Latest / New Teacher Talk / Ep 147: Classroom Management: Be a Warm Demander

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Ep 147: Classroom Management: Be a Warm Demander · New Teacher Talk

My name is Jesse Kraft and I am an executive principal in
Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia,
and a former principal and a former teacher.
Today,
I'm going to talk about classroom management and the why
for each lesson and how that can accomplish a more engaging
instructional delivery.
So classroom management,
when we talk about classroom management,
we're really talking about a set of skills teachers use to
make their classrooms run effectively,
which basically means that work gets done.
Also,
these skills help keep students focused on tasks and respectful
towards others, which keeps them safe.
Classroom management is incredibly important.
Well, there's several, I guess,
whys for why you would want to be really skillful in this
area if you were a teacher.
For one thing, when you're a teacher,
you're over a classroom of students,
which means it's a group of people,
and they need rules if a group,
multiple people are going to function together.
Another reason that we need good classroom management
skills is because as a teacher,
your curriculum is probably way too loaded.
And what I mean by that is there's so much required to
teach and so little time to do it.
If you have good classroom management skills,
you bring efficiencies to your practice so that you can
handle the behaviors,
there's systems in place to make people productive and
efficient,
and you can accomplish teaching what you're required and
supposed to teach.
Another reason why classroom management skills are
important is because you care about kids.
And if you have kids in your care, in your class,
for that block of time or that full day,
depending on what your situation is,
you want them to consistently feel safe while they're in
there so that you can leverage that into more academic
learning.
Final big reason why classroom management is so important,
and we really hope you develop these skills,
is because your success depends on it.
I mean your long-term success.
If you are in command,
in control of your class because you've managed it well,
not only can you do everything we already mentioned,
but you can get your own personal work-related stress into
a manageable place so that you're not coming home every day
burnt out because of all of the toll the job has taken on
you during the day as you were addressing behaviors or
maybe slowdowns in your systems or anything else that can
happen when the class is not managed properly.
The analogy I use is it's like a game of whack-a-mole.
A teacher who never got really strong classroom management
skills developed as part of their toolkit kind of ends up
during the course of any school day playing a game of whack
-a-mole, just tamping down problems as they come up.
And over time, that's just gonna be too much.
If you have good skills at managing your classroom,
it's a little more even keel, a little more low stress,
and I believe you'll have a better work-life balance.
There are so many ways that I guess one could advise a new
teacher on developing these skills.
But let's give you just a couple things that makes sense to
get started with.
For one, let's talk about rules,
and you can do this beginning of the year,
and you can take this advice middle of the year once things
get going, because as a teacher, you are in charge,
you are the one with responsibility for the class,
and you can decide that we need to shake up the rules,
change them,
whatever you need to do to get to a good outcome for kids.
So a couple things related to classroom rules.
Number one, have them.
Like I said earlier, you're dealing with a group of people.
We definitely need expectations for how we're going to act
when we're together.
So number one for rules, have them.
Number two,
explicitly teach the rules to your class and post these
rules.
Whether that's a poster like up in the room,
whether it's in their agenda or in multiple places,
you explicitly teach every single rule, and you post it,
and you post it so that you can refer to it later,
just like a company or a store might post a really
important policy for customers,
you're gonna post your rules.
Number three, re-teach the rules regularly.
That doesn't mean you take an hour of lesson time to go
over the rules just like that first time you taught them as
a new thing,
but it does mean that we revisit them and explicitly re
-teach them on a regular basis.
Number four for rules, consequences.
The rules don't mean anything unless they mean something,
and that's completely up to the teacher.
Consequences are part, they come with having rules,
and so if a student breaks the rules after a clear warning,
or if the behavior's egregious enough that it warrants a
consequence straight away, as a teacher,
you are the one holding responsibility for giving that.
Piece of advice on delivering consequences,
whether it's a timeout, a call home, loss of a privilege,
referral to the office for formal discipline,
could go a lot of ways, but when you deliver a consequence,
be consistent, give it, stay calm, and matter of fact.
You wanna be careful that you do not appear to be highly
emotionally driven in what you're doing in that moment,
otherwise it seems to students that punishment or
consequence in your class is based on your mood or the type
of reaction they got out of you.
