In approaching your classroom management each day, I encourage you to consider some of the items below. Classroom management is difficult but is worth the time in doing it in a way that honors the Lord.
- Build positive relationships that improve discipline in the classroom. Those that have good relationships with students typically have good classroom management as well.
- Seek to provide a classroom that spends much more time naming and giving examples of what positive behavior looks like.
- Choose our words wisely. Positive words are always better than negative words.
- Demerits should never look like a stick that bludgeons a student but instead, they should look like guardrails that guide a student along a proper path.
- Spend more time on “meritious” behavior instead of so much time on the “de-meritious” behavior.
- The younger the student, the more time that you will spend teaching the positive and proper behavior...what you are looking for instead of resorting to throwing demerits of punishment at students.
- Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS or ROAR) was in your classroom before the demerit system. There is a reason why it is first.
- Students should NOT be consumed with fear that they are going to receive demerits but should have a respect for the boundary that is in place.
- Make the invisible visible. Sometimes students forget the boundary that is in place.
- Remind students of the presence of a guardrail before they actually run into it.
- If a verbal reminder is enough to prevent an actual infraction, then use it.
- It is much easier having a conversation with a parent when we are able to point out that the child was getting really close through warnings and then made a conscious choice to cross the line anyway.
- Demerits should be given when there is a wanton desire to be defiant.
- The Lord disciplines those that He loves.The same is true for students. Teachers discipline those they love but there must be no mistaking that the teacher loves those in their class.
- The Old Testament Law was fulfilled in New Testament Love.
- Our system should be viewed as one that disciplines and not one that punishes (see Why We Don’t Punish Our Kids below).
- Punishment is an easy (and wrong) approach to correcting behavior while discipline is hard (and the correct) approach to correcting behavior.
- Seek to transform the heart in the discipline and in the consequences that are meted out.
Thank you for your good work, each and every day!
The Gospel Coalition Articles
- Teach proactively, rather reactively.
- Give both consequences and rewards.
- Enforce the rules you give.
- The method of discipline must be effective.
- Catch them doing right
- Discipline seeks a changed heart.
- Discipline seeks a changed relationship.
