When I told my mom I was going to be a teacher, she said she wasn’t surprised. I had talked about being a teacher since I was two years old.
School was my happy place as a kid. I loved being in school. When my dad (a teacher) had to work on teacher work days, I loved going to school with him to help him and other teachers. Being a teacher seemed like a natural fit for me.
Until I had my own classroom of real live students.
My first year of teaching was challenging, to put it mildly. I hadn’t put a lot of thought into how I would manage student behavior, because I hadn’t been the kind of student whose behavior needed to be managed. This was new territory for me. So, I started by trying to implement the type of classroom management plan I learned how to create when I was in my teacher training program. That didn’t work at all.
I worried that I had been wrong about being a teacher.
Half-way through the year, I participated in training on a specific type of classroom management system. The system was quite complicated, but I learned two crucial lessons from it:
- Consciously creating expectations for student behavior based on the classroom activity
- Communicating those expectations clearly and consistently
These two ideas became the basis for my classroom management efforts for the rest of my first year, and they made a huge difference in how I managed student behavior. However, they were just the beginning of my classroom management journey.
Classroom Management School 