Do you ever feel like the strategies of classroom management you learned in school just aren’t enough? Does problem behavior make it difficult to get through your daily lessons? Do you stay up at night wondering what strategies of classroom management might improve your students’ behavior?
You’re not alone. For an increasing number of elementary school teachers, classroom management plans are taking up more and more time. Robust strategies for classroom management are needed now more than ever.
A transformation is possible. Imagine a peaceful, happy, productive learning environment where children feel loved and capable. Imagine feeling like the calm, confident leader of your classroom. Yes, children will still need occasional redirection and reteaching from you about behavioral expectations. But with these 5 strategies of classroom management, you’ll be able to focus more on what you love about teaching. You’ll be able to leave work each day feeling proud and fulfilled instead of defeated and exhausted.
How I Developed Strategies in Classroom Management…the Hard Way!
My own need for better strategies in classroom management hit me like a ton of bricks my first year of teaching. I mean, I did all the things I was supposed to do!
I made a T-chart of what it looks like and sounds like to sit on the carpet during instruction. I had students practice how to line up and walk down the hallway. I increased my positive interactions with students throughout the day to build strong relationships. (This was especially difficult to do with the students I was most often redirecting!) My students should have had pretty good behavior after all that, right? I wish.
Instead, planning for classroom management continued to be something I struggled with. It felt like my strategies of classroom management were generic and by the book. They were simply not enough to cultivate the behaviors I wanted from my students on a consistent, streamlined basis.
What is Classroom Management Strategy?
So how does this apply to you? Well, perhaps you could use some simple, practical strategies for classroom management. Maybe the strategy of classroom management you learned in college doesn’t apply to your unique group of students. Maybe the strategies for classroom management you learn in professional developments don’t feel like enough. Maybe you know exactly the classroom management strategy you want to use. You simply don’t have the time or materials to put it in action!
I have certainly been in all those positions before. And over the years, through plenty of trial and error, I’ve come up with these 5 strategies of classroom management. They have helped me efficiently and successfully shape my students’ behavior. I truly hope they save you time and headache. I hope they make your life a little easier and support you in being the rockstar teacher you are!
1st Strategy of Classroom Management: Provide Explicit Instruction
It seems so obvious. They should know how to walk down the hallway, right? They should know that when you’re teaching, they should be listening. They should know what, “Please come to the carpet” means. It doesn’t mean sprint across the classroom and dive on the carpet like they’re sliding into home plate!
Even though so much of what you ask your students to do throughout the day seems obvious, it’s helpful when your strategies of classroom management include explicit instruction.
Maybe your students have never been in a classroom setting before. Perhaps they truly don’t know what “line up” or “calm body” means. Maybe your students were in previous classrooms where the expectations were very different from yours. It’s possible some of your sweet, little muffins know they’re not making a good decision and just need a reminder!
Whatever the reason, explicitly teaching your expectations as a standard part of your classroom management plan helps students be successful.
2nd Classroom Management Strategy: Provide a Processing Activity
You know when you teach a lesson and feel like everyone has understood what you taught? Then later, it feels as if some of your students weren’t there at all. You may have moments in your day when you think to yourself, “We just talked about this! How can they not remember?!”
Sometimes it feels like our students are physically in the classroom during instruction but mentally on another planet! Maybe they were fixated on their wiggly tooth. Maybe they were replaying last night’s video game in their head. Or maybe they hung in there with you for a second but were mostly wondering how much longer until lunch.
When planning for classroom management, it’s beneficial to include a follow-up activity that helps students process their learning.
Types of Processing Activities to Include
This strategy of classroom management might be a cut-and-paste activity that asks students to sort pictures of what you just taught. It might be asking them to draw themselves modeling a certain expected behavior. It might be coloring a picture of a child starting her school day with a positive attitude, ready to learn.
For example, students could write about how to transition from recess to the classroom. They could draw a picture of themselves doing it or sort pictures of examples and non-examples.
A processing activity is a great classroom management strategy to help students commit the concepts you’ve just taught to memory. It can also act as an informal assessment for you on what may need clarification or reteaching.
