Effective classroom management is the cornerstone of a successful teaching experience, and it doesn’t have to be stressful! One way to stay ahead of the curve of classroom management is having consistent routines and procedures for your students. Believe it or not, these little routines can, when used effectively, save you hundreds of valuable minutes of instruction time per week. Read on for examples of routines and procedures that really work, and how to maintain them all year long.
Classroom management doesn’t need to be stressful, and the best way to save your sanity throughout the year is to set up systems and routines right at the start of the school year.
But even with the best preventive measures, no school year will pass without its behavioral bumps. Even after you’ve created a welcoming environment and established routines and expectations, you will need to occasionally help students get back on track. Here are a few ways to address behaviors and get the job done as smoothly as possible.
Creating a welcoming and inclusive classroom culture will make classroom management easier
Before any learning can get done, students need to feel secure and welcome in their classroom community. This may seem obvious, but it’s so important that it could make or break your classroom management for the year. If you’ve ever felt like a fish out of water, you know that staying positive and focused in that environment can be difficult. In this article, we’ll talk about ways to set up and maintain a welcoming and inclusive classroom culture for all students. We’ll end with some real life examples to help you visualize what the fruits of this labor will be.
The new school year is starting and you’re feeling ready: your pencils are sharpened, kids’ name tags are printed, the floors are freshly waxed. The only thing left to do is welcome your new students into a classroom where they can thrive academically and socially. And while you may feel pressure to jump right into curriculum, the absolute best thing you can and should do in the first few weeks of school is foundation work. Establish the rules and expectations that will make classroom management a breeze the rest of the year. Doing this early and often is a recipe for success. In this Teacher Tip Tuesday series, we’ll break down everything you need for year-long, stress-free classroom management. You can subscribe to our blog and follow us on social media to never miss a tip!
Teaching, like many other jobs, relies entirely on the relationships you build. Unlike other jobs, there is regular changeover, and it’s not just your success that depends on your ability to connect. One of the hardest lessons I learned during my years as a teacher was the importance of building mutually beneficial relationships with my students’ caregivers. I was trained during my graduate studies to embrace caregivers and community members and to include them in the goings on of my classroom, but was initially resistant. I worried that by inviting them in, all I was doing was providing fodder for criticism. It took work to put my pride aside and put my students’ needs ahead of my own insecurities. Doing so made all the difference. It was not easy work, and amid the thousands of other plates teachers are expected to keep spinning, it may seem like a luxury instead of a must-have. In this article, we will dissect the importance of building healthy caregiver-teacher relationships and becoming the Dream Team. In the rest of this series, we will provide concrete tips and resources for taking this important step.
We’ve moved beyond the buzzwords and uncovered the mystery of the science of reading. Now we’ll talk practically about five essential reading domains, critical pillars that will lead to student reading achievement. While there’s no single set of instructions for teaching each of these domains, science of reading research has shown that spending instructional time building skills in these domains will set students up to be successful readers. In this final installment of the Demystifying the Science of Reading Teacher Tip Tuesday series, we’ll talk about ways you can address these essential domains in your reading instruction and offer some tools to make it easy and fun!
We know that learning to speak and learning to read are not the same in the brain. Learning to speak is innate, while learning to read is not. Reading must be systematically, explicitly taught to bridge the connection between oral language development and reading proficiency. In this installment of our Teacher Tip Tuesday series: Demystifying the Science of Reading, we’ll discuss how decades of reading science research describes the act of learning to read. We’ll also discuss why even the most successful teachers can benefit from science of reading research and research-informed practices.
Why do some students develop as readers more easily than others? Why do most developing readers need more than being immersed in a language-rich environment? The answers lie in the brain and have major implications for teaching reading. In this installment of Teacher Tip Tuesday: Demystifying The Science of Reading, we’ll talk about the research behind how exactly we learn to read.
You’ve probably heard the phrase “the science of reading” being tossed around lately. Your district or school may be taking initiatives to align to the science of reading, and may even be changing your curricula after years or even decades. Why all the hullabaloo? Let’s talk about what the science of reading really is, what it isn’t, and why it matters.