Classroom Management: Always Have a Plan B

January 25th, 2010 By: Diane Trim in Articles, School Turnaround, Teachers' Corner

One year my school district had a new superintendent. On the first teacher inservice day in August, all of the district’s staff gathered in the high school auditorium to hear the new superintendent speak.

He had a big presentation planned with several LCD projectors and multimedia slides. The man even had puppets. Made out of plastic milk jugs. No, really.

I’m sure you’ve guessed the superintendent’s problem. We teachers sat in the auditorium for over half an hour while he, the panicked media director, the computer guy, and the theater director all tried to make the technology work.

Once they had the equipment working, the superintendent played a clip from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Apparently the movie’s perils of technology theme was lost on him.

All I could think was, “Plan B. You gotta have a Plan B.”

Sure, you expect technology to work or for the lesson to continue for its 45 minutes, but equipment failures happen and so do fire drills.

In the face of the unpredictable, what should teachers do?

Set up procedures. Yes, the unpredictable happens, but we can at least predict which types of events might occur. Fire drills, lock downs, drug dogs, power failures, tornado drills, bomb threats, hallway incidents, and an out-of-control student all unpredictable disruptions to your class. Even predictable disruptions like Homecoming events, assemblies, and club photo days can cause classroom chaos. How are you expected to teach when the power is out or half the class is in the yearbook room mugging for the camera?

On a peaceful week, maybe the week after the start of a new semester, draft a list of all of the possible interruptions that could happen and how you’d like for your students to behave.

During a fire drill, I’d like my students to huddle together and not mingle with other classes. I want the kids to make eye contact with me when I call their name on my roll sheet. In an ideal world, they’ll be discussing a question from class with one another to earn a participation or extra credit point.

Train your students. We’re teachers. We teach. That’s our strength. So, once you’ve listed the interruptions and your behavior expectations, select one interruption per day and teach your students how you’d like them to behave. Spring the interruption on them, run through the procedure, and offer feedback. Reward good behavior. Correct stragglers.

Develop a Plan B. If you’re a veteran teacher, or a new teacher who is quick on her feet, you might be able to give your students a quick discussion question as they leave the class or develop a Plan B on the fly.

However, it’s nice to have a couple tucked away for unplanned interruptions. When you’re mapping out your unit, develop a Plan B and include it with your lessons. You could try the following approaches:

• High-interest question – an ethical matter, a central debate in your discipline, or a hot topic are good choices
• A puzzle – for some quiet seatwork while you have to stand out in the hallway for a visitor, consider an extra credit puzzle or problem for students to solve
• Stations – During Spirit Week or yearbook photo day, you might consider setting up stations in your room with short activities at each one. Require students to complete three of the five stations. Each additional station is worth extra credit. Students can leave for their photo ops, return, and pick up where they left off with ease and the whole class isn’t disrupted.
• Quiet full-class work – During a lock down, students in my school had to sit quietly along my interior wall, away from the windows and doors. This is a great time to pull out small, personal whiteboards, markers, and review questions. Quiz students and ask them to write their answers on the whiteboards. Reward with participation points.
• Time sponges – when drug dogs came through my school, the class period extended beyond what I’d had planned, so I needed to soak up that time. Fun time sponges include: develop a clean joke about the material we’re studying. Punch lines must contain one vocabulary word; create a tweet (like www.historicaltweets.com) that a person in your discipline might have typed; charades with clues from the unit of study; and or a game of vote with your feet will get kids out of their seats, but still learning. (Vote with your feet: pose a question like, “Would you rather have wind power or would you rather save the birds?” Students move to the bird side of the room or the windmill side of the room and volunteer to answer the question with their opinion.)

Rein ’em in. When the power comes back on or the fire drill is over, you still have to settle your students back into the lesson. When you jot down your unit’s Plan B, write down how you’ll transition from the chaos to the class. A good idea for this is to have students report about the discussions they’ve had and the conclusions they’ve reached. Accountability for the learning activity helps to focus students on the discussion and discourages speculation about who pulled the fire alarm or what happened to the lights.

Do you have a Plan B that works well for you? Please share it with everyone in the comments.

Tags: behavior, Classroom Management, lesson plan, Lesson Planning, sponge, transition