems (Brophy and Good, 2000). Marzano states, “The teacher must provide clear direction to students and generate an atmosphere in which all students feel valued and intellectually challenged” (Marzano, 2011, p. 85).

At the heart of what determines a person’s behaviors related to self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision making, relationship skills, and social awareness is their belief system. This includes both their conscious and unconscious belief systems. Becoming self-aware of these beliefs is a prerequisite to changing a person’s social-emotional behaviors. As educators, we can best help our students by working to understand our belief systems as well as those of our students, our teaching team, our school, and the parents and guardians of our students.

We can only reduce the stress in teaching if we have the self-awareness to know we feel negatively about one or more students and have self-management tactics to use cognitive override to change our behavior.

In addition, teachers who can manage their emotions are more likely to display positive affect and higher job satisfaction (Brackett et al., 2010). Thus, looking at their own emotional response helps teachers recognize the emotional nature of their work, identify and reflect on their emotions and their causes, and cope with difficult emotions through reframing, problem solving, and emotional management (Chang, 2009).

The recommended time from most experts is 10 minutes per grade level, maxing out at 80 minutes for middle school and two hours for high school. Beyond that amount of time, homework does not have an appreciable positive impact on academics and may result in a negative attitude toward school (Xu, 2013, pp. 97-100).

Recent research has found that when empathy and trust-building become part of the disciplinary approach of the entire school, relationships improve and suspensions drop by as much as half in some schools. (Okonofua, J. A. et al., 2016)

I came to the realization that nearly all the social and emotional behaviors students need to learn are best developed through effective classroom management, group and partner work, and questioning.

Clear expectations + engaging instruction + strong relationships = a recipe for success in the classroom.

A well-managed classroom is like a well-tuned orchestra, where each student plays their part harmoniously, creating beautiful music together.

In an inclusive classroom environment, every student feels valued, respected, and capable of reaching their full potential.

The principles of classroom management guide teachers in creating environments where every student can thrive, learn, and succeed.

Effective classroom management isn't just about controlling behaviour; it's about creating a culture of respect, responsibility, and collaboration.

A supportive classroom is a safe haven where students can take risks, make mistakes, and grow both academically and emotionally.

In a supportive classroom, every student's voice is heard, valued, and respected, creating a sense of belonging and empowerment.

Excessive use of rewards and punishments may lead to a focus on compliance rather than genuine learning, hindering students' intrinsic motivation and long-term growth.

Public humiliation and verbal abuse have lasting effects on students' self-esteem and mental well-being, undermining the very foundation of a supportive learning environment

Corporal punishment has no place in a classroom built on respect, compassion, and understanding

In a classroom, every student deserves to feel safe, respected, and valued, free from the fear of unfair treatment or punishment.

Discrimination and biased treatment perpetuate inequity and injustice, creating barriers to learning and undermining the principles of fairness and equality in the classroom.

Authoritarian approaches may instil fear and obedience in the short term, but they erode trust and autonomy, essential elements of a healthy teacher-student relationship.

A school's curriculum crafts a roadmap for students' educational journey, guiding them towards knowledge, skills, and success.

The way we manage our classrooms sends a powerful message to our students about our values and priorities. Let's choose techniques that uplift and empower, rather than diminish and harm.

As educators, it's our responsibility to create environments where students can thrive academically and emotionally, without resorting to harmful or demeaning practices.

Effective classroom management is about fostering a culture of empathy, collaboration, and mutual respect, where every student's dignity and rights are upheld.

A well-designed curriculum is like a treasure trove, filled with opportunities for students to explore, discover, and grow intellectually, socially, and emotionally.

Zero-tolerance policies, without considering individual circumstances and context, risk alienating students and may cause them to misbehave.

One lesser-known fact about school curriculums is that they are dynamic and responsive, reflecting ongoing changes in educational research, societal needs, and student aspirations.