Whether you are a new teacher or a veteran teacher, positive classroom management is key to a successful school year in the classroom. This is because if your room is running smoothly, students will be productive, and learning will occur.
With how important effective classroom management is, it can sometimes feel overwhelming. Especially on those days when despite all your efforts – things are just not running smoothly. Trust us, we have been there!
Between the three of us, we have over 40 years of experience in the classroom. As teachers and as coaches. Over the years we had a lot of amazing learning days with our students. We also had days that felt like nothing was going quite how we had planned. That is part of teaching.
Early on we were taught that classroom rules are the key to effective classroom management. Over the years though, we found that rules are not always the answer. In fact, many times the rules just don’t work.
Classroom rules focus on discipline. Rather than anticipating a negative behavior that would require discipline, it is more effective to focus on building a positive environment.
Tips for Positive Classroom Management that Works
There are a lot of classroom management tips out there. You have probably learned several of them during professional development. While many of these strategies can be helpful, sometimes it feels like there are just too many to try and implement. It may even feel like there isn’t enough time to pause and focus on implementing these new strategies.
We have been there! It is difficult to take time away from teaching academics to focus on trying new strategies. Especially when there are so many expectations of teachers and students when it comes to testing.
You don’t have to implement every single strategy that they give you during professional development though. Nobody has time for that!
However, taking time to implement one new classroom management strategy can be extremely helpful. It can even give you more time to instruction moving forward.
Over the years we have tried dozens of different classroom management strategies. Through trial and error (yup, we have had plenty that didn’t work), we found dozens of strategies that are helpful for effective classroom management.
Of the many that we have tried, there is one area that we think is the most effective when it comes to positive classroom management: building a classroom community.
How Building Classroom Community Helps with Classroom Management
Building a classroom community is a combination of building relationships and creating a positive physical environment.
When it comes to building positive relationships, there are three areas to focus on: teacher-to-student relationships, student-to-student relationships, and whole class relationships.
While all of these relationships are important, as well as building a positive physical environment, we chose the one we thought was the most important! This is the one area that we feel if you focus on first will give you more time back in the classroom.
Focus on building positive student-to-student relationships.
Your students make-up your classroom community. Therefore, how they interact with one another will impact the overall classroom community the most.
The more your students are able to interact with one another in a positive way, the more efficiently your classroom will run. This doesn’t mean they all need to be best friends. However, they need to know how to be kind towards each other.
How Teaching Kindness Helps Build a Positive Classroom Environment
School is not only about academics. It is about social skills. It is about learning to be effective community members. When you teach your students to be kind, you are teaching them how to show respect.
This allows students to make positive peer relationships. Even if they don’t become best friends, teaching them how to respect each other will greatly improve any negative behaviors in the classroom.
Students are more likely to work well together, as partners and in groups. They are also more likely to be engaged during whole class instruction because they won’t want to disrupt their peers, or the teacher.
Download our Mastering Classroom Management EBOOk Today
Teaching Resources for a Positive Classroom Community
Compliments are one of the best ways to teach kindness. However, elementary students are often not sure how to give a compliment. Moreover, they may not feel confident in giving a compliment.
Enter Compliment Cards!
Compliment Cards were designed to help students spread kindness, encouragement, and positivity throughout your classroom. When used regularly, they help foster a positive classroom culture by building positive relationships.
Moreover, compliment cards can help foster positive relationships between teachers and students as well. One teaching strategy that easily addresses two important areas of classroom management!
How to Use Compliment Cards
Our resource includes everything you need to use compliment cards in your classroom. You can even choose three different formats!
- 36 colored printable Compliment Cards
- 36 black and white printable Compliment Cards
- Link to 10 Compliment Cards preloaded to Google Slides so students can share, print, or email the digital compliments.
Printed cards can be kept in the classroom and students can use them throughout the week to give to their peers. Moreover, you can encourage students to give them to someone they have not complimented yet. This helps all students get a compliment.
The teacher can give compliment cards to students when they are doing a good job on a task or to encourage them throughout the day.
Give students a fun place to keep their compliment cards, like an envelope. You can even make it an art project and let them design a mailbox! In addition, you can share a Google Folder of Compliment Cards with all of your students. Then they can share or send digital compliments!
Additional Classroom Management Strategies
Building the classroom community through relationships is the perfect place to begin when focusing on classroom management. It helps students create positive connections with their peers and with their teacher. This reduces the desire for disruptive behavior in many students.
Once you have focused on building positive relationships, explore these other areas that impact classroom behavior. Implementing one strategy in each of these additional areas can further support effective classroom management, by establishing clear expectations around behavior.
- Positive Physical Environment
- Classroom Routines and Procedures
- Student Engagement
- Accountability and Leadership
- Time Management
