How to start the year (assigned)

One thing I plan to do differently at the beginning of this school year is to implement more procedures, have the students actually practice them more, take longer doing so, and assess them on their knowledge of the procedures (give them a test in which one question will be like, “Where does your butt need to be when the bell rings?”) Besides the first year teachers with very few discipline problems (which are those rare teachers who actually took heed to the advice that we heard from day one), I’m sure most of us will do something similar to what I have described.

A fellow teacher told me that at one school, a young, white, blonde, and small first year teacher was not expected to have any classroom management skills at a “tough” school. She went in there and made her students practice procedures for first couple of weeks. That’s all they did; she didn’t teach them anything about literature, writing, or grammar (I believe she was an English teacher). She ended up having the fewest discipline problems among the first-year teachers, and I believe even in comparison to many of the veteran teachers she worked with.

I don’t want to spend weeks and weeks teaching my students how to be on time and how to act in my class. Perhaps a week…because they need to get in into their heads how they are not only expected to act in my class, but must act in my class. I’ve gotta be firmer, whether I like it or not first. I’m not an authoritative teacher, have never been and will never be. I smile a lot, I like to laugh. It’s not my teaching personality, but from day one I’ve got to get them into the groove that they’ll be in for the rest of the year- they will have to follow certain rules and procedures so that they can learn a lot and enjoy it in the process.

It seems kinda silly to think so much about something so simple and seemingly trivial, but I keep changing my philosophy on whether students need to raise their hand before asking/answering questions. At first I thought yes, then in class it worked better (I thought) to allow open answering during the lesson, then I reverted back when I was evaluated, then it gradually changed back into free-for-all responses. Even in summer school, I didn’t want to make a class of 11 wonderful students have to raise their hands. And it was fine, but our first-years were having some issues with too much chatting (the students were getting too comfortable) and now get them to raise their hand before answering questions. The students haven’t been deterred from being as participatory as they were. They still love to volunteer and work out problems on the board. But, it is just in a more organized way. So, in the end, I’m going to do the hand-raising procedure. Kids need to be given clear instructions on how to act and behave, and instead of saying “Sometimes you need to raise you hand, but if I tell you that you don’t have to then you can answer without raising your hand.” It’s even confusing right now to try to quote myself on what I’d say.

I am going to really try to do what we have always been told to do - make realistic rules, consequences, and rewards that we can use, and stick to them.