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Part 2 of this free online resourse focuses again on the need of students to belong but this time explores building strong and positive staff/student relationships to prevent classroom management issues. It even includes a link to a fun "get to know you" survey you can have your students complete! Knowing your students (their likes, dislikes and triggers) and establishing postive relationships is perhaps the most important step in preventing classroom management issues.

Part 4 of this free online resourse dealves deeper into the need for students to feel empowered and using praise and encouragement to help meet this need and in turn prevent classroom management issues. It offers specific strategies to improve praise including how to structure it and when it is appropriate.

This site has a section (General) aimed at the student teacher (including a quiz on classroom management styles) as well as full timers. There are numerous sections detailing help for teachers in the social studies which include, besides the obvious sections on history and geographry, sections on critical thinking, student questioning, games et cetera. The subsections are quite good (under History for example there is an article: "A Relevant Approach to History (At Risk Leaners)" that outlines a lesson on time for students having a hard time grasping that concept. All of the lesson plan ideas and articles as downloadable as MS Word docs for easy retrieval off of the site.

Classroom management is a big part of fruitful group work. How groups are made and students' understanding of group work are two big factors in how much students get out of group activities. This website lists the many ways that groups can be made. Those new to me were knowledge/subject grouping, skill/strategy grouping and student choice grouping.

You cannot ignore bad behaviour or it will just get worse. Here are some basic rules to dealing with bad behaviour: 1-bad behavior, not bad person 2-act but do not react 3-analyze, then respond 4-be consistent and fair The article continues to discuss other issues like inattention, side conversations, heckling, threatening and fighting. In the extreme case of students fighting one another, you should never put yourself between the fighters unless you are certain you can end it with little harm to anyone. The article is from changingminds.org and contains many other great articles.

This website has different categories for stages in a teaching career. There are links for beginning teachers, substitute teachers, mentor teachers and students. They have teaching tips, articles, and blogs and you can also join an email discussion list. I like that you can connect to different aspects of education from one location.

This website is a little like a blog with teachers from all over the world sharing their strategies on dealing with behavior problems

A neat way to make a visual representation of desired class volume levels that can be placed somewhere where all students can see it and be reminded of what is expected of them in terms of their volume. Probably a good strategy for primary/junior level

Emotional intelligence in my eyes is related to the restorative justice, but concentrates on the skills needed to use restorative justice. It is more of an awareness of their own emotions, their peers emotions and being able to manges emotions and not lash out at peers.

This article talks about what they are doing in California to help new teachers with classroom management. Schools will pay for a supply teacher for the day while the new teacher observes a veteran teacher in the classroom. The best piece of advice that the article gives is a quote from a student. Take a quick read to find out what she says....

Behavior contracts, rules and good ol' affirmation are the key points in this page. A music classroom is a unique place in that it can get very noisy very quickly, and so an established classroom routine and set of rules are essential to the smooth running of a music classroom. Somewhat lengthy, but the ideas presented are applicable in virtually any classroom.

Beth Lewis outlines her ideas around class meetings and community circles. Practical, useful and definitely applicable to multiple grade levels. Try it out if you want to work on character development or building community in your classroom.

This site outlines eight points about what teachers can do to keep their students engaged and, therefore, quiet. While it doesn't target specific strategies, perse, it does hit upon some broader practices. There are also some great links such as "How do I Keep My Students Away from Me?" posted before the article's main text.

The article by Gary Maclean discusses the importance of management in the classroom. He defines management as "designed to bring students to their ultimate objective". Gary briefly outlines five elements of classroom management: organization, simplify, cleaning, standardize and sustain. Most of the article was fairly self explanatory, but the one element I found interesting and very useful that I had not thought of before was cleaning. A busy classroom gets messy, therefore cleaning should be a daily activity. This is not an occasional activity and should be done at the end of the school day. In conclusion, Gary presents us with a great article on classroom management and includes five important elements.

Another short set of high school classroom management techniques. This author outlines some elements affecting older students' lives that do not as often pertain to primary, junior and intermediate students. Building on these, the article emphasizes good connections with students, and positive environments, suggests use of humour in class, but recommends sticking to private praise and discipline.

A helpful article that links off to a number of useful topics such as classroom management, teaching tips and the like specifically oriented towards the new substitute teacher - useful for our immediate futures!

The following video includes very helpful suggestions on classroom management. These suggestions include: creating structure in the classroom, what to do if interrupted during a lesson, and the importance of promoting student independence and responsibility.

This article contains some ideas/tips on how to deal with unexpected emotional situations and for planned "hot topics". Conflict resolution and the need to listen carefully are discussed.

This is a good, in-depth read about how to effectively run classroom meetings in your own class. It talks about what classroom meetings promote amongst your students, some objectives you can address, ways to deal with challenging situations, and how to set it up for different age groups, and some questions you can use to start communication. If you're interested in implementing classroom meetings in your next practicum (or later on as a teacher), this document will give you everything you need to get started.

This video is the other part of the story (part two of the video posted under engaging students of today) on using technology to engage our students when we teach. As teachers we need to be life long learners and implementing technology is part of that. Using technology in the classroom will engage our students and hopefully result in fewer classroom disruptions that require management strategies!