The Secret to Effective Classroom Management

Keep every student appropriately challenged

Author’s Note: First, I want to welcome to this weekly (Friday mornings) newsletter everyone who participated in my Author Discussion webinars. If you missed them, you can find recordings here. And please share with anyone you think might be interested!

One of the greatest challenges in teaching is managing students’ behavior. You have things you want your students to do in order to learn, which means that at some point you’ll need to tell your students how to behave. And as anyone who has ever worked with young people knows, young people don’t always behave the way we want them to.

So if you want to succeed as a teacher, there are two questions you need to answer.

1) Why do my students misbehave?

2) How can I get them to behave better?

I admit that I’m not an expert in behavior - my thoughts here are only my observations from years of teaching, and what I’ve learned from my colleagues and students along the way. But I can tell you that, in my experience, there’s a hard way to manage student behavior and an easy way. And learning the easy way didn’t just make my life better, but it helped my students learn more too.

Here’s what I’ve figured out.

Why students misbehave

Every young person wants to succeed. Young people want to learn new things, to be recognized for their talent and effort, and to earn the respect of their teachers and peers. I’ve never met a student who wants to do poorly.

So why, in an average class, do so many students misbehave?

When I’ve spoken with my students, observed others’ classes, or reflected upon my own experiences as a student, I’ve discovered three main reasons.

1. Students are bored. At the start of my teaching career, I was perplexed when my strongest students caused behavior problems in class. I knew they liked my content and took pride in doing well. But over time, as I observed them chatting or goofing off, I realized something: they already understood what I was teaching in class, so there wasn’t much point in listening. I had nothing new to offer, so they preferred to socialize or play games. And it was hard to blame them.
   

2. Students are lost. It wasn’t just my advanced students who struggled to behave productively in class. More often, in fact, it was the students who I knew were struggling to understand my content. And while it was tempting to blame their poor performance on their behavior, I eventually realized that the opposite was true: they weren’t paying attention because they weren’t prepared to understand what I was saying. (Imagine sitting through a lecture in a language you don’t understand.) Sitting quietly and listening wasn’t a great use of their time, either.
   

3. Students are distracted. Our students go through all sorts of things at home, then come to school and go through all sorts of things there. It’s inevitable that, some of the time, students may struggle to focus on our content when they face larger challenges outside of class. (Almost two in three Americans report at least one adverse childhood experience before age 18.) And it’s natural for young people to disengage when they have other things on their minds.

Bored, lost, distracted. This image was generated by AI, but it will be familiar to any teacher.

I’m sure there are other reasons why students misbehave. Yet most of the time, at least in my experience, I see them act out for one of three reasons above. 

When students are engaged; they behave well. When they’re bored or lost or distracted, they don’t. It’s as simple as that.

Of course, the conditions that cause students to feel bored or lost or distracted in the first place - their prior knowledge and their experiences outside of class - are beyond your control. But as a teacher, you have to deal with their consequences anyways. That’s part of being a teacher. 

So students come to us bored, or lost, or distracted. What do we do about it?

The hard way to manage behavior

My teacher-training program didn’t go too deeply into the reason students behave or misbehave. Instead, I was told that students would inevitably misbehave, and given a long list of techniques to manage behavior.

I was told, for instance, that:

• My students should SLANT: Sit up, Lean forward, Ask and answer questions, Nod their heads, and Track the speaker.

• I should require all of my students to comply with my directions, 100% of the time - and wait until every student complies before moving on.

• And so on.

So I began my teaching career prepared to rule my classroom. I expected each of my students to do every last thing I said, exactly how I said to do it.

Then I encountered bored, lost, and distracted students.

And as I bet you can imagine, I spent the start of my teaching career feeling pretty frustrated! I stood at the board trying to control my students’ behavior, but I always seemed to end up in behavioral showdowns: I asked a student to do something, that student - who just happened to be bored or lost or distracted at the moment - refused, and we ended up in a no-win standoff, while the rest of the class watched.

