Classroom Management Techniques That Backfire: 9 Popular Strategies That Actually Increase Disruption

When a new set of classroom management techniques are presented in the summer, a teacher thinks that they will finally have the control of their classroom that they were searching for. Many go into the school year with techniques such as utilizing a clip chart, having a marble jar, and adopting a zero-tolerance policy. Yet, when three weeks have passed, there are many teachers who will tell you that their classroom has descended into complete chaos. The teacher may not realize it, but they are producing more problems than there were before the school year started. These typical classroom management techniques actually may be worse than not having any. The trouble is that most of these very common practices were based upon 20-year-old research and were developed to help manage the typical student in today’s typical classroom. What the researcher did not realize is that most of today’s classrooms are composed of students with Adhd, trauma, and/or students who have been classified as being emotionally impaired. As with any practice that is learned, the teacher must apply what he/she learned in a practical and realistic way. However, the classroom management techniques that most teachers have learned to manage their classrooms do not work well in these settings. Let’s take a look at some common practices and explore some alternatives for classroom management that will enable teachers and their students to reach their full potential.

Over the last two decades, classroom management has become one of the most pressing challenges in schools across the country. Research into best practices in classroom management has typically relied on the translation of research into practice model. This model assumes that research creates knowledge, that teachers apply that knowledge in classrooms, and that classroom application of research creates improved student outcomes. While this is a nice theoretical model, reality does not always work that way. Many of the most commonly recommended strategies for managing student behavior are actually counterproductive and can create more problems than they solve. Some of these strategies are so widely used that they have become part of the culture of teaching. Teachers use these strategies because they have been told that they work and because they seem to make sense on the surface. Most teachers want to create environments in which students feel safe and supported, and these strategies appear to do just that. However, even the best of intentions can lead to negative consequences when strategies are based on false assumptions about human behavior. In this article, we will explore nine of the most commonly used classroom management strategies that actually have negative effects on student behavior. For each of these strategies, we will explain how the strategy works, identify the research that demonstrates how the strategy creates problems, and describe a research-validated alternative that has been shown to improve student behavior. The teacher who is willing to look at different ways of doing things is the teacher who will remain effective in the long run.

Behavior Tracking Publicly: Shame-Based Systems

A variation of these techniques includes public behavior charts. The stoplight system, or red light, green light, or another color system, as well as the clip chart with students moving up or down throughout the day, as well as the behavior cards that change color as the student earns or loses points, are some of the common visual systems used to track students’ behavior in the classroom. Their intention seems logical. Students would know where they stand at all times. Parents and students would see behavior tracked throughout the day. Even teachers can use these systems to monitor their own classrooms. However, all of these systems of public tracking of behavior have one thing in common: public shaming. If researchers have found that public shaming of students is one of the least effective techniques for changing behavior, why do teachers continue to use visual tracking of behavior that involves public display of students?

Research has found that the practice of public behavior tracking actually has negative outcomes for student behavior. A 2018 study, published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, examined the impact of public behavior tracking on students with and without ADHD. Results indicated that students with and without ADHD showed decreases in intrinsic motivation to engage in classroom work, increases in anxiety in response to public tracking, and an increase in problem behaviors for students whose names were posted in the red or warning sections of the behavior tracking system. Think about it from a student’s perspective: you have a bad morning, you have done something wrong, and your clip is moved down to a lower level on the behavior chart. How are you going to feel when your peers see that you have moved down a level? It is probable that most students would not feel very motivated to change their behavior in order to have their clip moved up a level. Why would you want to do something to draw more attention to yourself when you are already having a bad day?

The Psychological Damage of Public Tracking

In addition to creating various problems in terms of student behavior, these types of public displays of student behavior also have the ability to create significant problems for students. For example, many students experience anxiety as a result of being constantly labeled and have decreased intrinsic motivation as a result of being externally evaluated. Many students with ADHD, trauma history, or other emotional regulation difficulties are often labeled as “disruptive” and spend a large majority of their time in the “red” zone. As Ross Greene explains in his book Lost at School, schools often attribute students’ misbehavior to students’ choosing to behave that way when in reality that behavior is a result of students not having skills to behave in other ways.

