Passion is one of the most powerful tools that a teacher can utilize. I find this to be especially true when teaching math. If a teacher says that they do not like math, then students will think it is okay to also not like math. However, if a teacher shows his or her passion for math, then students will see that it is alright to love math and to be excited by it. Teachers often-times do not realize how much students pay attention to what they do and look to them as role models. This is why teachers can use passion as a powerful tool.

When teachers are passionate about any subject, not just math, they tend to work harder to make sure students are learning and appreciating the material. Personally, I am very passionate about math, and I want students to have the opportunity to become passionate about it as well. I want to engage the students and allow them to perform many activities that will help them learn deeper. By having this passion, I will be able to reach out to those students who are resisting learning and who do not think they need to learn math. They will have ample opportunity to explore math in multiple ways and in multiple forms.

One of my main goals in my future math class is to make math relatable. Students need to know the “why” behind the math they are doing. They need to be able to see how they can apply this to their future lives. By using project based learning, students will be able to tackle real-world problems and then share them with an actual audience. When using project-based learning, it helps if the teacher is passionate about the subject because then they are more likely to put in the time and dedication needed to make the activity work effectively. Passionate teachers can also help to motivate their students to be excited about such projects.

When thinking about my future classroom, I often dream about the posters and bulletin boards that I will have up around my room. I think of the many different ways that I could set up my students desks or tables. Unfortunately, I tend to forget though how truly important the classroom environment is for student success and how many components make up the classroom environment. It is also important to realize that there is more involved with the environment than just the physical layout. Within the classroom environment, there should be consistency, expectations, sequencing with awareness for the length of activities, and an explanation of any changes.

Consistency

Consistency is key in the classroom for many reasons. Without consistency, expectations will not be reinforced and students will not learn them or follow them. Consistency is also key for students who come from an home environment where they are lacking it. They crave the probability of know what will happen in the classroom and having a consistent set of rules and procedures to follow.

Expectations

Having expectations in the classroom is more important than having rules. Rules tell students what they can’t do while expectations tell students what they should be doing. Expectations have a more positive connotation surrounding them, and they do not have a gray area. Students know exactly what they should be doing, and thus it provides them with more structure. However, expectations should not just be posted on the wall, they need to be taught, rehearsed, and reinforced. This will ensure that there is no confusion.

Sequencing and Length of Activities

The length of each activity that is put forth in the classroom should be thought out. Each class period should be planned out and sequenced so that transitions are smooth and students stay engaged. Most middle school students cannot focus and work independently for a whole class period. Activities need to be planned out to retain the students’ interests, which will thus decrease classroom management issues.

Explanation of Changes

Once consistency and probability is established in the classroom, students will resist any changes that are made. If a procedure, routine, expectation, etc. is changed, students will question why it happened and will often push back against it. Teachers must explain why the change occurred and ensure that they are explicitly teaching the new change. Explaining why the change occurred will not completely eliminate resistance, but it will decrease it.

Students crave consistency and probability in the classroom and school environment. Addressing each component of classroom environment provides students with a safe and structured environment for them to succeed and learn.

Almost every student and teacher has heard the phrase about teachers having “eyes in the back of their head.” Skilled teachers always seem to know when there are problems happening in their classroom, and some can even anticipate such problems. I believe that one of the key reasons why these teachers are so good at this is because they use the classroom practice of active supervision.

What is it?

Active supervision is not walking aimlessly around the room without a purpose and only addressing misbehaviors. It is the constant monitoring of both student behavior with regards to expectations and student learning. Active supervision is the teacher constantly moving around and interacting with the students in a positive manner. Teachers should be moving around supervising work and activities to make sure students are on task and are not struggling the with assignment or activity. Teachers should also be scanning the room in an intentional way by frequently looking at all students. Active supervision is a constant practice that should be taking place at all times within a classroom.

My Experiences with Active Supervision

My time as a substitute over the past two years has given me a lot of time to practice active supervision. Looking back on my experiences, I have realized that I have used active supervision in some form since my first day substituting, but I have also improved my skills over the years. At first, I would just use scanning while I stayed at the front of the classroom because I felt that this was the best way to monitor the class. After a few times substituting with a livelier group of middle school boys though, I learned that I needed to move around the room. This lead me to the realization that proximity is key to active supervision. Whenever I saw a student beginning to display a non-expectation for the classroom, I would simply walk over by them and they would usually begin to fix the problem. I could do this without disrupting the entire class or stopping the flow of instruction, and it kept the problem from escalating. Interacting was the last component of active supervision that I consciously implemented. Previously, I would solely interact with the students to see if they were having problems with what they were working on, but I did not always use positive reinforcement. It took about a year of subbing before I began using positive reinforcement with my speech to reinforce positive behavior and decrease unwanted behaviors. Instead of asking students to be quiet or addressing individual students to ask them to stop talking, I would point out tables that I appreciated for following the expectation of working quietly. I immediately began to see an improvement in student behavior and it created a more positive environment in the classrooms that I was substitute teaching in.

Future Goals

Active supervision is a classroom practice that I feel very strongly about because I have seen its positive effects in a classroom firsthand. Changing a few simple words I used and adjusting how I walked around the classroom monitoring students created a more positive and productive classroom environment. For my future classroom, I would really like to practice my interactions with students. Using more positive reinforcement and becoming even more intentional with how I move around the classroom will help to make my active supervision stronger and more fluent.

My personal future behavior plan includes a variety of different plans combined. Mainly, I take plans from Leader in Me, Behavior Intervention Support Team (BIST), and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS). I believe that each of these programs have quality attributes that can help contribute towards a well-rounded behavior plan.