3rd Strategy of Classroom Management: Reteach Expectations
Okay, you’ve explicitly taught an expectation and given students a processing activity to help them commit those concepts to memory. You’re doing amazing with your Strategies of Classroom Management!
The next step in your classroom management plan is to reteach. Remember that student with the wiggly tooth? Or the one thinking about how many more minutes there were until lunch? They will definitely benefit from some reteaching! Even your student who was totally listening to you could still glean something new from your reteaching. And I don’t know about you, but sometimes after a day or so, it becomes really clear which aspects of a lesson I need to reteach!
The strategies of classroom management you choose for this step could vary from rereading a Teaching Text you used in your original instruction to doing a new activity that reinforces the concepts you’re teaching to just carving out another section of time in your busy instructional day to talk about it. Reteaching is also a great time to incorporate student-led instruction in your classroom management plans. When planning for classroom management, the point of this step is to clear up any misunderstanding, answer any questions students may have about an expectation, and provide repetition of key concepts.
4th Classroom Management Strategy: Reinforce Desired Behavior
Now this step is where the magic can happen! You’ve taught students a desired behavior (like how to come from their desk to the carpet, for example), given them a processing activity to activate synapses and create new learning, and even retaught important concepts. You’ve done incredible work with these Strategies of Classroom Management!
Next, it’s time to reinforce the desired behaviors. And here’s the best part: the reinforcement could just be social praise! Just you acknowledging a behavior counts as reinforcement! Some examples of reinforcement you could include in your strategies in classroom management are as simple as, “I see Juan pushing in his chair,” “Wow, Aisha remembered to point her belly button at me,” “Excellent job, Le, taking deep breaths as you transition from recess to the classroom.” When thinking about reinforcement, it could be as simple as a high five.
Of course, your strategies for classroom management could also include more elaborate systems of reinforcement, such as “caught doing it right” tickets, class/group points, or a treasure box. Nobody knows your students as well as you, which makes you the best judge of what will work for them.
And you certainly don’t need to implement every behavior reinforcement system under the sun! Teachers already feel so much pressure to do so many things, and sometimes prepping a laborious behavior reinforcement system is not the best use of your time. Just know that simply acknowledging a behavior and giving students that social praise can be very impactful and takes no time or money to set up!
5th Strategy of Classroom Management: Provide Consequences When Necessary
This is often the most difficult part of behavior shaping- providing consequences when necessary. Of all the strategies of classroom management, this can be the trickiest to figure out and follow through with. One, you don’t want to give your students a consequence- it’s no fun! They don’t like it, you don’t like it. And two, what should you be giving as consequences anyway?
How to Include Consequences
Hopefully, most or all of your students will respond to the first four strategies of classroom management we’ve discussed so far. If one or more students are still displaying undesired behaviors after you’ve explicitly taught the expectation, given them a processing activity, retaught the expectation, and offered reinforcement for desired behavior, then it’s time to provide a consequence.
When giving children a consequence, our attitude is so important. Remember that you are doing this out of love. You care about your students so much that you’re willing to do what they need, even if that’s something that’s difficult for you.
It’s not mean. It’s not a punishment. It doesn’t mean they’re a bad kid. They’re a wonderful kid who you know is capable of more. And since you believe they are capable of meeting your expectation, you are going to hold them accountable.
When to Provide Consequences
When planning for classroom management, it’s helpful to have 5-10 minutes a day that can be used as reinforcement for children meeting behavior expectations and time to provide practice, reteaching, or consequences for other students, depending on the unique circumstances of each student and incident.
You might take your students out for a quick extra recess, take them out to a regularly scheduled recess 5 minutes early, or have a Learners’ Choice time in class. I don’t like to use their regular recess time, since that’s an important time for them to exercise, develop gross motor skills, and practice social skills. And if you don’t monitor your kids during recess, it’s also one of the few times you can go to the bathroom, grab a snack, or prepare for the next set of lessons! If you do have to monitor your kids at recess, I sincerely hope you are getting other times in the day for a quick break!