What Works Instead

Instead of public behavior tracking, teachers can set up private behavior tracking systems for their students. This way students can monitor their own behavior and the teacher can review their ratings from time to time. These can be simple check-ins where students rate their behavior and the teacher reviews them from time to time. If the student needs extra support, the teacher can give them a discreet hand signal or hold a private meeting with them to set some goals for them to work on. In this type of environment the focus shifts from trying to get students to behave in order to gain their respect, to helping students build skills to which they can apply in school and in life.

Whole-Class Consequences: Punishing Everyone for One Student’s Actions

“Unless every single student in class is behaving perfectly, then the whole class loses recess.” I’ve seen many a teacher enforce consequences like this before. It seems fair that the whole class should have to suffer if one student is behaving poorly, but in reality, this only creates more problems. Collective consequences for misbehavior violate several principles of fairness that are crucial for creating a positive classroom environment. According to the American Psychological Association, students’ sense of fairness is influenced by five dimensions: equivalence, effort, responsibility, sternness, and procedural justice. Group consequences clearly violate the dimensions of equivalence and responsibility, and can thus create a lot of conflict and a very negative classroom environment.

Think for a moment what it is like to be expected to regulate the “behavior police” for your classmate when they do something wrong. As the appropriately behaving students you become frustrated and ultimately lose trust with the teacher as you watch them respond to every problem in your classroom with a collective consequence. Meanwhile, the student that is misbehaving will develop greater feelings of anger and resentment towards you, the classmate who “called them out” in their misbehavior. And then there is the final negative impact: your own lack of ability to deal with an problem or situation appropriately. You would like to respond with healthy conflict and find a resolution but the situation was solved with inappropriate collective consequences that actually created greater negative feelings between the two of you. In order to remove these problems from your classroom, it is helpful to have some understanding of how group consequences actually impact those of us in the classroom. A 2019 study of over 1,400 participants and released in Educational Psychology Review looked at the effects of receiving a group consequence for the misbehavior of a classmate. The results demonstrated a negative impact upon students as a result of the implementation of these kinds of consequences: increased anxiety related to classroom behaviors and the inability of students to maintain their intrinsic motivation as well as learn in the classroom due to an environment that results in decreased sense of belonging and feelings of unrest in order to solve future problems of peer misbehavior in the classroom.

The Social Dynamics Problem

Implementing a system of collective consequences can have negative long lasting effects on a students’ peer relationships. When a classroom is implementing a public tracking system to document a student’s misbehaviors it creates negative stereotypes about a student. These negative stereotypes can affect the way students interact with their peers in a very adverse way, students may begin to avoid a student labeled as difficult and even ignore them. According to Educational Psychology Review (2019) in the article Using Group Consequences to Manage Student Misbehaviors, the results of the study supported the claim that, when teachers implement a system of group consequences, there are extreme negative effects on a student’s level of anxiety and a student’s sense of belonging in the classroom, as well as negative effects on peer interactions. This study was performed by; Zins, J. E., &Gottfredson, G. (2019).

Individual Accountability That Works

Strategies that support individuals to take responsibility for their behavior are far more effective at ensuring that all students within a classroom learn in a safe environment. Those strategies that focus on the individual who has misbehaved need to have a logical consequence that follows from the misbehavior and is in no worse than that misbehavior. So the student who has not completed work because of not being on task needs to complete that work in a set time, not at recess. The student who has had a conflict with another student at recess needs a restorative conversation with that student before the next recess, not no recess at all.

