How to Manage a Classroom – Part 1

For those of you out there that are teachers – whether in a formal school classroom or at church or at ballet class – managing a classroom is the number one challenge you must conquer to be able to teach.

How do we do it? Think about your own life and world. Chances are you would describe it as more complex – more complicated than 10 years ago, or 20, or…

Classrooms follow that same pattern. More complicated than 10 years ago, more complex layers.

That makes managing a classroom more difficult than years ago.

BUT . . .

The heart of managing remains the same. The core is ageless. It’s what caused Me to learn from my first grade teacher many years ago. It’s what caused my daughter to learn a difficult subject from her college professor. And it’s what caused my students to learn in my early years of teaching (before I even knew what it was) and in my middle years, and what I lost some of in my last years. So what is it?

People need to feel safe in order to learn. And they need to know you genuinely care about them.

If we don’t feel emotionally safe (or physically for that matter), forget about learning taking place. We can’t focus. Our brains won’t process what is being taught. Instead, we react to the perceived threat. So, let’s look at the issue of safety in this post. In part 2 we will look at positive classroom management versus negative.

We may:

• pretend all is well and cower inside
• cower outwardly
• act like a clown
• sit and stare
• draw on our work paper
• hide under our desk
• get angry and shove work off our desk
• yell
• threaten
• run out of the room

What are some perceived or real threats? We may:

• feel overwhelmed by the setting (ie sensory overload or fear)
• feel overwhelmed by how long the assignment looks (especially if we think we don’t know how to do it)
• be too timid to ask for help when work is too hard (we don’t want others to think we are stupid)
• be intimidated by students who know (or seem to know) more than we do
• think the teacher doesn’t like us
• have been inadvertently scared by someone or something
• have a bully scaring us
• and more

As a teacher our first and most important job is to figure out the cause behind any misbehavior. It’s the most challenging job. It may just be simple naughtiness. But it could be any one of the “I-dont-feel-safe causes listed above.

And the next step is to nullify the real or perceived threat. A perceived threat is just as real to us as one that is based in reality.

Or is this an emotional upset? What can we do to help that? Is it being caused by us, or is it bigger than just school. Is the family experiencing some kind of trauma – a death, divorce, financial insecurities or some other issue? If we know what the trauma is, it’s helpful so we don’t inadvertently add to the trauma with books or conversations in class. But even if we don’t know, we can show compassion and continually reassure our student that we genuinely care about their emotional distress and that we are a safe person.