Classroom Management

This week's article summary is What No One Told Me About Classroom Management as a New Teacher. It’s written by Carol Ann Tomlinson, the guru of differentiation in the classroom, about her first-year experiences teaching high school history.

As you’ll see, even a legendary educator like Tomlinson started her teaching career as a blank slate and learned over time from her classroom experience what students of all ages need.

The secret is identical to last week’s summary: we all need positive relationships and a sense of belonging to maximize our potential.

I really like how Tomlinson bases her teaching on displaying care for her students by ‘seeing, hearing, accepting, and valuing’ them as unique individuals. The old teaching adage of ‘your students don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care’ is true. Their trust in you comes from the care you show them.

Particularly in these first days of school, we are establishing a classroom culture of learning and mutual, interdependent respect. Getting kids to see that they help others learn is vital.

Ultimately, a successful school year comes from all of us enjoying one another’s company and committing to supporting and helping one another.

Joe

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In my first year of teaching, I had virtually no useful content knowledge, no pedagogical knowledge, and no rules for classroom management. 

But I did have some worthy, if wholly undeveloped, instincts. Those instincts saved me from my worst fears and bought me some time to begin understanding what passable teaching looks like—and, over the years, what aspirational teaching looks like.

As each week passed, my vision and sense of what it means to be a teacher began to develop. Although I rarely understood cause and effect in the moment, the next six months in the company of those high school sophomores and juniors helped me lay a foundation for what we often call classroom management. 

Here are the lessons I learned.

See, Hear, Value, and Accept Each Student as an Individual: Effective "classroom management" and effective teaching begin with a teacher who is, to a significant degree, smitten with the students as individual human beings and relishes the opportunity to make a difference in their lives. Young people need to feel seen, heard, accepted, and valued. They experience learning in a far more motivating context when they see that their teacher wants to teach them important things than when they conclude that the teacher is largely about teaching content and that their presence in the classroom is secondary. This caring is the foundation of trust between students and teachers and thus the foundation of effective classroom management and effective teaching.

Structure the Class in Service of Learning: Learning requires structure and order, but the structure and order should be in service of learning—not for the sake of demonstrating who’s in charge. If the first day of school is about going over classroom procedures and listening to the consequences of violating them, students will find it difficult to feel that the environment is safe and welcoming or that the teacher finds them trustworthy. Young people, like all of us, need structure in their lives but how and why teachers go about establishing that order makes a great difference. 

Effective Teaching Naturally Leads to Effective Classroom Management: Effective classroom management is not a separate entity from effective teaching. If “what” we teach and “how” we teach are lively, varied, sometimes surprising, often joyful and meaningful, both teachers and learners are largely relieved from the burdens implicit in teacher-student power struggles. 

Plan Proactively for When Lessons Go South: When we plan proactively for predictable classroom malfunctions, both we and our students are likely to be able to respond in ways that prevent derailments or at least maintain the dignity of those involved. We eliminate many, if not most, of the reasons students act out when we have a plan for when a lesson goes awry, when students get restless, whether to address (or ignore) minor or more significant behavioral issues, when lessons are just a bit briefer than the general attention span in a class, or when the work we ask students to do is neither consistently too difficult nor consistently too simple for their various points of entry into the work. 

Humanizing the Classroom: I still dream about having a chance to reteach that year. There are so many things I would change. And yet, I never again saw the unruly, trash-talking, defiant teens with whom I spent the last day in my adult life when I was not technically a teacher. Perhaps the most important lesson they taught me was that effective "classroom management"—and, in fact, the better part of effective teaching—pivots on humanizing the classroom.