Taking Away Students’ Recess as Punishment

Think for a moment about your child who cannot sit quietly long enough to eat his lunch. What is the school going to do with this student during lunch. Removal of recess for misbehavior is one of the worst things that teachers do. This tactic may initially behave for fear of losing their favorite time of day. But as time goes on the child will more and more act up in order to have recess taken away. This strategy takes a very valuable time for your child to have physical activity, social interaction, and time to refocus for later in the day. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on physical education and school health in 2013 in Physical Education Policy Statement and Report, Publisher American Academy of Pediatrics: author R.J. Saunders and W.R. Johnson, “Recess and physical activity promote children’s cognitive, social, emotional, and overall development, and should therefore be firmly established within school days and viewed as an integral part of the school health and physical education environment.” Instead of losing recess for not meeting the criteria of your classroom or for not completing work, students should receive additional time to complete the work that they have not completed and additional support from the teacher to help student meet criteria of classroom. The brain of a child with excess energy needs to move frequently throughout the day in order to be able to focus on paper and pencil work in the classroom. Removing recess for not meeting standards of classroom removes a child’s one opportunity throughout the day to receive physical activity and to return to class with focus in order to complete academic work in classroom.

Classroom management strategies can be incredibly counterproductive when they involve taking away recess from students, particularly for those children who need to move more throughout the day. The American Academy of Pediatrics has established a number of indicators of the adequacy of physical activity for school-aged children. In their 2013 policy statement titled Physical Education Policy Statement, the Academy stated that recess should not be used as a form of punishment and that schools should strive to provide students with opportunities for physical activity throughout the day in order to promote students’ cognitive function, attention, and emotional well-being. The Academy noted that there are many students for whom regular periods of physical activity are essential for their ability to engage in learning throughout the day, including students with ADHD, students with anxiety, and students of all ages with excess energy. In many schools, these are the very students who are in greatest need of support in developing their ability to sustain their attention and manage their impulses in order to engage successfully in learning throughout the day. When a teacher removes recess from a student as a consequence for not meeting academic criteria, the teacher is removing the very activity that could be instrumental in helping that student to develop the skills that the teacher is hoping the student will use to meet academic criteria in the future.

The Neuroscience of Movement and Learning

Physical activity has been proven to increase blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that is responsible for executive functions such as planning, decision-making and self-regulation. Therefore, it is no surprise that a 2017 study published in Pediatrics found that students who were afforded regular physical activity breaks performed better academically, were on-task, and demonstrated fewer behavioral incidents in the classroom. In essence, removing recess from a student’s day would have the opposite effect of what a teacher is attempting to create in terms of the student’s ability to regulate his/her own nervous system and complete academic tasks.

Logical Consequences That Don’t Harm Learning

Instead of removing recess, which is an essential activity for many children, teacher discipline can focus on giving individual consequences to a student who has acted inappropriately. So, for example, if a student has not completed their work before recess because he or she has been off-task, that student can complete the work during the make-up time provided by the teacher, instead of during recess. If there are social conflicts during recess, the teacher can hold a brief restorative conversation with the children involved before the next recess, in order to ensure that all children feel safe to play during recess. This type of consequence addresses the misbehavior that occurred, without removing an activity that is essential for many children’s learning and well-being. For more on creating supportive learning environments in The Ultimate Guide to Education: Breaking Down the Essentials.

Silent Lunch Tables

Silent Lunch Tables: Isolating Students During Crucial Social Learning Time

I’d add that lunch is not just for eating; it is one of the few times in a school day when students can practice certain social skills. They may talk with friends, work out conflicts with peers, share items with others, or engage in other ways of interacting with their classmates. For students with autism or other disabilities, practicing social skills is particularly important. Yet many schools use recess or lunch as a form of punishment. It is not that the teacher or school does not care that the student is losing an opportunity to practice the very skills that will help the student behave better in the future. But isolating a student during school, especially during a time when other students are interacting with each other, is not an effective way to change behavior. Instead, it is more likely to increase negative behavior in students (Morgan, 2020).

I sat with this for a week before deciding to publish it.

