When To Reteach Your Classroom Rules Smart Classroom Management
After you’ve taught your classroom rules, you will be tested.
Count on it.
Sometimes it will be immediate and sometimes misbehavior will trickle in later in the week. No matter, you must follow through precisely as you taught and promised.
Student breaks rule and you enforce consequence.
One follows the other like the forming and crashing of a North Shore wave. No hesitating. No reminding. No negotiating.
You’re an NFL referee calling em’ like you see ’em.
Once you prove that you’re all-in committed, the testing will stop. Every. Single. Time. Therefore, in this case, there is no reason to reteach. In other words, testing isn’t a reason.
The answer to being tested is consistent follow through.
However, there are two situations that do call for reteaching. The first I hesitate to even call reteaching.
It’s when you’re reviewing your plan.
For example, the second and third day of school (and more), it’s smart to review your plan in greater detail to make sure every student understands its ins and outs.
Daily review can also limit testing because it shows that classroom management is a priority.
The second situation is critical. It’s something many teachers either miss or misinterpret. It can also lead to disaster and total loss of control.
It’s when more than a small few students are misbehaving at the same time.
In other words, four, five, or even a lot more students begin misbehaving at once or one right after the other. In this case, they’re not testing you.
They’re misbehaving because you didn’t teach your plan with enough clarity, detail, and emphasis or you’ve already proven to be inconsistent. Either way, they’re misbehaving because they believe you’re a pushover.
Thus, the moment you notice multiple students misbehaving, stop everything, cancel whatever you have planned, and reteach your classroom management plan with greater boldness.
Reteach it with double the modeling, double the explicitness, and double the practice. Hammer it home.
Your students must know what does and doesn’t constitute breaking your classroom rules as well as you do and they must believe you mean it. If they don’t, then misbehavior is the result.
Now, it’s important to mention that there is a lot to this article and the strategies mentioned, all of which have been covered extensively on this website and in our books.
However, if there is something in particular of which you need clarification, please let me know below and I’ll put it on the list of future articles.
In the meantime, if you follow the path above and ensure all gray areas are removed and you prove that you do what you say, then you’ll have laid the foundation to a great school year.
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