By Nate Reaven

The question of classroom management has become an issue lately at my summer school. I have always heard of classroom management as something to corral the animals.  I have heard classroom management as the fence surrounding the acceptable, and keeping the unacceptable out of reach. Now, while I just made that simile up, I think it adds value to what it means to have a well-managed classroom.

A fence with a hole will be exploited immediately by the animals inside. Similarly, if I create a hole in my classroom management, my students will exploit this until the end, sealing my downfall as a quality teacher immediately. If I treat one student with any hint of favoritism, or another student with any hint of personal dislike, my students will no longer trust me, and instead attempt to try me as a person, as oppose to challenging themselves as students.

For some reason this does not feel like the silver bullet that I am looking for in my classroom management. So often I have seen teachers fall victim to the “New Teacher Disease,” where they are only able to rule their classroom with discipline and negativity. Instead of praising students for intelligent answers, they will call out students for speaking out of turn or not raising their hands. They believe that a quiet classroom is a good classroom.

I have never really subscribed to this paradigm. I believe that students inherently want to succeed. True, it oddly seems to be cool to be unintelligent amongst urban youth these days, but I sincerely believe that when given the right motivation and finding the right teacher, that intelligence can be seen as the right path to go down. But a student cannot become a passionate learner in a quiet classroom.

Take a second. Think to yourself about the most excited you have ever been in a classroom. Were you silently reading or writing in a corner only academically and intellectually interacting with yourself? Were you listening to the teacher drone on about simple or complex sentences? Or were you instead working on a project? Were you in class interacting with a friend or two about how to make a volcano? Or, were you jumping out of your seat because of the way the teacher expressed their ideas?

I’m not sure what your answer was, but I would bet that it was probably during a time when you were using your hands, your body, your voice and your ability to express yourself. Not just writing down your thoughts and showing them to only your teacher.

Unfortunately, for those new teachers that have contracted the “New Teachers Disease,” this means that their classrooms need to be a tiny bit chaotic (if chaos can be tiny that is). And I welcome that. If my students are not yelling, they are not learning (okay, that might be a little hyperbolic, but wouldn’t that be more fun?).

I guess what I am trying to say is that you need to get your students excited about learning. If they are bored, they will act out. And then they will not be excited about anything except finding a way to get through that hole in your classroom management-fence.