11 Classroom Management Tweaks You Don’t Learn in Teacher Prep

Early in my career, I had a moment with a student who had broken the cell phone rules multiple times in a class, and I followed school policy and my training and politely asked for the phone. I did everything by the book, but the student still got angry.

The next time it happened, I tried something no one had taught me—I squatted down by the student’s desk when making the request instead of standing over them. That subtle change made a gigantic difference, and the student handed over the phone, no problem.

This exemplified something I have found throughout my career: Clear policies and routines are—along with knowing your students well—essential elements of good classroom management, but by themselves they don’t ensure that your class will run effectively.

Over time, I started finding smaller, sometimes seemingly odd, approaches that helped me better respond in the moment when I needed to redirect an individual or group. Here are 11 of my best classroom management hacks.

1. Be at the Same Height as the Student

As I said, I found it so helpful to attempt to be at the same level as a student I was trying to talk to, especially for a difficult conversation or in attempting to redirect a student. My go-to was often to squat down by a student’s desk when I needed to talk to them, but you could also roll a stool around or set up a spot for students to come sit and talk with you. Research supports being seated at the same level versus both standing up, as the latter can confuse students since sitting is the norm in classrooms.

Positioning myself at the same level of the student helped to defuse a possible power struggle. It sent a cue to the student that we were working together, and as silly as this might sound, it made it feel more natural to give a fist bump or high five when we solved the issue.

2. Get Student Input on Attention-Getters

We all know “waterfall” and “quiet coyote,” but those weren’t effective in my high school classrooms, so I worked out a better system with my students. They knew I love birds, so every Monday a student would identify a bird, we would look up that bird’s call together, and our attention-getter for that week was that call. I would do my best interpretation of it, and then students would do it back. Every so often we would all end up laughing at the ridiculousness of it.

This will likely look very different for you. If you’re into music, you could have students identify a song for a lyrical call-and-response attention-getter. A colleague of mine was really good at using affirmations with her classes, so she would let a student identify an affirmation as the attention-getter.

3. Have Students Pass Back Anything Without a Score

Early in my career, I noticed halfway through a term that the kids in my class didn’t know each other’s names. I had assumed they would learn them naturally because they had been in groups together occasionally.

Being able to call people by their name has a huge impact on classroom culture, and it also activates parts of the brain responsible for attention and engagement. I need to be able to pronounce names correctly, of course, but it’s equally important for students.

My trick for learning names is to have students fill out a small note card with their name and a few details about them that I collect and pass back repeatedly throughout the first week. It’s my own form of retrieval practice. And if I have papers to be passed back that don’t have scores on them, I have students do it—this shouldn’t be done with anything with scores or marks on it, as that could have a negative impact on students who struggled with the assignment.

4. Create Positive Peer Pressure With Google Classroom

No one is surprised that adolescents are greatly impacted by peer pressure. However, this isn’t always a negative, and teachers can carefully leverage positive peer pressure.

Google Classroom has a feature where you can click on an assignment and see how many students have and have not turned it in yet without showing any names. I found this to be really valuable when I assigned work to be turned in by the end of class. I would project that count on the board and occasionally give updates as to how we were doing.

Now, there’s a balance to this one—lean on it too heavily and you’ll have students rushing to turn in garbage because they panic. Be sure it’s just a subtle nudge, a reminder of what they are aiming for.

Sometimes I turned it into a competition between classes, putting up each class period’s numbers on the board to see if the current class could have a better turn-in rate than the previous ones.

5. Use the 2x10 Strategy

I once had a class period that I thought was my hardest to manage, but I realized that it really was just a couple of students disrupting the class. Those students and I often had negative interactions because I was trying to redirect them, and those negative interactions snowballed and impacted the class.

To change course, I started using the 2x10 strategy, where you intentionally have a two-minute conversation with a student for 10 days in a row. It is generally acknowledged that positive student-teacher relationships benefit learning and classroom behavior, and this strategy helped me really target my efforts. I found that these intentional positive interactions changed my experience with a student and helped me appreciate them in the classroom so much more, and they helped the entire class function better.

6. Say ‘Thank You’ During a Request, not After

Whenever I asked a student to do something like sit down or put their phone away, I always included a thank-you in the request instead of waiting until the action was completed.