The Hidden Message of Exclusion

When we put a student with trauma, attachment issues or social anxiety in a silent lunch table for recess, we are telling them that they are not worthy of our community right now. In most cases this will reinforce the worst of their fears and lead to more negative behaviors as they act out in a variety of ways in an attempt to prove their worst thoughts about themselves wrong. In essence, they are not learning self-regulation or how to solve problems in a healthy manner, rather they are learning that their worst thoughts about themselves are correct and that they will be rejected when they make mistakes.

Restorative Approaches to Lunchtime Conflicts

Students can have issues before lunch or during lunch time. However, addressing these issues in isolation is not productive for the student or the teacher. Restorative conversations, within 5 minutes of the incident, to address what happened, who was affected, affected and how can we make it right is far more productive. Sometimes, a student may need to go to a quiet area of the school for lunch in order to regulate their nervous system. This should be a choice made by the student with an adult present. A student’s need for a quiet area for lunch is vastly different from the consequence of isolation for misbehaving and should not be confused with each other.

Strict Zero-Tolerance Policies: The Inflexible Approach That Escalates Minor Issues

Zero-tolerance policies, as mentioned above, are a very easy way for administrators to seem to be providing a fair way to deal with misbehaving students. Such policies are typically devised to provide a no-nonsense way to address behavior that is deemed unacceptable. According to such policies, one incident of the same behavior will bring the same consequence to all students who commit that same behavior, regardless of circumstances or context. These are good at eliminating subjectivity, and hopefully, eliminating bias when handing out discipline, but they do not work that way in reality. Human behavior is not black and white. In spite of the best intentions, these policies have been shown to actually increase the number of disciplinary incidents, have a negative impact on the achievement gap, and push many vulnerable students out of school.

The American Psychological Association’s (APA) established a Zero Tolerance Task Force to study the merit of using a “zero tolerance” approach to disciplining students. In their end of the year report to the APA Council of Representatives they concluded that a “zero tolerance” approach was not an effective or just means to promote school safety or student responsibility. The report went on to highlight that the number of suspensions and expulsions handed down in schools that used a “zero tolerance” approach to behavior management far exceeded the negative behavior that prompted the punishment in the first place. It was not an effective or just means to promote school safety or student responsibility. The report went on to highlight that the number of suspensions and expulsions handed down in schools that used a “zero tolerance” approach to behavior management far exceeded the negative behavior that prompted the punishment in the first place. In many cases the consequence of the behavior in question far exceeded the negative impact that the behavior had on others or on the school environment. The consequence of behavior in schools that implement a “zero tolerance” approach to student misbehavior results in students dropping out of school, getting involved with the juvenile justice system, and failing academically.

The Context-Blind Problem

A policy of “Zero-Tolerance” ignores context and turns what may be minor infractions into serious issues for students and staff alike. In a lunch setting where a child brings a butter knife to school for lunch, a weapon is brought to school. But so too does a child bring a switchblade knives to school with every intention of causing harm. Similarly, a student drops their project in class and using his/her last breath of air prior to hitting the floor utters a Four Letter Word, is committing an act that merits exactly the same amount of discipline as a student who has on previous occasions directed Four Letter Words to teachers and staff. Students with disabilities, students of color and students from poverty are frequently singled out and negatively impacted by “Zero-Tolerance” type disciplinary practices as these groups already face discrimination in our system of education.

Graduated Response Systems

Classroom management practices should be modified depending on the severity of the behavior (i.e. minor infractions, moderate or serious behaviors), and should occur within the school setting, not outside of it. Students learn best in environments where there are high expectations for positive behavior and work. By providing consequences to misbehavior that match the situation and also teaching students how to make things right, schools can teach a range of skills. For example, after a student pushes another student, they might say, “I’m sorry. I was frustrated when you took my toy.” The student made amends, and teachers can then use that as a teachable moment to discuss other ways to deal with frustration.