The Leader in Me program focuses heavily on giving leadership opportunities to students. I feel strongly about this because I believe when students can take responsibility for their behavior and for actions that take place in the school they will behave more maturely and as adults. We see this prevalent when we allow students to help us make rules. Students like to have the ability to contribute to rules and to what is occurring within the classroom. In my future classroom, I would like to allow my students to have leadership roles both within and outside of the classroom. This is especially relevant for when I become a principal. I would like for my entire school to have opportunities for students to have leadership roles, such as student council, student-led newspaper, etc., because students are better at holding each other accountable and to a higher standard.

During one of my pre-service teacher classes, we learned the powerful effect that self-reflection can have on students both behaviorally and academically. BIST has “think sheets” that I would like to also use in my behavior plan. These self-reflection sheets would not be used every single time a student displays a nonexpectation in my classroom. Instead, they would be reserved for more personal matters, such as when a student calls another student a hurtful name or some other negative interaction occurs between two students. I believe that these situations are the perfect time to use self-reflection sheets because it is important for students to think about how they are affecting another person and look back on what made them decide to do it in the first place in order to prevent it from happening again.

Another technique I have learned extensively in my pre-service classes is the use of positive reinforcement to both encourage wanted behaviors and discourage unwanted behaviors. PBIS is a major advocate for positive reinforcement both within individual classrooms and the entire school. I would like to use positive reinforcement in my classroom to encourage students to follow expectations and to redirect students who are not following these expectations. For example, if I see a student talking while I am teaching a new concept, I will point out to the whole class a student or group of students who are following expectations and say how I really appreciate how “so-and-so” is being respectful of me and giving me their attention. This will positively reinforce the students who are meeting expectations and redirect students who are not so that they can also begin meeting expectations.

This behavior plan is only the start of what I would like to do in my classroom. As I continue to learn more about classroom management, I am sure that my ideas will grow and develop. I also anticipate them changing once I am in my actual classroom someday and throughout my entire career. Constantly keeping up to date and participating in professional development on current trends in classroom management will help to keep my behavior plan the most effective so that my students will have a safe and productive environment to learn in.

The Seven Key Behavioral Principles:

1. Goals of correction procedures
2. The role of teacher attention in correction procedures
3. The nature of behavioral intensity, escalation, and defusion
4. The nature of behavioral chains
5. The role of behavioral extinction and extinction bursts
6. The power of personal reactions
7. Establishing fluent responses

My Classroom with the Seven Key Principles

When thinking about my future Middle School Math classroom, I have to admit that I most worried about what my classroom management will look like. Middle school students are a unique age group because many things change from when students first enter middle school in 5th/6th grade to when they leave in 8th grade. They go through physical, mental, and emotional changes, which can create some issues, especially when it comes to classroom management. The seven key behavioral principles will help me to become an educator that is skilled at correcting problem behaviors without escalating a situation or distracting other students from their learning. They will also help me to think about how I will handle future problem situations before they arise so that I am not caught completely off-guard whenever they happen. Lastly, I believe that they will help me to remember to step back from a situation and examine it before I respond so that I am handling the situation correctly.

My Favorite Principle

Although I can see the usefulness of each key principle, a few of them stood out to me more than others. The one that stood out to me the most is “The Nature of Behavioral Chains.” I found this one very interesting and beneficial because it allowed me to further examine and understand how every teacher-student response feeds off of each other. An interaction-pathway, which is the word to describe the back and forth responses that occur between a teacher and a student, is an excellent way to see how every response that a teacher gives is reinforcing the student’s previous behavior. This means that when I am educator must think about what response I am giving to my student(s) and thinking about what behavior I will be reinforcing with this response. The interaction pathway also shows how when a situation escalates, the end result or consequence usually only addresses one problem behavior, which is typically the last and most extreme problem behavior. This means that many problem behaviors are not even being mentioned, which can be problematic for future situations and lead to a repeat of similar problems. Understanding how the behavior chain works will aide me in deciding an appropriate response. Even though this one is my favorite, I believe that classroom management is most effective whenever all seven of the key principles are used together.

My Current Experience with the Principles

When I was in middle school, I had the unfortunate experience of having many teachers who had poor classroom management. Looking back, I can see that they tried and did many things correctly, but the similar problem that each of them had was the inability to keep a situation from escalating and their tendency to respond personally to a situation. I remember one instance where a student refused to take a test. The teacher addressed the problem by saying that this student did not respect him and that if he would not respect him then he could leave the classroom. The student and teacher then went back and forth arguing. The scene ended with the teacher writing the student up and the student kicking a desk as he walked out of the room. The teacher responded personally to the situation, which principle six warns against, and he allowed the behavior to escalate, which principle three discusses. When behavioral escalation occurs, a student’s behavior progressively gets worse with each response, which was evident in the example above. A teacher’s goal should be for behavioral defusion, which is when the behaviors get progressively less severe. This shows the situation in deescalating and that the student is headed in the right direction. Responding personally to situations is what I anticipate to be one of the most common classroom management problems that teachers have, especially young teachers. When a teacher responds personally, the students behavior usually escalates because they then feel like they are being personally attacked. I know that I will need to practice and train myself to respond to the behavior appropriately, and to not only monitor what I am saying verbally but also what I am saying with my body language and tone.

Final Thoughts

The main thing I took away from the seven key behavioral principles is the importance of preparing for problem behaviors and situations. Knowing what my goals are when addressing problem behaviors and realizing the impact of my reactions to problem behaviors are extremely important to consider and dig deeper into. Finally, my preparation with regard to each of these principles will help me to keep situations from escalating and to create an environment where students will be respected and a place where I can help them learn how to properly behave both inside and outside the classroom.

Citation: Colvin, G. (2010). Defusing disruptive behavior: In the classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.