Classroom Management From the Ground Up

Todd Whitaker, Madeline Whitaker Good, Katherine Whitaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351374521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Classroom management can make or break your teaching. But as educators know, there is no one-fits-all solution for every classroom. That is why bestselling authors Todd Whitaker, Madeline Whitaker Good, and Katherine Whitaker came together to write this book. They created a guide combining sound research with practical wisdom so educators could have a classroom management resource written by teachers for teachers. From this book, you'll gain effective strategies for designing and improving your classroom management from the ground up. You'll learn how the three core aspects of classroom management (relationships, high and clear expectations, and consistency) can be used to build and maintain an effectively-run classroom. You'll also find out how to tweak minor issues and reset major challenges when things don't go as planned.

Each chapter covers a core aspect of classroom management and includes a foundational understanding of the concept, powerful stories and examples, how-to applications, and tips on tweaking as problems arise. In addition, each chapter features a "What You Can Do Tomorrow" section--strategies you can implement immediately. Whether you are a new or experienced teacher, this book will empower you to identify what is going well, adjust what needs to be changed, and feel more prepared for the unexpected.

1
House Metaphor

Although this book is about managing a classroom, we aren’t going to begin the story in a school. Instead, we want you to picture yourself in a house. Not just any house, however. We want you to picture your dream house. Whether you currently live in a house, apartment, condo, mobile home, or even an RV, we can all picture what our ideal home would have. Think about both the practical and frivolous parts that you would want. What is the floor plan? How many stories, bedrooms, and bathrooms? What is the overall architecture? Contemporary, Victorian, Art Deco? What about the fun stuff? Pool, game room, or even an indoor basketball court?

In this book we are going to discuss classroom management in the context of this house you pictured. To build and maintain a house you need three main things: a strong foundation, the actual house structure, and regular upkeep. When thinking about managing a classroom, you also need three things: strong relationships, high and clear expectations, and consistency. Since we all have now visualized our house, the house metaphor introduced below will be our first step in making the abstract concept of classroom management become clearer and more concrete for everyone.

The Foundation—Relationships

When building a house, the foundation comes first. If a house is built correctly, the foundation will be strong on the 70 degree and sunny days, and will continue to maintain on the severe-thunderstorm-warning days. This is just like your classroom. When relationships are built correctly, those bonds will be there to help you celebrate on your best days of teaching, but also keeps your classroom cohesive on your worst. When becoming a great classroom manager, you need to place relationships at the forefront. Relationships with your students are like the strong and solid foundation of a house. According to Emmer and Saborine (2015), “building positive relationships with students should be a primary focus of preventative efforts” when it comes to classroom management (p. 27). As cited by Emmer and Saborine (2015), research has shown that positive student-teacher relationships not only positively affect student attitudes and learning (Cornelius-White, 2007; Roorda, Koomen, Spilt, & Oort, 2011), but also have direct ties to teacher burnout and overall job satisfaction (Chang, 2009; Friedman, 2006; Klassen & Chiu, 2010).

The Structure—High and Clear Expectations

Now, it is actually time to build the house itself. This is the house that you will see every day—the one that you will live in. Thus, just like you wanted to have a strong foundation to build upon, you also want a solid, functional, and livable house. A clear floor plan that works for you with rooms sized and shaped just the way you want. So what would a solid, functional, and livable classroom look like? Would it have kindergarteners crawling all over the ground while you are teaching an important literacy lesson? Would it have 10th graders having a conversation about last night’s party when they are supposed to be analyzing poetry? Of course not! This is why having high and clear behavioral expectations is an additional aspect of strong behavior management skills.

According to Bridget Hamre and Robert Pianta (2006), it is critical for schools and teachers to maintain high behavioral expectations to go along with positive teacher-student relationships. Even if you do not end up in a setting where these assumptions are school-wide, you are the person who makes expectations in your classroom. If you do not expect kindergarteners to sit quietly during a lesson—then they won’t. If you do not expect your 10th graders to stay focused on a task—then they won’t. Make sure that you are the teacher that expects your students to behave their best, and explains explicitly what that looks like. Therefore, you and your students know the difference between what is appropriate and what is not.

