It hasn't been easy to try new things in the classroom in the past few years related to classroom management. Because of pandemic restrictions and all of the shifts in delivering instruction, there's been things I just couldn't do or didn't have the mental space to think about. This year, with restrictions fully lifted and a return to traditional instruction, I had the ability and mental space to try out some different things related to how I run my classroom. Some were successes, but some still need work.
At the end of each school year I do like to spend some time reflecting on what worked and what didn't, so here's a review of the things I tried out this past year.
1. Daily Do Nows
I've done bell work at the start of class in the past, but more recently had switched to having students read independently at the start of class. Since that hasn’t been settling students down the way I want, I decided to move back to bell work.
Starting last summer, I designed a set of Do Nows to help build up and reinforce students' vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, and knowledge of literary terms and word parts. I got a good start on the project before the school year started, but it took me until Spring Break to have a full school year's worth of prompts complete.
You can read more about the planning process for these Do Nows in this blog post and find frequently asked questions in this one. If you are interested in using these Do Nows in your classroom, you can find them here.
2. Good News Notes
These quick notes home were great for reinforcement of positive behaviors. Despite being in sixth grade, these kind of things still matter to students. Students who didn't get one always wanted to read their peers' and asked where theirs was.
On the front side of the note is a checklist of behaviors I would possible praise in my classroom, which might be a little different in a different subject area class or based on what another teacher values. On the back space was room to write a note.
Throughout the year, I tracked who I gave them out to on a Google Sheet of names by class period, which also helped me to see who I wasn't noticing good things about. Once I gave one to each student, I cleared my tracker and started over. Each time I gave these notes out, I also emailed home to let parents know to ask about the good news. This also helped build up positive rapport with families.
You can make a copy of these notes (and personalize them if desired) here.
3. Free Time Friday
My hope that Free Time Friday would be an easy whole class incentive to implement and manage, one that also wouldn't cost me anything. The idea was that each class would earn minutes toward free time on Fridays, which might be free time on their devices, playing card or board games, or just chatting with friends. However, it just never worked as smoothly or effectively as I wanted it to. I'm not sure if it was me, the students, or the system.
After a few tweaks what worked best, though still not as effectively as I'd like, was setting a specific behavior target like coming to attention or being prepared with independent reading books. Students would earn a minute each time they met the target, which was added to the 5 minutes I started them with each week. They couldn't lose minutes, but they had to earn at least 1 minute to get the 5 minutes I gifted them.
4. Pencil Sign Out
Pencils have been a problem for a long as I have been a teacher. As part of our sixth grade supply list, we ask families to purchase a certain number of pencils with them at the start of the year. Something new we tried this year at the beginning of the year was to have students put a certain number of pencils in their pencil cases and the remainder in a ziplock bag that homeroom teachers kept for them for when students needed it later. Some students managed this well, some didn't, and by the time my student teacher left in May, all my extra pencils were gone.
I don't mind giving a student or two a pencil as needed, but I am not interested in supplying unlimited pencils for the same students daily. I tried doing a pencil sign out in the past with some success, so I clipped 6 pencils up on the board and started having students sign out a pencil if they needed to borrow one.
I also sent a generic email home to all families to let them know students' pencil supplies were low. I then specifically emailed home if a student needed a pencil two or more days in a row to let their families know they still needed a pencil restock.
I wasn't always great about immediately remembering to get the pencil back at the end of class, but combined with emailing home, it worked better than just handing out pencils to the same students every single day.
5. Hand Signals
I am not sure why I never tried this before. An instructional coach had suggested it earlier in the year, but I resisted and completely regret it. Students had clearly used them in other classes or previous grades because the signals caught on very quickly and students needed few reminders about using them.
I have signals for question, restroom, water, pencil, agree, disagree, and connection. Using these signals cuts down on so much of the noise, especially at the start of class, that makes my head want to explode.
You can make a copy of these signals (and personalize them if desired) here.
6. Absent Work On Board
I was never great at managing work for absent students, so this year I started writing their name on the paper and hanging it on the front board. It is easy to point to when students returned. I did the same with papers that got left behind instead of put away in folders.
7. Class Tracking Sheet
After my student teacher left this year, I doubled down on all of the small behavior issues that she hadn't been addressing, so these sheets were really helpful for taking notes. I created a one page grid for each class with each student's name and columns for each day of the week.
In each day's box I could make note of positive behavior (something I wanted to write a good news note home about) or negative behavior. It was also where I kept track of who repeatedly needed a pencil. These sheets were perfect for a quick check of completion of an activity or assignment or recording scores for a paper assignment that I would later transfer to my grade book.
You can make a copy of this tracking sheet to customize for your class here.
I would say six out of seven of these tries were a complete success, with Free Time Friday being something I'll try to rework or replace with another incentive for next year. Let me know in the comments if you try any of these ideas with success!
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