Reddit reviews Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College

I teach 7th Grade in a Title I inner city school. I totally understand your feelings. Don't give up yet! Since my first year, the things that improved my teaching / classroom management the most were:

1. Reading Teach Like a Champion - really helped me put my classroom needs into actual techniques. As a beginning teacher, it's really frustrating to hear admin and mentors give advice in platitudes. This gives actual techniques that you can apply.
   
   
2. Changing my curriculum to favor hand-on approaches (interactive notebooks, lots of cutting and pasting, etc.) instead of more traditional notes and worksheets.
   
   
3. Creating a Rewards System in my classroom. It doesn't have to be big or expensive, but low income kids will do a lot for food and candy. Reward for participation and good behavior. Make them have to earn several of something to get a prize, so you don't have to constantly pay out.
   
   
4. Try to lead with positivity and remain calm when things go badly. You are the leader of this classroom. You can handle it when things go awry. At this age, they really do want to do well and to please you. Give them a chance to buy in before you hit them over the head with difficult work. Support them and praise whenever you can. I know it's hard to find those times, but it makes a difference.
   
   
5. Use whatever discipline system you have. Send out kids if you need to. You need to protect your learning environment. Be clear about what your expectations are - you can do this without yelling and screaming. Kids want a safe, calm place where they can learn. Give that to them by using your resources and not allowing kids to derail your lessons. They will respect you more if you have a low tolerance for shenanigans.
   
   Good luck!! Feel free to PM if you want to vent or have any questions.
   

What consequences are you giving? Do they make sense? Would working on the major problem behavior of the worst offenders help? Sometimes it's one kid influencing others to be naughty.

I recommend Collaborative Problem Solving with the worst kids. Here are the forms.

Secondly, I recommend reading Teach Like a Champion.

Lastly, I recommend Teaching with Love and Logic.

The first two books I typically recommend for teachers are The First Days of School and Teach Like a Champion. Harry Wong, especially, is a leader in teacher development.

There's often a myth that kids with mild-moderate special needs should be taught differently than non-disabled kids, but the literature doesn't really bear that out. They just are less resilient than their peers to poor teaching techniques, so evidence-based techniques become more important for their success.

If your kids have moderate-severe impairments, I would suggest some different reading materials.

What an awful situation.

Take it bird by bird--the most important thing right now is (like you said!) going to be management, and it sounds like management is going to be pretty much impossible in your context without relationships with the kids.

I found Teach Like a Champion super helpful when I was starting out--very concrete strategies, and I liked the videos. I thought it translated fine to a middle school context. I didn't love The First Days of School, but I know a lot of other folks do. It helped me to watch videos--I liked this one a lot in terms of the level of structure you'll want while you get settled.

Consistency, structure, relationships.

One other note, though - you can't pour from an empty cup. Sounds like your admin is dealing you a pretty tough hand. Make sure to take care of yourself this year.

When you start your job start asking around about your mentor! Try and meet with your mentor and other people down your hallway as much as possible. Ask questions and never feel like you’re a bother. You’re all in it together!

If you’re nervous about student behavior, start asking around about their PBIS procedures. Do they have a bounce system? In school suspension?

Also read The First Days Of School as well as Teach Like A Champion .

You’re going to do find! Students respond to teachers who genuinely love what they do and care about them.

I´d say that the key to successful classroom management is transparency and consistency. Transparency because your rules need to be known and understood by all students; they should never have to guess at what you want (or don´t want), but know in advance. Whenever you dish out sanctions, you should not have to explain why - the student should be familiar with the rules and know that he/she broke them. If this is not the case, students will unknowingly break rules, you will punish them and thus frame yourself as a mean, unfair teacher. Understanding the rules is step one. This leads to the second point, consistency: sanctions should work almost like an if-this-then-that statement, meaning that you apply the same rules for all students, every single lesson, and as soon as a problem arises. If you are inconsistent, the system isn´t transparent and students will begin to test your limits - but if your limits are the same every single lesson, they will quickly learn them and, hopefully, learn to respect them.

Second, it´s important to understand that successful classroom management arises from a combination of rewards and sanctions - but many people forget the former. You will want to reward model behavior in order to communicate to the model student (and the rest of the class) that this is the sort of behavior you are looking for - this goes hand-in-hand with the transparency and consistency concepts mentioned above. If done correctly, you should see an increase in desirable behavior. Rewards don´t have to be tangible; a word of praise will do, or a clap on the shoulder, or a smile. Positive reinforcement, if done right, is often more impactful than sanctions. An example could be the following:

>In my classroom, students wait outside for me to open the door. I greet them at the door, they enter, take their seats and take out their notebooks, homework diaries and pencil cases. I have a poster outside my classroom to remind students of this, and it is drilled a bit in the first week of school.In the beginning, lots of students will forget to do it. At this point, I am tempted to frown and say something like "Remember what I told you last time? Take out your equipment!" The farther we get through the school year, the harsher my voice and the greater my frustration. But there´s another way to deal with it; find the one student who has taken out his/her equipment it and say "Maria has taken out her equipment, well done." This statement achieves the same as the former but is much more positive. You have stated your expectations and highlighted model behavior.

Role-modeling behavior like this works for a ton of things. Imagine that you ask a question to the class and three students raise their hands. Tell the class "I see three hands raised" - I promise you that a few more will pop up!

If things get more serious (for better or for worse), you should ideally have a whole-school policy in place to fall back on. Before you even start teaching, the first thing to do would be to talk to your line manager, department head or the class teacher to figure out if there are any such systems in place for rewards and punishment. An ideal school should have such a system; for example, merits for exceptional behavior and detentions for unwanted behavior. If there is such a system, most of your problems are already solved since you won´t have to figure out punishment and rewards, but only have to dole them out in accordance with your rules. If there is no such scheme, I recommend that you go through the other posts here - there are some great ideas.

One thing that I would stress in extension of this is that rewards and sanctions for the entire class go against the principles of transparency and consistency. If you teach 40 students and 30 behaved well while 10 misbehaved, do you reward or punish the class? If you reward, then you aren´t being transparent with the 10 - and if you punish, you aren´t with the 30.

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Finally, a quick list in no particular order:

• Be realistic. Don´t set rules that you can´t enforce and don´t be much more (or less) demanding than their other teachers when it comes to creating the rules.
  
• Make sure that the rules are agreed upon by the students. Some teachers like to use their first lesson to, as a class, write a set of rules. You might also consider asking the students what the rules are in their other lessons and work from there - again, consistency from teacher to teacher helps as well.
  
• Make sure that the rules are visible; either as a poster or as a handout glued in their notebooks. Consider getting them translated to your students´ first language. Again, for transparency.
  
• Do not, under any circumstance, compromise with transparency and consistency in the first weeks of teaching in order to give an impression of being that "cool, laid-back teacher" that we all loved when we went to school. If you don´t follow through with sanctions according to your rules, students will think you are a push-over. When you finally do put your foot down, they won´t understand why since you let them break your rules several times before. Transparency and consistency should automatically lead to mutual respect and a good classroom environment; once your students know the rules and follow them, you will only have to punish rarely.
  
• Read up on the topic. Books were already recommended in this thread, so I´ll add mine: Teach Like a Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov. It´s developed from observing great teachers in charter schools in the USA, but most of the techniques are applicable in any classroom.
  
  I hope this helps!
  
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