Secrets of the Best Classroom Managers

The Experts’ Most Effective Classroom Management Tools

Includes Free Lesson Plan and Worksheet
 

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Secrets of the Best Classroom Managers

The Experts’ Most Effective Classroom Management Tools

There always seems to be that handful of teachers who can manage even the most unmanageable students while their colleagues struggle to make any progress at all. The truth is that there are some basic classroom management tools that can help any teacher succeed managing even the most unmanageable youngsters. Hello from Youth Change Director Ruth Herman Wells, M.S. I’ve just finished 6 weeks of touring the country training schools from Boston, Mass. to Yakima, Washington to Los Angeles, California. This article has gathered some of what I learned from teachers and counselors on my summer training tour. These new classroom management tools can help you build a better school year with fewer behavioral, social, academic and emotional problems.

Teach Missing Behavior Skills *

*Includes FREE lesson plan and student worksheet

If you are still expecting students to arrive with the skills they need to be successful, properly behaved students, you may have fallen behind the times. Yes, moms and dads used to reliably teach their offspring manners, civilized behavior, compliance skills, respect and so forth. These days, however, we can’t always count on parents to have taught their children to have the minimum behavior needed in your classroom and throughout the school. If you have tried to improve student conduct by setting rules and consequences, you probably have already discovered that quite often, rules and consequences don’t get the job done. While rules and consequences are essential, they are not nearly enough. If rules and consequences could get the job done, then I could require you to speak Swedish or face grave sanctions, and you would still be utterly unable to speak Swedish. Most of us have difficulty when expected to perform behaviors that no one has taught us. So, if you are serious about not wanting any more behavior management problems, then take the time to teach your students the exact skills they are not performing satisfactorily. Typically, those skills will include punctuality, hand raising, talking one at a time, compliance, chair sitting, managing school supplies and property, what to wear to school, what to bring to school, and so on. Are you wondering how you teach students what we call School Skills? Here is the answer. Check out this free, reproducible student worksheet and lesson plan that teaches students to more readily accept responsibility for their conduct rather than blame others.

Motivation Reduces Classroom Behavior Problems

If you still expect unmotivated students to behave acceptably, you are going to often be disappointed. When students believe that school is as enticing as a root canal, some of them are going to act accordingly. Motivation can be taught. Yes, you did not have the chance to take courses like “Motivating Wannabe Sports Stars” or “Motivational Methods for Students Who Plan to Be Famous and Never Need School.” Those courses– and their content– do exist as you will find if you sign up now take our Breakthrough Strategies to Teach and Counsel Troubled Students Workshop coming to Portland on October 11-12, 2018. In our workshop, you actually will learn powerhouse motivational methods for students hoping to become famous actresses, singers, sports stars, models and more. We even have strategies for students who hope to avoid needing school through reliance on their family or welfare. Check out just 1 of the 200 classroom strategies we will be giving out at our upcoming Portland, Oregon workshp. Here is an educational and compelling strategy (Poster #701, pictured at left) to convince students that regardless of their wished-for career path, they will still need school. Click on the link or the image so you can enlarge the picture enough to read the content of the poster. Once you start teaching your students to become more motivated, you are going to discover that motivation colors everything. You will find that the more you set aside time to motivate your students, the less time you will need to set aside for on-demand behavior management in your classroom and hallways. There are hundreds of motivational strategies throughout our site including here.

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Systematically Resolve Overwhelming Behavior Problems 

Your students’ classroom behavior management problems can quickly start to seem overwhelming. The volume and seriousness of the problems can seem substantial. You need an easy-to-implement game plan and here it is. First, start by writing down all the classroom management issues that you see. Second, prioritize the list. For the most part, there is no right way to prioritize beyond placing the issues that are most concerning to you at the top of the list. However, safety issues always get top rankings.  Now that you have your list sorted, you are ready to move forward. The third step is to focus on just the top three issues at a time, and forget the rest of the list for now. Teach students to have improved behavior for your top three concerns before moving onto the next three items. Note that teaching students to have improved behavior is not the same thing as setting consequences, re-stating the rules or any of the conventional classroom management strategies that you are already doing. Teaching means teaching. You will be teaching about how to walk down the aisle between the desks, or how to talk one at a time, or how to properly ask for help. You will be teaching these essential School Skills just like you teach math or handwriting: step-by-step, with lots of repetition until students have mastered and can use the concepts taught. This page on our website has hundreds of free lesson plans and worksheets so you can better grasp the details of training kids to become prepared, motivated, successful students.

Learn About Conduct Disorder

If you are still attempting to use conventional classroom behavior management methods with your most misbehaved students, you are playing a losing game. Conventional classroom management methods always fail with the most seriously unmanageable students. Until you take the time to learn about this mental health problem that affects an estimated 11-14% of your students, you will continue to find that “nothing works” to rein in the most hard-to-manage youngsters. These are the students who are small in number, but take up most of your behavior management time. There are countless articles on how to manage this student on our site. By investing a half hour now learning about what tailored techniques to use, and which common methods to avoid, you can get back in charge of your classroom. There are no shortcuts here. You either learn about this disorder and which classroom management tools to use, and which classroom management tools to avoid, or else prepare for a long, frustrating school year and an unending fight to control your classroom. Read about conduct disorders, and discover what this very common mental  health disorder is all about, and most importantly, what to start doing to successfully manage these most unmanageable students. There are no shortcuts. Either you learn these targeted, tested methods, or classroom management will remain problematic. The good news is that now you at least understand what has gone wrong– and how to fix it.

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