You don't want them to think that.
What we want them to realize is that consequences are the
appropriate follow-up when students do not follow the
established rules, which have been taught, which are fair,
and that we apply to everyone.
So consequences, but deliver them in a calm way.
Final piece of advice on rules,
positive feedback from the teacher throughout, for kids,
for the entire class,
for their ability to follow the rules.
Specific feedback is better than broad feedback,
but if all you have time for is a good job,
do that and normalize that level of feedback,
positive reinforcement of the rule.
Positive reinforcement is called positive reinforcement
because it reinforces the good thing and keeps it in place,
keeps it energized,
keeps it important for all the students and this who are
following the rules.
Another aspect of classroom management is building systems
in your class.
Usually we break that down into establishing routines and
procedures.
And these are things you do as a teacher to make sure your
class runs the way you want it to.
It's efficient.
We get things done.
We keep things safe.
We minimize interruptions and keep really good momentum for
instruction.
So you want to consider that in any given day,
there's a ton of transitions.
Students moving from their desk to a carpet area,
students lining up,
students transitioning from a whole group activity to a
small group table check-in with a teacher.
All of those transitions need some kind of procedure taught
to the kids, to the students,
so that they know how to do that the way that the teacher
intended,
so that it's not a sideshow and something that can derail a
lesson or give a student an opportunity to escape learning.
So transitions, distributing materials,
how many times in a given day are you going to pass out
papers, collect something,
have students get up from their seat and go get a piece of
equipment or something they need for the assignment.
Any of those needs a procedure.
Even if it's something simple, proceduralize it.
Students are going to have to ask you for help.
What should that look like?
If you're busy with other kids, should they interrupt you?
If you're in the middle of a lesson and a student sees as
an opportunity to derail the lesson or wants help for
something personal, do you have a simple system,
simple procedure for them to do that?
You can't ever as a teacher anticipate every little issue
that's going to pop up in a classroom, right?
You probably can't have a unique system for every single
scenario.
But if you have a clear system for most important things,
it does become part of the culture of your classroom.
And even when something rare happens,
students pretty much get a sense of how you want the
classroom to run and they find an appropriate way to do
whatever that thing is.
But you're not going to get far about systems,
which is procedures.
And when the procedures are done at a high level and become
habits, they're routines.
So think about what you need for that.
Go about defining what that looks like.
Explicitly teach it to your kids.
If a procedure is incredibly important and it's used a lot,
post that.
Make a sign, an anchor chart, just like you do with rules.
Re-teach it regularly if you need to.
There should be consequences for not following it.
They don't always have to be big punishments,
but certainly reminders stop the world if you need to,
to re-teach a procedure in the moment so that kids do it.
And positive feedback for when it goes well,
which should be most of the time and normalize that
positive feedback.
Alright, as we wrap that up,
a couple pro tips about classroom management.
First, body language.
When you are in charge of a classroom and you don't have to
be like a drill sergeant,
but you do need to project yourself as the responsible
person who is in charge of the classroom.
Think about how you're standing.
Think about opening your center line, your eye contact.
If you're giving a consequence,
but your body language makes it look like you're
uncomfortable with that,
students will probably pick up on that and that's going to
make it harder for you to get compliance when you need it.
On the other side of the continuum,
your body language when you are being a positive reinforcer
is really important as well.
Open that center line, smile, stop,
walking around maybe stand still.
If you're giving a meaningful compliment or saying
something to the class that's incredibly important and I'd
offer the same advice when you're giving them some kind of
like critique or like an important redirection,
stand still,
equal weight on both feet and speak with more confidence to
make your point.
You know one of the things that principals really like as
teachers develop their classroom management skills is they
would love to see you become what we call a warm demander.
A warm demander is high on approachability.
It's pretty clear they love their kids and they're also
very confident being in charge,
having rules that they follow through on,
having good systems that keep kids productive and
ultimately just accepting responsibility for keeping the
kids safe,
giving them a stable learning environment and pushing them
to do their best.
So warm demander is your goal as you develop your classroom
management skills.
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