Five Effective Strategies
1. Teach and promote Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) from the start of the school year. Social and emotional learning (SEL) enhances students' capacity to integrate skills, attitudes, and behaviors to deal effectively and ethically with daily tasks and challenges (CASEL, 2016). If you make it a priority to begin with students will learn and reap the benefits of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, responsible decision making, and relationship skills for life (CASEL, 2016). Furthermore, incorporating SEL into the classroom creates a more inclusive classroom community and saves teachers time and effort later from addressing negative behavior, conflict management, and student achievement later.
2. Publicly praise the positive behavior students demonstrate and privately correct students negative behavior and actions (Booker, 2016). Sometimes, it is unavoidable that negative behavior must be addressed in front of other students, however, privately correcting negative behavior allows teachers to better equip students with alternative options for acting out, allows teachers to better understand the root of the behavior, and provide students with reflective questioning. It also allows teachers to focus their attention in the classroom, obviously, on students demonstrating positive behaviors, and takes away the power from those students who are negatively seeking attention.
3. Collective classroom rewards are powerful behavior, motivation, and academic incentives! Harness using them in the classroom using a classroom compliments, warm fuzzies jar, or other whole classroom incentives to create motivation, further strengthen the community, promote self regulation, and help students to better understand accountability.
4. Musical transitions can greatly improve behavior, noise level, and the mood and energy level of students (Booker, 2015).
5. Model and demonstrate the behavior your want your students to have. Students have a talent for spotting unfairness and insincerity. Hold yourself accountable, follow your classroom rules along side your students, and set classroom expectations by modeling how to meet them. Teachers that truly value community don't just create it in their classrooms, they also create it among their school, through positive relationships with their co-workers, school personnel and administrators. They are involved in their educational, local, and global community yet maintain professionalism. Teachers that truly value kindness, model it and demonstrate kindness by using it with their students, co-workers, and outside of the school community. As I previously stated, Albert Bandura's studies proved how children learn from adults and the behaviors they view modeled before them so use that power to demonstrate positive behavior, action, and values (Gutshall, 2016). According to Booker, rules must "hold both the teacher and the student accountable" (Booker, 2016).
