Classroom Management Strategies Guide – 5 Foundational Techniques for Student Success

What are Effective Classroom Management Strategies?

Five primary classroom management practices have been identified that work together to promote better student behavior. (And there are many options for other classroom management strategies that fit within these five). The five practices include

1. Maximize structure and predictability
2. Post, teach, review, monitor, and reinforce expectations
3. Actively engage students in instruction
4. Implement a continuum of responses to acknowledge appropriate behavior
5. Implement a continuum of responses to inappropriate behavior

1. Maximize structure and predictability

This classroom management strategy involves two main elements to build structure, including (a) setting up the classroom layout, and (b) establishing classroom routines.

When designing the layout of your classroom, it’s helpful to consider what will increase the likelihood that students are engaged in learning and prevent or limit disruptive behaviors. This might begin with considering what kinds of actively engaging learning strategies you plan to employ and what desk/furniture arrangements lend themselves to student success (e.g., table groups vs. rows for more partner & small group activities).

It’s also important to think about movement in the classroom, both for yourself and your students. Active supervision (including moving around the classroom, engaging with students, and giving them feedback frequently, especially specific positive feedback) is a powerful predictor of better student behavior. Active supervision requires free, easy movement around the classroom, so make sure you consider spacing between desks to give yourself room to get around (as much as possible–I know some of you are out there with 40 students in a broom closet, so extra space is a challenge!).

Providing room for traffic flow also prevents congestion of students. And clusters of students, especially during transitions and down-times, can be a predictor of problematic behavior. Give students space to move if you can, and consider spacing in areas they may be likely to gather (e.g., pencil sharpener, homework cubby).

Establishing and teaching classroom routines is a critical part of classroom structure to help students fluidly meet expectations during common, daily activities. When routines are well-established, students know just what to do and when. And common challenges like transitions end up much smoother, with far fewer disruptions and increased time for instruction.

Consider for example the transition routine in this clip:

Although some find this degree of structure to be a bit too intense (or even militaristic!), take a moment to consider what we see happening. Students know exactly what to do (e.g., stand up, push in chairs) and where to go (i.e., a specific carpet square). And what happens?? Consider: when does instruction begin? Before they even make it to the carpet! Students are choral responding before the transition is even complete. Transitions between instructional activities are where we often lose a lot of time and experience a lot of problem behavior that carries over into our next activity. However, because of this teacher’s tight transition, it’s like she created time that didn’t exist before!

So how do they do this?

Just good kids? Offer them a pizza party to pretend just for this video?

No, it can happen in real life with real students. If we teach them. Anything we want the students to do, we have to teach. And that, of course, doesn’t mean just telling them. We model the routine, engage in guided practice, and give opportunities for independent and natural practice, all with feedback along the way. And we reteach at different times throughout the school year to ensure students maintain these skills.

One last note on routines: some might see the clip above and think yes, of course, this is just for elementary kids. My response is Heck No! All ages of students benefit from routines (and all of the classroom management strategies I’m addressing here). You might adjust the language and steps you use to be more appropriate for your student population. That said, I’ve seen some amazing classroom transition routines in high schools that included students with (usually) very challenging behavior following right along.

2. Post, teach, review, monitor, and reinforce expectations

The next classroom practice is to establish a small set of expectations of what you want students to do universally, pretty much across all contexts and situations. These expectations are positively stated containers that encompass all the desired behavior you want from students.

Ideally, these are already established school-wide. A common example you’ll find in a lot of schools is Be Respectful, Be Responsible, Be Safe. Think about how these tell students what you want from them all the time. It doesn’t matter if they’re in small groups, walking the hallway, eating lunch, going to the bathroom, whatever—the expectation is always to be respectful, responsible, and safe. Even if your school doesn’t have these (or they’re dead in practice, just written on faded, ignored posters on a wall somewhere), you can establish your own.

Within these expectations, you can establish a small set of rules, which are clear definitions of what it looks like to follow expectations during specific activities, routines, or situations. For example you might describe what you want from students to be responsible during certain instructional routines, like whole-group instruction, small group work, independent work, etc.

A great way to do this is with a classroom teaching matrix, like this:

Classroom Teaching Matrix from Creating a Classroom Teaching Matrix Brief – Center on PBIS

Figuring these expectations and rules out is just part of the journey. Just like with routines, these need to be taught and reviewed throughout the year. And as part of your active supervision, you can be looking for students who are actually following your expectations and acknowledge their good work to reinforce what you want in your classroom.

But shouldn’t they know all this already? Or shouldn’t someone else have taught them how to behave?? (hint, hint: their parents?!) Well, yes, no, maybe so…

What I try to emphasize is if students haven’t been effectively taught appropriate school behavior, then who’s going to do it? I can wish all I want that someone else would step up, but as a professional, I know it’s going to come down to me in a lot of cases. And this is totally in our wheelhouse—as teachers, we’re well-equipped to teach behavior.

My last thought on that is that even if it’s older students who’ve been around for a long time, they’ve never been your student before. They don’t know how to be your student. And I bet you do things differently than some of your colleagues. Perhaps there’s a teacher down the hall who seems all loosey-goosey with students, and that kind of controlled chaos drives you nuts. You’d never do things that way—your classroom is a place of order and peace.