Maybe I ended up in these situations just because I wasn’t strict enough… but I didn’t want to be! That wasn’t (and isn’t) me. I went into teaching to help young people grow, not to police their behavior.

These classroom-management techniques really just made me and my students feel angry with each other.

Fortunately, no images of me losing my cool in class exist. But this AI-generated image is pretty much how it felt.

When I reflected on my failures, I realized that my approach failed to address the reasons why my students misbehaved in the first place.

For instance, sitting quietly and listening:

• Won’t challenge a bored student who already understands my content - what that student really needs is something new to learn.

• Won’t help a student who lacks the prerequisite skills to understand, either - what that student really needs is more support.

• Won’t engage a student who is distracted by trauma at home - what that student needs is human connection and encouragement.

In fact, my behavior-control strategies weren’t just failing to address the root causes of my students’ disengagement. They were making that disengagement worse! Constant disputes over behavior consumed my and my students’ valuable time and energy, and they didn’t help anyone learn.

I needed a different approach. And, fortunately, I found one.

The easy way to manage behavior

Success breeds success. When students do well in school, they want to keep doing well - and they’ll behave, to the best of their ability, in ways that help them succeed.

So the best way to manage students’ behavior, I realized, was to create the conditions for every student to succeed.

This is easier said than done - and it requires an approach that provides each learner with the level of challenge and support they individually need.

This meant, for me, that I had to:

1. Digitize direct instruction. When I recorded my instruction on video and stepped down from the front of the room, my students could watch, pause to ask questions, and rewatch if needed - all at their own paces. I could avoid behavior standoffs in front of my class, and address behavior challenges one-on-one.

2. Let students advance at their own paces. My students who were bored needed a challenge, so I let them move through my content quickly. My students who were lost or distracted, on the other hand, needed more time, so I let them take the time they needed. Now each of my students was appropriately challenged - and therefore engaged - every day… and I could give each student appropriate support.

3. Require mastery. Success in school means achieving understanding. So I made sure each of my students understood! When they reached the end of each lesson, each student took a Mastery Check. If they showed understanding, they could advance; if not, they revised and reassessed. This prevented students from getting lost and gave each of my students well-earned self-confidence.

I call this approach the Modern Classroom instructional model:

There’s a lot to this approach - I’ve written a whole book about it! - so I won’t go into the full details here. If you’d like to learn more, you can also take the Modern Classrooms Project’s free online course. 

But I will say that this approach greatly reduced my and my students’ frustration, and let us focus on what really mattered: learning. We had a lot more fun together, too.

And the thousands of teachers who have adopted this approach after me have experienced similar benefits. 

So while you might think that a Modern Classroom, in which students control their own learning, might be harder to manage than is a more traditional classroom, it’s actually the reverse:

In a traditional classroom, students feel bored or lost or distracted, so teachers spend lots of time and energy policing behavior, often in a confrontational way. This fails to address the root causes of students’ misbehavior, and makes disengagement worse.

In a Modern Classroom, students feel appropriately challenged, so they behave productively - and teachers can address behavior challenges that do arise in a personal, one-on-one way. This addresses the causes of misbehavior and creates the conditions for all learners to succeed.

Modern Classrooms can take time and energy to launch and refine. But trust me: once they’re up and running, they make life much easier for teachers and students alike. 

And if you don’t believe me - ask around! The teachers in MCP’s Facebook Group can share how these strategies work for them every day.

Final thoughts

Think, for a moment, about being a student who feels bored or lost or distracted. Would you rather:

1. be told to follow along by a teacher who is frustrated at you for disengaging?

2. be given content that engages you, and support from your teacher when you go off course?

I’d prefer the second option, and I bet your students will too.

So if your students are ever like mine – bored, lost, or otherwise distracted - I hope you won’t blame them, or tell them to sit up straighter. I hope you that instead, you’ll design a classroom that encourages them to be the best learners they can be. And once you do, you will all succeed.

For your consideration

What strategies have you found to be particularly effective - or ineffective - in keeping students engaged?

I’m always eager to learn from readers like you - please comment below!