The Maintenance—Consistency

Picture this: you now have your house built. It is built on a sturdy foundation, and looks beautiful with its brick exterior and welcoming front porch. You absolutely love living in it, and you cannot imagine moving out. Then one day, you have a leaky faucet in your upstairs bathroom. You think to yourself, “Hmm … this is just a leaky faucet. Not a huge issue—I will fix it later.” In two weeks, you now have hard water build up around your leaky faucet. Even though you are disappointed, you still think of that issue as minor, and decide you will get back to it another time. After one month, you walk into a back room of your house that you rarely visit, and find a wet mark on the ceiling. You run upstairs and discover that your leaky faucet has more issues than you thought—and now you are left dealing with broken plumbing, a ruined floor, and even a damaged ceiling! In that moment, you realize that you should have just fixed that leaky faucet when you first found it.

This story finalizes our metaphor of the house that we built. The foundation of the house is the relationships, and the actual house we live in each day is the expectations that we have. Now, how do we keep the house running smoothly? Regular basic upkeep, like fixing a leaky faucet. In the classroom, this regular upkeep represents consistency. This consistency applies to both relationships and expectations. So our challenge is working to do the right thing on a day-to-day basis because taking care of your classroom (and taking care of a house) can take a lot of regular upkeep.

* * *

We want you to use this metaphor as a starting point to help build, affirm, or reconstruct your understanding of classroom management. With that being said, we are not here to tell you exactly how your dream house, or your classroom management structures and systems, should look. Every teacher is different and every classroom is different. Thus, only you can decide how this will play out in your classroom. What we want to do is give you the building blocks to be able to start thinking about classroom management in a slightly different way. We want to affirm positive techniques you are already using and simultaneously empower you to change what needs to be adjusted.

Tweaks and Resets

As we discuss the different aspects of the house you will be building, we are also going to discuss what to do when things don’t go as planned. There can be a lot of things that cause a house to crumble. An unstable foundation. Shaky at best floor joists. A plumber who was not as qualified as they claimed to be. Sometimes it can be something as unpredictable as a tornado or hurricane. The same can be said for your classroom. Maybe you received a class of students who seemed to be mortal enemies with each other from the day they walked into your classroom. Maybe you had to implement a new technology initiative that threw off the expectations you are normally able to explain so clearly. Maybe you can’t seem to figure out how strict you should be in enforcing your cell phone policy. Maybe three new students showed up at your door on the first day of state testing. No matter what happened, there can be times when you are standing in the middle of class and you realize something is not going well. Sometimes it is a small thing, like a lesson structure or a seating arrangement. Other times, it feels like literally everything in your class is a disaster. So what can you do about it?

Tweaks

Let’s imagine that you are not pleased with how one specific part of your day has been going. For example, each day you are struggling with the transition from lunch to learning. Your students come in boisterously and it seems like a “battle royale” just to get them to focus. Your initial instinct may be to talk to the entire class about behaving more appropriately. Rather than reactively telling the entire group of students what they are doing wrong, we want you to become reflective about what you can do to come up with a long-term solution. For example, you could change your behavior or a structure within your classroom to see if that makes a difference. In the end, the only behavior you can truly control is your own. Let’s say you decided that starting tomorrow, you will find a way to more clearly state your expectations after lunch, whether that is teaching them a song that they sing as they transition into the classroom or a visual reminder of expectations on the board. That way, you know there is absolutely no confusion about what students need to do when they step into your classroom.

