Teacher Tip: Creating a Classroom Management Plan

Summer is a good time to revise your classroom management plan to implement better measures for next year. If you do not make changes to your classroom management plan, expect the same results. Often, all you need to do is to tweak the current plan.

It is important that teachers continually update their classroom management plans, so they will avoid problematic and disruptive student behavior.

I recommend that you look at the discipline referrals for the current school year and analyze the number of students you wrote up and the infraction for which you wrote these students up. If you wrote up 20 students for texting on their cellular telephones in class, maybe you need to revise your classroom policy on use of electronic equipment. It may be that you need to implement more stringent consequences for students who are caught texting.

For example, if a student is caught texting, you may choose to have that student write a persuasive essay to other students on why he or she should not text in class. Give the student a couple of days to complete the assignment, and if he or she does not complete it, write the student up for texting and for disobedience. I highly recommend that you grade the assignment so that it will not be considered punishment work.

We completed both of these steps in the previous section, and it is fairly simplistic to figure out ways to improve classroom management.

After identifying the areas in which you feel that you need to improve, simply come up with a more stringent consequence or a less stringent consequence, if you think your current consequence is a bit overbearing and causes students to rebel. This is a teacher-by-teacher evaluation to figure out what worked in your classroom this past school year and what did not.

If you need help changing a policy, look to other teachers. Look to those teachers who have been teaching a long time. These are the experienced veteran educators that many teachers regard for their wisdom. Make sure that these teachers know how to manage a classroom before you go asking for help. Otherwise, you may be digging an even deeper hole for yourself.