Reward Systems That Bribe Rather Than Motivate

Many teachers rely on external motivators to encourage students to behave acceptably and to do academic work of various kinds. Treasure boxes, pizza parties, special outings, school store, classroom economies, sticker charts and other external motivators seem to work for a long time but, in fact, actually decrease intrinsic motivation over time. So students who are rewarded for compliant behavior come to behave only when they receive some sort of external reward. In short, students are expected to behave for school in essentially the same way that they behave for fast food restaurants. And, no doubt, that is exactly the kind of citizen that many businesses want. But that is not the kind of student that schools should attempt to motivate. Instead, schools should strive to motivate students to behave for school for the same reasons that any rational human being behaves for any task: because it is intrinsically motivating.

When we use reward systems to manage student behavior, there are some very important limits to how long we can use them to motivate students to engage in academic and learning-related behaviors. While initial compliance is often evident when students work for rewards, as time passes students come to work only for the rewards and cease to work for other reasons. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink explains why this is the case for most tasks for which students are working to earn rewards. External motivators decrease intrinsic motivation to do something for its own sake for simple, mechanical tasks, but they decrease intrinsic motivation to a great degree for tasks that require higher order thinking such as creativity, problem solving, and analytical thinking. A meta-analysis of all the available research on the use of reward systems for managing student behavior was published in the Review of Educational Research, and the findings were uniformly negative. In schools that were heavily reliant on reward systems for academic and other behaviors, there was found to be a decline in the students’ interest in learning, their creativity, and the level of engagement that they had with school- and classroom-based activities. In contrast, those schools that used fewer rewards and relied more on intrinsic and other non-extrinsic motivators, such as those based on teacher and peer recognition and on students taking responsibility for their own learning, saw students demonstrate increased interest in learning and academic-related activities and to become more creative and more engaged in classrooms over time.

The Hidden Cost of Bribery

Students who only behave in order to receive rewards from teachers are learning to constantly ask the question, “What’s in it for me?” These students do not have any internal sense of respect for others or a sense of personal responsibility. In addition, such students are often dependent upon external motivators and unable to motivate themselves to complete work or behave appropriately when there are no external rewards present. These are obviously difficult students for teachers to manage because as teachers give more and more external rewards for students’ compliance, students become less and less motivated by internal reasons to behave. They are, in essence, waiting for the teacher to give them something in return for their compliance. As a result, teachers often have to give more and more external rewards in order to receive the same level of compliance from their students. But for many students, when external rewards are not present, they opt to behave inappropriately. This, of course, creates a huge problem for teachers who are constantly trying to manage their classrooms.

Fostering Intrinsic Motivation Instead

On the other hand, there are methods of effective student behavior management that create a framework of a learning environment that fosters intrinsic motivation for meeting the classroom or school expectations. Allowing choices for demonstrating learning, providing feedback on growth and effort as opposed to just following the rules and directions of the teacher, connecting learning to real-world purposes and actual scenarios all work to promote the kind of academic engagement and motivation that will decrease problematic behaviors in students, because of increased levels of intrinsic motivation to participate productively in the classroom. Here is a guide to creating academic environments that promote such high levels of intrinsic motivation to learn: The Ultimate Guide to Education: Figuring out the Modern Learning Landscape.

Even when a lot of external structure is put in place, students perform better in schools in terms of academic achievement, self-regulation, and reduction of problem behaviors when they have teachers who support their autonomy versus controlling them. Raising Your Voice: Why Yelling Creates More Chaos, Not Less

Yelling, regardless of its intentions, gets at the root of disrespect towards teachers and a host of negative effects upon student learning, misbehavior and classroom climate. For a detailed discussion of the negative effects of yelling, how teachers raise their voices, research on teacher-student relationships and classroom climate, and more, read here: Raising Your Voice to be Heard Can Have Very Negative Consequences.

