Read or listen to this as a podcast.

You cannot survive PBL in total chaos - class management matters!

*structure
*time for deep work
*clear behaviour expectations
*noise shouldn't interfere with learning
*accountability through interdependence
*be proactive!

Erin Espinoza's kindergarten classroom encourages children to learn on their own. A classroom profile.

This is a playlist of 191 videos you can do with your students (of various ages) to get them up and moving!

Simply project the video and let the students move along to it.

"Why take brain breaks?
Brain breaks allow children the opportunity to mentally rest their brain by diverting their mind into movements that allow them to:
• refresh
• recharge
• refocus
• regenerate
• release stress
• breathe
Regular brain breaks enhance attentiveness, concentration, focus and accelerate learning by allowing children to release their energy, anxiety and stress. Brain breaks also increase circulation, promote physical fitness and coordination."

Some students misbehave because they are trying to attract teacher attention. Surprisingly, many students who value adult attention don't really care if it is positive (praise) or negative attention (reprimands)--they just want attention!
Unfortunately, instructors with students who thrive on teacher attention can easily fall into a 'reprimand trap.' The scenario might unfold much like this: First, the student misbehaves. Then the teacher approaches the student and reprimands him or her for misbehaving. Because the student finds the negative teacher attention to be reinforcing, he or she continues to misbehave-and the teacher naturally responds by reprimanding the student more often! An escalating, predictable cycle is established, with the student repeatedly acting-out and teacher reprimanding him or her.
Teachers can break out of this cycle, though, by using 'random positive attention' with students. Essentially, the instructor starts to ignore student attention-seeking behaviors, while at the same time 'randomly' giving the student positive attention. That is, the student receives regular positive teacher attention but at times unconnected to misbehavior. So the student still gets the adult attention that he or she craves. More importantly, the link between student misbehavior and resulting negative teacher attention is broken.

Motivating a reluctant student to complete schoolwork is not easy. In a typical classroom, students can choose from a number of sources of potential reinforcement (Billington & DiTommaso, 2003)--and academic tasks often take a back seat to competing behaviors such as talking with peers. One way that teachers can increase the attractiveness of schoolwork is by structuring lessons or assignments around topics or activities of high interest to the student (Miller et al., 2003).In fact, with planning, the teacher can set up a 'trap' that uses motivating elements to capture a student's attention to complete academic tasks (Alber & Heward, 1996). Here is a 6-step blue-print for building an academic 'motivation trap' (adapted from Alber & Heward, 1996).

Students can sometimes have emotional outbursts in school settings. This fact will not surprise many teachers, who have had repeated experience in responding to serious classroom episodes of student agitation. Such outbursts can be attributed in part to the relatively high incidence of mental health issues among children and youth. It is estimated, for example, that at least one in five students in American schools will experience a mental health disorder by adolescence (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999). But even students not identified as having behavioral or emotional disorders may occasionally have episodes of agitation triggered by situational factors such as peer bullying, frustration over poor academic performance, stressful family relationships, or perceived mistreatment by educators.

This Module—a revision of Who's In Charge? Developing a Comprehensive Behavior Management System—highlights the importance of establishing a comprehensive classroom behavior management system composed of a statement of purpose, rules, procedures, consequences, and an action plan. It also provides information about how culture, classroom factors, and teacher actions can influence student behavior (est. completion time: 1 hour).

This Module—a revision of You're in Charge! Developing Your Own Comprehensive Behavior Management Plan—reviews the major components of classroom management (including rules, procedures, and consequences) and guides users through the steps of creating their own comprehensive behavior plan. The module is a companion to Classroom Management (Part 1): Learning the Components of a Comprehensive Behavior Management Plan (est. completion time: 2 hours).

A home screen for your computer that can include a timer, traffic light for noise management, clock, drawing board, and much more!

Grab a tissue and watch the video.

What a wonderful gift to give your students.

Enjoy.

