Classroom management will probably be the hardest thing for me as a new, inexperienced teacher. In the pages that follow I discuss various strategies I have tried and plan to use in my classroom to keep behaviors at their best, and allow for a positive classroom experience. Some of the ideas I have not been able to personally try out due to the time when I entered into my student teaching. However, there are strategies that I have tried and will use in my own classroom.

The first thing to do in order to set the school year off on the right foot is to have a list of published rules, made up with both the teacher and the student input is a must. This way there is no question as to what is right or wrong. Another item that both teachers and students should develop together is a list of rewards and consequences. Once again this provides the students with the knowledge before they act as to what the consequence will be. This will assist the student in making "good choices", because they will know ahead of time what is expected of them. I feel it is very important to keep the parents informed of the rules and the consequences and rewards in the classroom. By keeping the parents informed it makes the job much easier if there is a need for punishment. The consequences need to be appropriate for the action. For example, if a student does not do their homework, a consequence might be to stay in from recess to finish the work. However, if the student habitually forgets to do homework, a letter or call home would be an appropriate action.

Once the list of consequences and rewards has been established a good classroom behavior plan is needed. Students are not always perfect, and teacher cannot expect them to be. During my student teaching I came across a classroom behavior plan that I feel I will use in my own classroom. This is illustrated here. I took a display board and placed colorful pockets with the students numbers on the front. Each student was given three cards, in three colors: green, yellow, and pink, and a plain white card with their name on it. In the lower corners were pockets labeled "hot lunch" and "packers" where the students would place their white cards in the appropriate pocket, either packing a lunch or buying. This helped me immensely with the attendance and lunch count procedures. I could simply look at the display to see who was absent, and could count the number of packers more quickly then I previously could.

As I said before this was a means for behavior management. As the day progressed if a student was misbehaving, they were told to "pull a card". The students are to then fill out a form with two questions: "what I did wrong" and "next time I will…" this way the actions are in the student’s own handwriting and wording. If three cards were pulled in one day, the student would have to attend work-study. On Friday, the reports were mailed home to the parents, to keep them informed on the actions of their child. This seemed to work well, because there was no argument, they simply pulled the card and there was no discussion needed. A special reward can be offered to those students who do not have to pull a card for a week and a whole class activity if no one pulls a card for the week.

One problem with managing a classroom is all the paperwork. Where do students put the paper work, by paper work I mean homework and permission slips. In my classroom for my student teaching I had a filing system where the students would place their papers in the appropriate hanging file. I could check off the homework when I had time, which was usually when they were in a special class, or that night while I graded the papers. That solved the paperwork problem for the children, they knew the expectations and were not trying to hand me papers. Now that the problem with handing in papers was solved, I still had to figure out a way to pass the papers back to the students. My cooperating teacher had already established a series of mailboxes where the graded papers were place, then on Tuesdays they were taken home. I feel this system worked great. This way the papers were out of my way and the parents knew when to expect to see the homework papers.

Another good way to keep parents informed would be a weekly classroom newsletter, which can be easily done on a computer, and printed off for the parent’s review. The newsletter can contain items such as the new topics the class will be covering, any parties coming up, field trips or general classroom news. A high tech version of the newsletter could be placed on a web page. Newsletters are becoming more popular in education, and I feel I will utilize them to help keep the communication lines open.