Classroom Management

Promote kindness in the classroom by teaching your students how to give genuine compliments. Then have them practice this skill within their cooperative learning teams by creating Team Compliments Cards.

Before you can involve your students in cooperative learning activities or other active engagement lessons, you'll need to establish clear procedures for whole class management.

Here are some options for seating students in a cooperative learning classrooms based on whether you want them to sit together all day long or just for certain activities.

Are you frustrated with students who forget to turn in papers or who forget to put their names on their work? I used to get so annoyed when I took a stack of papers home to grade, only to discover that three students had not turned in their work and three more turned in a paper with no name!

Goal setting is a powerful process for bringing about change. Identifying what you want and mapping out a plan of action helps you achieve your dreams, both personally and professionally. The same is true for students. Since the goal-setting process can be unfamiliar and challenging, I'd like to offer a few tips, a freebie, and some additional resources for teaching these skills to students.

Seating students together is not enough to ensure teamwork. Many kids have very little idea how to interact appropriately with their classmates. They simply lack the social skills needed to perform the most basic cooperative tasks. Lack of social skills is probably the biggest factor contributing to lack of academic success in teams. Fortunately, social skills can be taught just like academic skills. If you use a systematic approach like the one described below, you'll find that your students CAN learn how to interact appropriately and become productive team members.

Corkboard Connections is a blog written by Laura Candler who enjoys connecting terrific teachers with amazing resources!

Forming effective teams is an important first step in cooperative learning. A team of four has been shown to be the most effective size. A four-person team allows for many different kinds of interactions. The group can work as a team or can be broken down into two sets of pairs. Each team should be as heterogeneous as possible so that kids can learn to work with all different kinds of people.

If you are anything like me, you have tried every class management trick in the book. After 20+ years of teaching, that adds up to a lot of time spent on tricks and gimmicks to be able to run your classroom smoothly and effectively. I've tried group points, individual strategies, treats, moving desks around (a lot), classroom bucks, phone calls to parents (both positive and when students are struggling) and many, many more. Even though classroom management is a strength of mine, it is still a difficult challenge, especially now, as our students enter the room with more and more challenges.

When it comes to classroom management, actions speak louder than words. If you have an effective management system in place, you don't have to raise your voice or waste class time lecturing students about their behavior. You simply take action! The most effective system that I ever used was called the "stoplight" management system. Read this post to find out how to use it in your classroom!

Chances are good that you have at least a few gifted children in your classroom, even if they aren't formally identified as being gifted. These students can be a joy to work with, but it does take a special teacher to know how to motivate them to set high goals for themselves and being willing to take on challenges.

In the middle of your fraction lesson, a chatty student blurts out, "What time is lunch?!" You blurt back, "How many times do I have to tell you to raise your hand to speak! Grow up and act like a third grader!" You match your student’s emotional blurting with your own.

Do you dread the last few weeks of school because your students are full of energy and unable to focus? Administrators might say to stick to your routines and keep your kids busy with regular assignments, but that didn't work for me. Making my students do seatwork at the end of the year was like putting a lid on a pressure cooker, turning up the heat, and wondering when it was going to blow sky high!

Today's question actually comes from me instead of from a Facebook fan! I remember the trials and tribulations of having to get kids in a line and out the door, quickly and in an orderly manner. So I asked "What strategies do you use for getting kids to line up in an orderly fashion when you are going to lunch or to a special class like art or music?"

Do you have an interventionist in your classroom? Do you struggle with how to use him/her? Do you forget about them all together and then either send them away or give them something not very meaningful to do? If so, this post is for you! You'll pick up some great tips and a free set of Small Group Planning Sheets!

Today's question comes from Anne, who asks, "I have a second grade student who at this point in the year still interrupts class. He has the need to always be right and be heard constantly. The other children get very antsy when he starts up. Any thoughts?"

When it comes to encouraging kids to produce quality work, one of the biggest problems we face is getting kids to slow down and take their time. For some reason, students seem to feel there's some sort of prize for the one who finishes first, or maybe it's just that they want to rush through some assignments to get to other activities they think will be more fun. If this is something that you struggle with in your classroom, read on to learn 25 terrific tips from real teachers who have solved this problem.

When you teach hands-on lessons and use active engagement strategies, it goes without saying that you MUST have an effective quiet signal! You'll use it over and over again, so it can't be too annoying, and it needs to be something that will get your class quiet in less than 5 seconds.