I like to schedule reinforcement/consequence time every day in September, as I’m teaching expectations, and then sporadically do it throughout the year as needed. That’s the nice thing- once my strategies of classroom management are working well, I don’t need reinforcement/consequence time every day. But the kids know the routine, and it’s a great classroom management strategy to come back to after school breaks, when we get a new student and I’m reinforcing behavior expectations, or any other time it’s necessary.
Trusting Your Intuition When Using Strategies of Classroom Management
As a teacher, you are making so many decisions throughout the day based on what you see in the moment, what you know about your individual students, and your intuition. This makes it difficult to have a standard “If ___, then ____” system for providing consequences in your strategies of classroom management.
For example, you might be proud of one student who talks out of turn 5 times in a lesson, because that might show significant effort and restraint on their part, while another student might need a consequence for talking out of turn once, because you glean they were intentionally testing your boundaries. No one is a better judge of your students’ behavior than you, which makes you uniquely qualified to choose from a variety of consequences for each isolated incident.
What Consequences Should You Include in Your Classroom Management Plan?
One of your strategies in classroom management might be pulling them aside during extra recess and asking why they behaved a certain way- maybe there are circumstances affecting that child that you aren’t aware of. This can be a great time to check in with a student one-on-one.
If it seems everything is fine with a student and they were just testing a boundary, you might start with a minute away from the reinforcement time as a consequence. After a minute, have them tell you about the choice they will make next time and why, apologize to anyone if necessary, offer a hug or high five, affirm you care about them and know they’re capable of making good choices, and send them off to play.
This classroom management strategy can offer you a wonderful time to connect with your students who are struggling behaviorally and strengthen your relationship with them. I like to follow-up with them once they’ve been dismissed to play and comment on something they’re interested in, like, “Wow, I see you’re really good on the bars!” or “Can you tell me about what you’re building with these blocks?”
Using Apology Letters and Behavior Reflections as Strategies in Classroom Management
If a student’s undesired behavior seems more egregious, you might have them write an apology letter to someone or fill out a behavior reflection as a consequence. It’s super helpful when you have parent support, and the child might be able to complete an apology letter or behavior reflection at home, so it doesn’t take up time during the school day. However, when parents, for a variety of reasons, aren’t able to provide this support at home, it’s nice to have a built-in time during the day when this is appropriate (for example, not during an academic block or their regularly scheduled recess time).
A simple behavior reflection can also be a consequence for a behavior that’s not egregious but is repeated. So a first offense might result in a conversation with the teacher during Learners’ Choice. A second offense might result in filling out a behavior reflection. You could then send the completed behavior reflection home as a way to inform parents of what’s going on.
How to Use Practice Time as a Classroom Management Strategy
Another consequence you might include in your classroom management plan is to provide children with “practice time.” I like to use this as a consequence for a second or third offense after I’ve had a one on one check in with the student to see if there’s something affecting them that I’m not aware of.
For example, if several students continue to talk in line in the hallway and you’ve determined it’s a self-control issue, you could stand in your classroom doorway as the rest of your students are having Learners’ Choice and watch those students walk up and down the hallway properly. You’re providing them with additional time to practice the skills you’ve taught that you know they are capable of doing. After a few minutes of this practice, you could check in with them again, have them verbalize the hallway expectations and why they’re important, affirm you care about them and know they can do it, and send them off to play.
The next time you’re in the hallway, these students will probably only need “that look” from you to effectively redirect them! You are helping them develop their self-control, which is an important life skill that will benefit them across all areas of their school day!
Incorporating These 5 Strategies of Classroom Management in Your Classroom
Imagine this: a classroom where all your students behave exactly the way you want them to, in every situation, without any instruction or redirection from you! Ahh, think of the academic instruction you could get done…maybe we could bring back cursive and long division!
While I hope your classroom feels pretty close to that utopia, I’m guessing you need to employ a plethora of strategies in classroom management on a daily basis. And with challenging student behaviors increasing in both frequency and intensity, teachers today need strategies for classroom management more critically than ever.
I hope these 5 strategies of classroom management give you some ideas that feel easy to incorporate in your classroom and help you feel more empowered as the stellar teacher you are.
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