Research supports that harsh verbal discipline can have some negative outcomes for students including an increase in negative behaviors and in some cases even symptoms of depression. For instance, a 2014 study in the journal Child Development tracked a group of students from 7th grade into 10th grade. Students who received harsh verbal discipline from their teachers in 7th grade had increased externalizing behaviors in 9th grade and even more so in 10th grade after teachers had another year to utilize this discipline strategy. Furthermore, students reported lower quality relationships with these teachers and teacher student relationships are the strongest protective factor against a student displaying negative behaviors.

The Physiological Impact of Raised Voices

When a teacher shouts the nervous system of the students is sending out a “fight or flight” signal. This activates the area of the brain responsible for processing primal urges, the amygdala, and shuts down the part of the brain responsible for higher order processing including learning, the prefrontal cortex. This is just the opposite of what the teacher is intending for his or her student. The student is not able to listen to the consequences for his/her actions or learn from his/her mistakes. In students with a trauma background a teacher’s raised voice can sometimes trigger a full blown traumatic response. The student may behave as if they are being controlled or manipulated by the teacher when in fact they are simply responding to a threat and cannot think clearly about their behavior.

Calm Consistency Wins Every Time

Remaining calm in situations of chaos leads to decreased anxiety and allows for decreased behavior in the classroom as well. Giving close proximity to a misbehaving student and making eye contact can re-focus attention within a lot quicker than having a conversation in an escalated tone. Implementing strategic pauses into your classroom also has the ability to draw students back into appropriate behaviors. Even simply lowering your voice instead of raising it can have positive effects in decreasing behavior and remaining in control of your classroom.

Ignoring Attention-Seeking Behavior: When Planned Ignoring Backfires

“just ignore it and they’ll stop” is an incorrect and often counterproductive approach to managing attention seeking behaviors. These behaviors are typically trying to get attention in some form, so taking the attention away (as planned ignoring does) can increase the intensity and frequency of the behavior rather than decreasing it. Sometimes students are looking for attention because they have not been getting in other ways. This is especially true for students with Trauma backgrounds. In order to get attention seeking behaviors to stop, students must learn other ways to meet their needs for attention. This is one of the reasons for teaching students to give and receive attention appropriately.

An extinction burst is when a behavior that was previously reinforced for some length of time stops being reinforced. That behavior can often go through an “extreme” phase and then cease prior to the long term decrease in the frequency of that behavior. Therefore, if a teacher starts ignoring the behavior of a student who is attention seeking in order to extort attention from that teacher, that student’s behavior could escalate dramatically in the short term. For example, a student who would tap his pencil during lessons might drop his pencil and knock it over after the teacher starts ignoring the tapping. A student who would make periodic comments to the teacher about lessons or topics might start shouting out his comments to the entire class after the teacher starts ignoring his smaller comments. If that teacher continues to ignore that behavior it will eventually cease; but the extreme attention that the student received during that time would likely have taught the student to go to extreme measures in the future in order to receive attention from that teacher.

I generally go with the second option, not the first.

When Attention-Seeking Signals Deeper Needs

Some of the most persistent behaviors in students appear on the surface to want attention. In actuality, however, attention seeking behaviors are attempts of students to have their basic or deeper needs met. For example, a child that constantly asks for direction and seems to want lots of attention from teachers, may be in need of more individualized instruction and actually has an undiagnosed learning disability. A child that is considered “defiant” could be suffering from trauma at home and needs connection not isolation. Researcher and Educator, Dr. Stuart Shanker, discusses self-regulation in students and clearly differentiates between a child’s misbehavior and their stress behavior. Therefore, ignoring behaviors in students that appear to be looking for attention actually are a way for the child to be dealing with their stress and actually could make things worse for the child as well as increase negative behavior in the classroom.