Or maybe you’re the free spirit, and you’d never want to teach like a drill sergeant. Well, how do students know the difference? Especially when they have many different teachers.

It all comes down to what we teach them.

All students do better when they know exactly what we expect of them, and especially students who tend to struggle with challenging behavior.

3. Actively engage students in instruction

Now we’re into the classroom management strategy that might speak to your heart—good instruction. It turns out students behave better when involved in great teaching.

And that’s the key—they have to be involved. Actively engaged in instruction. Not just passive recipients.

This is some crazy rocket science, I know, but it turns out the more time students spend actively engaged in their learning, the more they learn! Shocking, I know!

“The relationship between engaged time and student achievement has the same scientific status as the concept of homeostasis in biology, reinforcement in psychology, or gravity in physics.”

Researcher David Berliner

A simple idea, obviously, but so very important to our work. When actively engaged, not only do students learn more, they behave better. It’s more difficult for engaged students to be disruptive or distracted or to seek out *fun* diversions from instruction.

So it’s important to maximize instructional activities that actively involve students.

One simple practice is to include strategies that increase opportunities to respond for all students during instruction. Opportunities to respond are any method a teacher uses where students must do something, such as asking a question or choral responding (like in the transition video above) or other strategies like think-pair-share.

A traditional instructional strategy has been for teachers to ask a question and have one or two students give an answer. If you used a heat map of the seating chart to see who participated, I bet you wouldn’t be surprised to find it’s the same few students who answer most of the questions. Then, there’s a few more who occasionally answer. And there are some that never answer anything. Students know they can disengage (and do) with this approach.

Researchers have done a ton of studies around teachers increasing opportunities to respond for all students, including students with very challenging behavior, finding that students become more actively engaged, behave better, and learn more. Who wouldn’t want that??

4. Implement a continuum of responses to acknowledge appropriate behavior

Next, it’s important to think about what the heck we’re gonna do when students actually do what we want them to. When they exhibit the kind of behavior we want. The things we taught them.

When we respond in positive ways to desired behaviors, it has a powerful impact on student behavior and the climate in our classroom. And we’re more likely to see more of those behaviors in the future.

So one of the most important classroom management strategies we can employ is to acknowledge and reinforce the appropriate behavior we want to see in our classrooms.

Here we can think of a continuum or spectrum of planned responses to appropriate behavior.

On the most practical end of the spectrum, we can simply positively acknowledge desired behavior when we see it. The best way to do this is through behavior-specific praise, which is basically just telling a student what they did well (e.g., “great job raising your hand first”).

You might choose to implement more intensive evidence-based reinforcers to support appropriate behavior. In the middle of the spectrum, this might be something like occasional group contingencies (i.e., students in the class earn a reward if one or more of them meet certain behavior expectations, depending on how you set it up) or individual contingencies with specific students who need a bit more support (e.g., a behavior contract).

Token economies can take more effort to set up and run but offer a powerful way to promote better student behavior. I’ve seen a lot of teachers implement some version of scholar dollars where students earn classroom money that can be exchanged occasionally for certain privileges or rewards.

Note that these reinforcers don’t have to be tangible items like candy if that isn’t your thing (or you wallet’s thing!). You can go a long way with just the power of your words through positive feedback or with certain privileges (e.g., a homework pass, break pass, time for a preferred activity, seating choice).

5. Implement a continuum of responses to inappropriate behavior

Last—and I think last for a reason— is to think about what the heck we’re gonna do when students don’t do what we want them to.

This is where teachers sometimes try to start when thinking about classroom management: what do we do when kids misbehave? (And really, we often mean: what punishments will work?)

But the classroom management strategies we’ve discussed so far are about setting up students for success in the first place, and assuming that they can, in fact, be successful with the right support.

That said, there’s no behavior strategy that’s a miracle cure.

Students are still going to engage in inappropriate behavior at time, even if we implement the first four strategies very well. It’ll be less often than without those strategies, but still a reality. Just like academics—even with our best instruction, students still make errors. And some more than others.

It’s helpful to think of misbehavior as errors that require intervention and more instruction. Great teachers have an array of possible responses when students are struggling to master academic content. And it’s just the same for behavior.

So just like the previous classroom practice, here we want to plan a continuum of possible responses to inappropriate behaviors ranging from simple to more intensive.

On the simple, practical end, we can still rely on the power of our words through feedback. Corrective feedback, in particular, which is when we give brief, specific, corrective information to a student about what we want them to do instead.

This feedback isn’t just a reprimand (e.g., “No!”, “Stop that!”). What’s important is that we tell the student explicitly what we want to see them do. They’re more likely to do it! (Imagine if we just said “No!” or “Stop that!” and moved on when students made academic errors without any instruction or guidance).

A more moderate effort response might be to spend some time individually re-teaching expectations to the student, especially if we’re seeing a pattern of the same problem behavior.

There are other strategies we can plan that can be powerful agents of change when implemented appropriately such as planned ignoring (when a student is misbehaving to get teacher attention) or time out from positive reinforcement (which is a brief, structured removal of a student from a reinforcing activity/setting).

And we may need to have some practical interventions in our toolbox to improve the likelihood of certain students’ success. I share about those on this site, such as precision requests, choice, and behavior momentum. Keep in mind, though, that successful behavior interventions rely on having a strong classroom management foundation.