Unit 3: Re-establishing Classroom Management
Project Home Creating and Maintaining Classroom Management
What to Do?!
₪ So, it's been a few weeks/months into the school year, and all of a sudden it seems like your classroom is disorganized, noisy and out of control. Well, I think it is safe to say you lost your classroom management. But do not worry; you are not alone! Almost every teacher has been in this position, and many will continue facing this issue. It happens! Students are different year after year, so plans that may have worked before, might need to be adjusted or totally revamped. No big deal (sure, try telling me that when I'm in front of the class, face red from screaming and students running around the room)!
There are a few steps that are helpful in re-establishing classroom management:
1. Realize you have lost classroom management and stay calm. (I know, I know. How??)
→ Are students wandering around the room without permission?
→ Are students speaking while you are speaking?
→ Is the noise level louder than it should be?
→ Are the normal routines not being followed (HW/Bathroom/Asking Questions)?
→ Do you find yourself (or your students) unorganized and struggling to keep the attention?
→ Do you find yourself spending more time trying to keep your students quiet than actually teaching?
2. Take time to figure out which areas of your classroom management need to be addressed.
→ Organization?
→ Rules?
→ Routines?
→ Maintaining control?
3. Take a day or two to reflect on the areas of your classroom management that you need to work on.
→ What is the stimulant of the problem?
→ Do I need to come up with a completely new classroom management plan or do I just need to tweak a few things?
→ How can I address these issue areas and regain the classroom management I want?
→ What new strategies and techniques will be effective with my current students? (You can research online or ask colleagues for advice too)
4. Test out your new ideas.
→ Try your favorite strategy and see how the students react.
→ Make sure to test it out for a good period of time. Results do not happen in a day!
→ If that idea does not quite work, test out your other ones.
Different Scenarios
Before we move forward, I would like to share a personal experience that I had face in re-establishing classroom management. Take a look!
Have you ever experienced something like that? If you are experiencing that now, I recommend testing out my idea! It worked wonderfully for me, so maybe it can work for you too.
Now, I would like you to take some time to listen to three different classroom management scenarios that I have created. While listening, take careful notice to what is happening. The goal of this is for you to identify the exact moment the teacher lost classroom management. You can replay the audio scenarios more than once if you need to re-analyze. There will be a multiple choice question for you after each scenario where you pick the exact moment the teacher loses classroom management. Also, you will find the explanation for the multiple choice answers below as well. Good luck!
Task
Everything we have discussed in this course has led us up to this very important task: Creating Your Own Classroom Management Plan!! Exciting and useful!
- Before you create your own plan, check out this example of a great classroom management plan: Example Plan Use this only as a reference of how your plan can be organized, not to copy ideas.
- Open up a Microsoft Word Document to create your management plan. The reason for using Word is that, ideally, you can save this classroom management plan for future use!
In your plan be sure to include the following three topics:
♦ Room Arrangement ♦ Classroom Rules ♦ Classroom Procedures
Reflection
Before ending this course, I want you to leave reflecting on the following two questions:
→ What would I do to re-establish classroom management if I were in the position of the teacher mentioned above?
→ Do I need to re-evaluate my current classroom management plan? Why or why not?
♥ Thank you for taking time to go through this course. I hope it helped! Good luck in your own teaching experiences!! ♥
Project Home Creating and Maintaining Classroom Management