This strategy is called a tweak. A tweak is a small change you make to improve something that is not going well in your classroom. Tweaks are something that effective teachers do regularly all day long. Usually it involves a change in the behavior of the teacher with the objective being a resulting change in the behavior of the students. Sometimes tweaks are in regard to a lesson, like when you are in the middle of teaching something but you realize it is not coming out clearly, so you try a different approach. Other times tweaks are used in response to student behavior issues, which are the situations we will be addressing in this book. Because it is a tweak, communication is optional. You do not have to inform/announce to the students that anything is changing. Even though your students often realize you may be implementing different expectations, you approach it in such a positive tone that they will not make the connection that the decision came from a reaction to their behavior. Instead you tweak your behavior in order to prevent misbehavior that was occurring previously.

Typically tweaks are implemented to prevent something from occurring again rather than as a negative response to something that has already happened.

Reset

Now let’s imagine that there are more than a few things that are going wrong. Not occasionally, or after an assembly, or on a really nice Friday, but pretty much every day. Each time the students enter your class they are out of control. Seemingly every time you teach a lesson, students are unengaged and disruptive. You have been using tweaks for the past couple of weeks, but the culture and climate of your classroom has become too ingrained for these small changes to truly affect anything. You go home every day at a loss about what to do next. When your classroom begins to look or feel like this, tweaks are usually no longer an option.

When you hit the point where you can no longer be the teacher you wanted to be, it is time for a reset. If the climate and culture of the classroom has hit this point, that usually means that either the foundation is cracked, the structure is not as high and clear as it needs to be, or we have not maintained our classroom like we should have. Sometimes only one of these is the issue, but sometimes it is all three things. The differences between a “tweak” and the “reset button” are significant.

When you hit the point where you can no longer be the teacher you wanted to be, it is time for a reset.

Tweak	Reset
• Unlimited • Small/medium-sized adjustments • Optional communication • Can be planned or made in the moment	• Limited, 1–2 times in a year • Large changes in relationships, expectations, rules, procedures, consistency, and classroom culture • Mandatory communication • Must be planned in advance

You can hit your “reset button” anytime, but it may be most effective after a holiday break, after a 3-day weekend, or on a Monday. In many schools, there may be natural opportunities with a new grading period or semester which may involve different students in the class. It does not matter, as long as you have taken the time to really reflect on what changes are needed. When you reset, you should reset everything that is not working since this may be your only chance to do these alterations. When you hit the reset button, you want a “fresh start.” If you begin this new phase with, “You guys have been so terrible …” is it really giving you and your students this new beginning? Instead, if the adjustments can be centered on your class’s future rather than on the past, you have a better chance of a successful reset.

The Silver Lining

We cannot emphasize the importance of tweaks and resets enough. Whether you are in your 1st or 31st year of teaching, it can be demoralizing when your classroom has not turned out how you imagined it. Tweaks and the reset provide us with that silver lining. This is why you will see a tweak section in each of the following chapters. We want you to understand the three aspects of the house metaphor conceptually, but then we want to show you how to adjust situations in your own classroom right now using tools we have introduced.

On our worst days filled with student misbehavior, truly the only thing that gives us hope is knowing that tomorrow we can do something that may potentially make the situation better.

As for the reset, we will be addressing this fully in Chapter 6. We are including this near the end of the book because we feel it is the last resort when it comes to classroom management. You cannot reset your classroom until you have a strong understanding of relationships, expectations, and consistency. We also feel that the majority of classroom issues can be solved through the use of tweaks. Giving you the foundational knowledge is first and foremost. Second comes the ability to continually tweak if something is not functioning the way you want it to. Last resort would be the reset. In that chapter there will be scenarios, thought processes, and language to use if a reset needs to be implemented.

Every bad situation has the possibility to get better, but the only way anything will change is if you continue to try. Although we are going to give you in-depth examples of how to make changes to improve your classroom management abilities, there is no “magic potion” that can fix everything. We are not here to try to get you to buy a boxed curriculum that guarantees a fix in student misbehavior. We all know that any salesperson who knocks on your door with that promise probably should not be let inside. Instead, what we are going to share is how we, as practicing educators, work to prevent and handle misbehavior when it inevitably arrives in our rooms. No matter how you feel right now, whether it is motivated, defeated, or even i...