Social and emotional skills development is quickly taking center stage alongside cognitive skills, technical skills, and content knowledge in both the classroom and the workforce. Use this path to learn the fundamentals of how technology helps support social emotional learning in the classroom. Creating a strong community begins with mindfulness. It continues by supporting students through the use of social emotional learning techniques. Flipgrid helps engage students in meaningful ways through reflection activities. Lastly, we tie it all together by empowering educators in the hybrid classroom environment.
The course offers an overview of now various Microsoft products can assist teachers in developing social and emotional skills in their students: Minecraft, Teams, Flipgrid, Sway, OneNote, Reflect.

Thom Gibson shares his ideas on how to design student jobs for your classroom community.
This fits into Distribution of Leadership in our REORDER framework and fosters developing 21st century competencies or skills.

From classroom management, to project ideas, to script writing and planning, the resources in these guides will help you implement creativity with technology across your curriculum.

The guides give strategies for implementing creative technology in: primary literacy, elementary literacy, elementary math, science, STEM, elementary social studies, digital story telling and English language skills.

he teacher's most important objective when faced with a defiant or non-compliant student is to remain outwardly calm. Educators who react to defiant behavior by becoming visibly angry, raising their voices, or attempting to intimidate the student may actually succeed only in making the student's oppositional behavior worse! While the strategies listed here may calm an oppositional student, their main purpose is to help the teacher to keep his or her cool. Remember: any conflict requires at least two people. A power struggle can be avoided if the instructor does not choose to take part in that struggle.

Galeet Cohen, 10th Grade Language Arts teacher at Central High in Pennsylvania, believes that adding humor to her interaction is essential. Galeet reminds us that teachers and students spend long days in classrooms, and humor can make it a good time.Ms. Cohen also uses humor to let students know she is aware of what they are doing and prefers her humor approach to strict rules or detention. She shares that sometimes students are "just testing you" and you can easily diffuse a situation calmly and with humor.

This Module, a DEC-recommended resource, includes information on how to create developmentally appropriate behavior rules for early childhood classrooms so that they link to a given school's behavior expectations. The importance of communication with families about rules and expected behaviors is also stressed (est. completion time: 1.5 hours).

As classroom managers, teachers regularly use commands to direct students to start and stop activities. Instructors find commands to be a crucial tool for classroom management, serving as instructional signals that help students to conform to the teacher's expectations for appropriate behaviors.

Plan for the Unexpected and Help Relieve Stress
Having to cover a class last minute? Need an emergency sub plan? Check out these easy, FREE activities from the CharacterStrong curriculum! Amidst this crazy time, the resources will help you pre-plan for the uncertainty of an educator absence or staff shortage.
Includes resources for:
- Prek-2
- 3-5
- 6-8
- 9-12

This is an excellent program for teaching young kids emotion identification, regulation, and social relationships.

"Emotional ABCs Classroom is a research-based Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum providing teachers (K–3) with 20 sequential Workshops and extensive classroom support materials for Teacher-led, in-class instruction."

This program teaches:
Self-Awareness
Social Awareness
Self-Management
Responsible Decision-Making
Relationship Skills

"Emotional ABCs Workshops are designed for teacher-led classroom instruction. Your free single user account gives you access to all resources needed to present the Workshops.

All Workshops include a Warm-Up, Mini-Lesson, Activity, Share-Out, and a Self-Reflection, and each can be taught as a 'stand-alone' lesson to target specific skills.

Instructors can teach directly from online Workshops or printable PDFs.

Emotional ABCs Classroom uses a common emotional language throughout the curriculum which can be readily adopted school-wide with minimal teacher training."

One of the greatest frustrations mentioned by many teachers is that their students are often not motivated to learn. Teachers quickly come to recognize the warning signs of poor motivation in their classroom: students put little effort into homework and classwork assignments, slump in their seats and fail to participate in class discussion, or even become confrontational toward the teacher when asked about an overdue assignment. One common method for building motivation is to tie student academic performance and classroom participation to specific rewards or privileges. Critics of reward systems note, however, that they can be expensive and cumbersome to administer and may lead the student to engage in academics only when there is an outside 'payoff.' While there is no magic formula for motivating students, the creative teacher can sometimes encourage student investment in learning in ways that do not require use of formal reward systems.