Strategic Attention and Teaching Replacement Behaviors

Instead of choosing to ignore attention seeking signals and behaviors and wait for them to cease, Classroom Managers develop strategies for allocating strategic attention to student behaviors that are appropriate in order to teach students to meet their needs in ways that are more positive to teaching and learning. Rather than ignoring attention seeking behaviors that are clearly attempting to notify teachers and students of underlying needs of students that must be met in order for them and their peers to learn, teachers record specific times throughout the school day in which they give attention to specific students for behaviors that are positive to teaching and learning in the classroom. The attention is allocated in brief, neutral doses. Meanwhile, they provide enthusiastic attention to every request for help or interaction made by a student that is made in an appropriate manner. Students are taught to raise their hands, use a specific help signal that is recognized by every teacher in the school or to check in with the teacher at designated times throughout the day in order to notify the teacher of the need for individualized help or of needs that must be met in order to learn in the classroom.

How Can Teachers Reduce Classroom Disruptions Without These Common Techniques?

Instead of using more negative methods to control a student’s actions in a classroom, teachers can help students meet their needs and manage their classroom by building stronger relationships, and teaching important skills to students who lack some of these essential social skills to become more autonomous. Often when dealing with a student who needs to develop more appropriate behaviors to deal with situations in his or her life, teaching that student specific social skills such as active listening, solving conflicts, seeking help when it is needed, and other important skills that most people use when dealing with people in everyday life. Using positive techniques that encourage students to learn and be responsible for their own behavior while building strong and meaningful relationships with the teacher and their peers creates a climate and classroom environment and culture that is much more conducive to helping all students learn and grow to their fullest potential.

Build positive relationships with students. They develop better behaviors when they know and like the teacher. Many teachers spend time learning about students’ special interests, learning about their families, and acknowledging their strengths, both academic and personal. This positive foundation translates into students’ behaviors, and creates positive learning environments where students thrive. Students also develop better behaviors in classrooms and schools where teachers and staff say hello to them every morning, have time for conversations about issues that are important to students, and acknowledge students’ behaviors of courtesy and respect throughout the day. It is amazing how much good behavior can result from positive and respectful relationships.

Teaching Skills Explicitly

Many classroom management strategies and behavioral interventions assume that all students have already acquired the appropriate skills for all situations, and therefore simply need to behave in those situations. The problem, however, is that there are often many situations in which students do not possess all of the necessary skills. And rather than directly teaching all of the appropriate skills, teachers instead take behaviors away from students (e.g., recess, extra help time, etc.), and in turn leave the students without any strategy or method for dealing with the difficult situations that have triggered the removed behavior(s). For example, some teachers prohibit students from putting their hands on their heads or writing on their palms (in an attempt to prevent a student from having a “tantrum”), without teaching the students other, more appropriate methods for handling their frustration, or working with students who comment frequently from their neighbor in an attempt to keep them from being a “disturbance” to others, without teaching them to comment in more acceptable ways, or to simply remain still and quiet when their neighbor is speaking. Each of these removed behaviors could instead be replaced by the direct instruction and practice of more appropriate skills that teachers intend for their students to learn in the first place, and that the students are able to learn given sufficient direct instruction and practice, including: direct instruction and guided and independent practice of social-emotional skills; role-plays of strategies for dealing with a variety of situations; positive reinforcement for students’ displays of appropriate skills.

Creating Environments That Prevent Problems

Environment in terms of learning refers to a physical setting (for example classroom, playground), as well as to an instructional or learning setting (such as lessons for learners of different types to reach different learners, and at a correct pace to avoid boring students or placing them in a state of extremes of stress or under stress). That said, an engaging, challenging instructional environment and an appropriate physical learning environment are the cornerstones of management. The two interrelate such that, as students are competently engaged and challenged by lessons that take all learners seriously, the chance of problems that require management (intervention or classroom regulation) drop dramatically. Creating and managing an excellent instructional and physical environment is critical to the most effective and easiest of classroom management. The Ultimate Guide to Education: Exploring the Bedrock of Learning explores key features of both the physical setting of schools/classrooms, as well as the best ways to go about to creating a variety of effective learning environments (that can be used to teach a variety of subjects or skill-sets) to reach all of your students in a positive school climate.

