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STRATEGY
Control Your Anxieties with Proactive Attitudes
Despite your anxiety, you can feel confident that you will soon learn how to manage all of
your students' complicated discipline problems. It is understandable that you may feel anxious if you are not able to manage all of them successfully at first. As you gain experience and confidence in your ability to cope with the daily events in your classroom, your anxieties will lessen.
One way to control your anxiety as you learn how to control your class is to adopt proacttive attitudes that put you on the right track. These five strategies will keep your confidence
level high while your daily experiences help you learn how to handle behavior problems
- Put school rules and classroom rules to work. If you consistently enforce school and classroom rules, your students will soon stop testing their limits. Because these sets of rules already have consequences attached, you will be able to act quickly without having to agonize over the right course of action to take.
- Motivate and encourage students. If you are generous with your praise and
appreciation, you will establish a strong bond with your students that will help keep them
on the right track. When you motivate and encourage students, you improve
self-esteem, which in turn will eliminate many behaviors that arise when students
do not feel valued by their teacher or their classmates.
- Deliver meaningful, interesting, and well-planned lessons. Students
busily engaged in meaningful and interesting work will not have time to misbehave.
When you plan lessons well, students will find it easier to be successful. Success breeds more success, and that will eliminate many problems.
- Have confidence in yourself. You will find it easier to control your emotions as you begin to see that you really can teach and maintain control of a group of students. Do not forget that the most important factor in every successful plan for managing
classroom discipline is the teacher. You—and no one else—can control the disciplinary climate for your students.
- Take every day as an opportunity to add to your knowledge. Even your setbacks
will teach you something about how to manage your class. As you get to know your
colleagues, you will have a large supportive network of people who are willing to help
you. And each successful day will make it easier for your students to trust you and
for you to learn more about them.
Excerpted from Section Fifteen, "Handle Behavior Problems Effectively," of The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide, by Julia G. Thompson. Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Thank you, Julia G. Thompson and Jossey Bass, for contributing this month's strategies!
If you would like to contribute to our newsletter, please contact Mike Rogers at Affiliates@EverythingAboutLearning.com. |
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