Applying Classroom Rules and Procedures

---Yanhua Wang

Teachers and students must create discipline plans including rules with clear and effective consequences. The rules should be agreed upon and understood by everyone in the class. It should be understood that when rules are broken, consequences will be applied fairly and consistently. In my classroom, I will explain in detail of classroom rules and the result. Action will be taken for punishment or rewards. Students will be given the opportunity to rectify  for the first one or two misbehavior. According to my experience, I will take actions towards two kinds of behavior.  I named the behavior as positive behavior and negative behavior.

I consider answering question actively, listening to other quietly,attending teamwork forwardly and helping other friendly as positive behavior; and sleeping during class, talking without a permit, not listening to instructions and keep bothering other students as negative behavior. I will have all the rules posted on the wall to make sure students have no excuse for breaking the rules. For students who are behaving excellently, I will liberally give them rewards. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy once said: Happy families are alike, the unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. I apply this famous saying in classroom management as “Excellent Performance is alike, bad performance appears in its own way.”

For well-behaved students I will have them bring home a reward card or a pass for a reasonable request like no homework for one time, not doing a project for one time. I have a student performance sheet hanging behind the classroom door. If a student is doing well in the class, I will put a sticker after his or her name.  For every sticker he or she collects, he or she can change them for a pass. It’s a very good example for other students because they also want to get the reward. James is a student in my class. He likes Chinese cultures very much, so he chose Mandarin Chinese as the second language. He is smart and hard working. I extremely like his attitude toward learning this subject. He not only attended class activities actively but also respected me and his classmates. He got many stickers in the last semester and he only used a pass for not doing homework for one time.

students are breaking the rules or not following procedures in many different ways. They may fall asleep, keep talking or not be willing to attend group activities. Chris had talent in learning languages. But as time passed I found out that he no longer actively answered questions as he used to do before. The worse was he didn’t hand in his homework on time. I talked with him alone, trying to figure out what happened to him. He told me that learning Chinese Characters was really hard for him. He felt like he was not able to catch up forever. I promised him that I could help him whenever he wanted. I used more teaching strategies to attract his attention. Chris was an introverted person. He liked to be encouraged, especially liked to be praised in public. I recognized that what he needed was an encouragement. So for every progress he made, I would tell him immediately with a big smile that he was doing a good job or he is the best. From then on he was doing better and better. After the final exam, he came to thank me for helping him build up his confidence.  

Classroom Behavior Process