The Magic Power of Effective Classroom Management

As I count down to the end of my teaching career in 37 days, the second big idea I've learned is there is no way to teach in a poorly managed classroom. I've seen loads of teachers who start out the year letting students decide what will be the rules of the classroom. They are always fairly young teachers. I even did it when I was starting out. I evolved into a teacher who knew what were the rules I needed to make my class function properly an that was my job - not the responsibility of 12 year olds. While teaching in Collier County an Asst. Superintendent for instruction gave a mandatory training session to new teachers to the county on classroom management. As part of the session he demonstrated a set of rules (see blog entry Aug. 9 - "The Rules Are Up") that took into account the 2 basic situations in the classroom, direct instruction and students working on assignments, with only 3 simple rules in each situation. With a little modification, I have used those rules for 20 years. Classroom management is, of course, not just about the rules. It involves the consequences and reward structure, the consistency with how they are applied, the method the teacher uses to allow students to make choices about their behoavior and the consequences that result, the respect the teacher shows to the students, ...
Until the management is right, the learning will be controlled by the students. Their hidden curriculum will be what they are learning most.
I had a colleague come in on Monday to watch how I managed a class. He joined a team. They had just formed new teams and were getting ready to play a comprehension game ("Challenge!!" is the name of the game). I gave 2 sentences of instruction: 1) we are going to play Challenge with the carbon cycle study guide,
2)team leaders get your teams ready. This is a class that he has some management trouble with, but they went straight to work, comparing answers, checking anwers in the textbook when 2 students didn't agree. The structure behind the activity was not obvious. The individual accountability of every team member to have an agreed upon answer to each question was not evident. My colleague attended a workshop session I did on cooperative learning, but he was not asking questions about where were the embedded aspects of cooperative learning in the structure of the lesson. He was amazed at how they were all on task as if I had some magic power over them.