This had a few benefits. One, it sent the message that I trusted the action was going to happen. Two, it helped me avoid sounding overly authoritarian or controlling, which can sometimes result in backlash from the student. Three, “Thank you” is often used to signify closure, so no reply is needed. This helps avoid the public power struggles that take time to bounce back from, in terms of classroom management but also in the relationship with that student. When done carefully, it helps build an ethos of a warm demander as a teacher.

I have to emphasize that tone is key. We all know a dismissive or condescending “thank you” when we hear one. My goal was to convey genuine appreciation and respect for the student while making the request.

7. Use ‘And’ Instead of ‘But’

It is a reality that “but” negates whatever came before it. I first noticed how this can impact students when I gave them feedback on their writing. I would say things like, “You are getting better with your transitions, but they still could be a bit smoother.” I found that students weren’t appreciating or valuing what came before the “but,” so I switched to using “and.” It was amazing how differently students received the feedback with that small change.

Once I was aware of this, I started using it as a classroom management tool, especially during difficult moments. If a student misbehaved, I would have previously used a side conversation to say, “I really like having you in class, but that kind of behavior is unacceptable.” Switching to “and” in these moments really helped the student see that both things were true: I did really enjoy having them in class—and their behavior needed to change.

8. Instead of ‘No,’ Try ‘Can You First…’

The dreaded restroom requests. So often these come at a time when the student is just bored or doesn’t want to do whatever task we’re engaging in, so the restroom is the escape. In times like that, I started replacing my “no” with a “can you first…” phrase—like, “Can you first get three sentences of your writing down?”

Sometimes, of course, the student really needed to go, but more often than not they would agree and begin working. The key was to make the request small, just to get the ball rolling. Before the student realized it, they had written more than the three sentences and were feeling better about their work, and suddenly the bathroom wasn’t as urgent.

This taps into the power of self-efficacy, as a student who sees even a little success is more likely to make decisions that contribute to success in the future.

9. Give Students a Chance to Name Their Behavior

Let’s say a student is up wandering around the room. I used to automatically say, “[Name], sit down at your desk.” That interaction was a teacher-generated decision, and students would often push back—and my response could actually increase the amount of disruptive behaviors in the future.

What I found to be more useful in that kind of situation was to say some variation of “[Name], what do you think needs to change about what you’re doing right now?” I preferred to do this as privately as possible. It puts the onus on the student to identify the behavior that is expected of them in this situation and name it.

You can add a little extra motivation for them by using the “thank you” mentioned previously, by saying something like, “Thank you for doing that,” when they have identified the behavior but haven’t started doing it yet.

10. Lead by Example

Four years ago I started having students place phones in an assigned slot in a calculator holder when they came into my classroom. I anticipated resistance, so the first slot was labeled “Mr. R,” and my cell phone went in there at the beginning of every period.

I really believe this little move is a large part of why students didn’t resist the policy. I would even let them call me out if I forgot, and I was able to model that sometimes I had to be reminded, too. Parking the phones was one of the best changes I made in terms of the classroom community and the level of resilience students showed when they were struggling.

This same thing applied to any silent reading or writing time in class: At least for the first bit of it, I would engage in the activity with them. It sent them the message that I thought it was important enough for me to do it, too.

Psychology research refers to these types of actions as organizational citizenship behaviors, and leading by example has been shown to have a positive impact in encouraging these behaviors.

11. Practice the Art of Noticing

This is for those times when you’ve been struggling with a class for a while and you dread when that period rolls around. We’ve all been there—sometimes I got so negative about that class that I struggled to see the positive things happening in the room, which impacted the culture of the class.

I decided to put a sticky note next to my computer and write down three positive things every day during that class. Eventually I changed to writing three separate sticky notes each day, one each for three students, to tell them what I appreciated about them. I made sure I wrote one for each student. The notes were generally pretty quick: “I appreciate the way you helped your neighbor on that activity” or “Thank you for making us all smile today with your joke.”

This changed everything for me with my most difficult classes. It rewired my thinking to help me look for the positives more often, and it made a huge difference in how those classes functioned. On multiple occasions I’ve had former students come back a year or two later to show me that they still had the sticky note taped to their notebook or computer.