When you feel like you are loosing them, get them standing and doing a Brain Break. They take only a minute or two, need no real preparation or fancy supplies and they can contribute huge dividends to your classroom management by allowing students to re-engage after a mental shift. They can be done with students of any age, usually make you laugh and challenge your brain often by crossing your mid-line thus engaging both hemispheres. They have even been suggested for use during exams and standardized tests. They are backed up by some action research I found on http://abllab.com/ which even shows some cool brain scans illustrating the difference in mental activity when someone was active right before or not! Definite food for thought to do more than your DPA to keep them engage, learning and not creating mischief!

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!

As new teachers we spend lots of time worrying about practicing good classroom management strategies but if we focus more energy on teaching using what is important to students in this digital age we might not have as many classroom issues to deal with. This short video reminds us to be aware of how we are teaching our students not just what we are teaching them. If our first thought is always, "is this genuinely engaging for my students,or could I make it more relevant to them" I think we will all become better teachers.

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.

This is a section of a website designed for teachers by teachers. It has been going for 15 years and has a section on classroom management. This article is posted by a teacher in Ireland and lists some organizational practices aimed at new teachers (some are common sense but good to review). There is another post further down on this site titled IDEAS FOR NEW MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHERS GRADES: 6-9 in this one, I love the idea that classroom management involves personalization to be successful.