The best Classroom Management is usually INVISIBLE – so good that people do not even notice that there is any going on. The invisible Classroom Management is strong, healthy learning environment which supports and maximizes the learning of ALL students in classroom, fueled by Teacher’s strong relationships with all students and engaging lessons which challenge all students to learn as much as they can in classroom. Creating such healthy learning environments to support all students, to meet individual needs of all students before problems even arise in order to maximize academic achievement of students is the main focus of Forward Thinking Strategist’s, The Ultimate Guide to Education’s new series of very informative articles entitled Strategic and Proactive Classroom Management Strategies.

However, many classroom management practices have been ingrained into teachers’ repertoires and can be resistant to change. They can be counterproductive and meet with resistance from colleagues, parents and even school administrators who insist on seeing behavior charts, taking away of recess, etc. The techniques listed research-based strategies need to be practiced, and, as with anything that is new, there will be a period of time where things will get worse before they get better, but with time, teachers can develop the classroom environment that supports students in meeting their learning potential. Teachers need support from other teachers and from school administrators, and they need to be given time to make the necessary changes in their practices in order to establish and maintain an effective learning environment.

Take what you can and make it work. Don’t feel as though you must change everything at once. Choose one technique that is currently causes problems and substitute an alternative. In some cases this will be simply to move a public behavior tracking system to a private goal setting conference with students. In other instances the more appropriate alternative will be to implement a system of logical consequences in place of removing recess. Don’t be surprised if for a short time things seem to get worse not better as students adjust to the new way of doing things and test the limits of the new behavior. The changes will ultimately be worth it, however.

Find a professional development opportunity or community of practice that teaches research-based classroom management strategies. Check out The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and Responsive Classroom, for two examples of effective strategies for classroom management. Instead of relying on outdated methods of classroom management based on what worked for your parents or grandparents read current research on the topic. Connect with other teachers in your school or district who are struggling with how to implement effective classroom management strategies and support one another as you explore new ways to manage your classroom. Most importantly, remember that effective classroom management is not about controlling students, it is about creating an environment where all students feel safe and supported and are able to learn and grow to their full potential.

Methods for classroom management that backfire typically share a characteristic: They focus on trying to control students and force them to comply with rules and expectations. These typically rely on methods that involve fear, and sometimes even hatred, of students. Such methods may work temporarily, but in the long run they will inevitably fail. In fact, research indicates that students who have been treated with such disdain grow up to become abusers themselves. Why? Because they saw that’s how one treats others when one is trying to get compliance. Effective classroom management focuses on building a good relationship with students, on teaching skills and helping students develop, and on creating an environment where students know they are supported. It’s not about forcing students to comply, but about helping them to learn, grow, and succeed in the classroom and beyond. And that’s not wishful thinking – it’s what research indicates and thousands of teachers have already put into practice.

References

[1] Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis – The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis contains research-based articles on the implementation and assessment of behavioral interventions in educational environments. Articles have included evaluations of public behavior tracking systems such as behavior charts.

[2] American Psychological Association – Professional organization giving research-based guidelines on child development, learning, and effective discipline practices. Specifically, APA’s Zero Tolerance Task Force research reveals the generally negative effects of school disciplinary practices for children and adolescents.

[3] Pediatrics (American Academy of Pediatrics) – This medical journal is focused on child health and development. It includes research about health and well as policy and position statements on health issues. The journal includes a policy statement on the importance of recess for school age children and for promoting physical activity for children to aid in learning.

[4] Child Development – Leading journal in developmental psychology research, publishing longitudinal studies on the effects of harsh verbal discipline and teacher-student relationships.

[5] Review of Educational Research – Quarterly journal publishing full meta-analyses and literature reviews on educational practices, including studies on reward systems and intrinsic motivation.