Student Empowerment: One Easy Strategy to Conquer Classroom Management

 As an educator, I am always learning. I’m always trying to find the newest thing on how I can apply it to my students, but then it’s even better if I can also apply it. A concept with my own children. I was at a PD for my district this last week, and I was reminded of a parenting tip or something that I had learned in a parenting class that I was able to apply in my classroom that made.

The world of difference when it came to classroom management. That is what we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode. Welcome to the Secondary Teacher Podcast, the podcast for middle and high school teachers juggling multiple preps to get the strategies to reduce overwhelm so that you don’t have.

To choose between being an effective teacher and prioritizing important relationships. I’m your host, Khristen. Massek, a 10 year high school engineering teacher, former middle school assistant principal and teacher coach. Every week we will discuss strategies, systems, and time-saving tips to help you not only survive but thrive as a multiple prep teacher.

That intro may have left you a little hanging, but I want to fill in the gaps. The thing that I learned that changed. Pretty much everything for classroom management, for parenting was choices and the power of choices. It is an easy and simple strategy, but for some reason we tend to forget to apply it, and sometimes we overcomplicate adding in.

The ability of our students to make choices during our classes. That’s what we’re going to go over today. We’re gonna start with a little bit of research. This actually is research based on giving students choices. There was a study done by Patal Cooper and Robinson in 2008, and I found these resources through the American.

Psychological association, in one of their journals and. Patel, Cooper and Robinson found that offering choices in classroom activities led to greater intrinsic motivation and engagement among high school students. One of the things that we did a lot with is apathy, or just trying to get students engaged and giving students choices.

Can make that happen more frequently. I also found a few more research articles, but one other one that I would like to point out is from Dessie and Ryan in 2000, and it’s on the self-determination theory. It’s this idea that allowing your students choices or autonomy can foster intrinsic motivation and decrease apathy.

And those are two big things that we are always trying to do in our classroom. Another point to think about with your students, this whole idea of motivation, that’s great, but there are a lot of things that. Choices are made for our students every single day. They may or may not have chosen their, their schedule.

And then there are things that are happening outside of the classroom that you are not in control of and they are also not in control of. And so allowing them to have that little bit of control can really help minimize classroom behavior issues. One of the other. Parenting classes that I took was talking about filling a child’s bucket and how they had to be able to fill their bucket to the top every day with positive things.

Or by the time the end of the day comes, they’ll fill it with negative things and. This concept really rang true to me, and part of it was is these positive things are choices that they could make, or having one-on-one time with a parent or an adult, and that if their bucket was filled and if their needs were filled, then they didn’t have to demand.

Them. That is another way that these choices fit in. If you are able to allow them to make choices frequently, even if they’re very small choices, then that is going to help you a lot in your class. Now you’re probably thinking, oh, that’s great. I should be giving choices. Okay? What in the world does that look like?

How can I. You do that in your classroom. The biggest thing with choices is you as a teacher need to be okay with either choice that you give for your students. If you are doing an assignment and you are okay if they work on their own or with a partner, you need to be okay with both of those choices.

If it’s something that you don’t want to give them a choice, you want everyone to work. Alone, then you don’t give them a choice. The biggest thing is you need to be okay with both possible outcomes. Another thing that I used to use this for a lot, and I use it with my kids all the time, is time. Do you need three minutes or five minutes to complete this?

And you’re okay with either one? Knowing that it probably will take them five minutes and more likely than not, they’re going to ask for the longer amount of time. But it works like a charm because when that timer goes off, they’re ready to move on because they were the ones who made that choice and set that boundary.

It. Allows them to have that sense of freedom and that autonomy that we all crave deep inside. Now, before I give you some more examples, I want to give you some guidelines to remember as you are giving these choices to students. The whole idea that we are using choices to prevent power struggles, or maintain our classroom management.

We want to think about these things as we are making those. Those choices for our students. The first one is choices should not be threats in disguise. Like, you’ll do this or else, or do you wanna do your assignment or do you wanna go to the admin? That’s not a good choice. It should be something that are, it’s going to make you happy and also your students happy also.

Give your students the small choices. Your students can make small choices. You can make the large ones, so you do not need to have your students running everything. One thing that I always struggled with is this idea of creating classroom rules together. I could never figure out how to do it. I’m teaching seven different class periods, how in the world am I going to remember what rules are going on in each class?

Well, you’re. Your students don’t have to come up with their classroom rules. They can come up with, you can give them choices for some other smaller things, but to save yourself some sanity, you do the big choices Then. The next one would be if a student doesn’t make a choice within 10 seconds, or your students don’t make it within 10 seconds, you choose for them.

If they’re hum hoeing, or if you’re talking just to one student and you’re asking them to do something, and you’re having them choose a choice, make a choice, and they don’t decide, then you just make it for them so that they know that you need to make the decision and move on. And then finally, you’re gonna want to offer choices to students before they become resistant, not after, because that’s when it turns back into a threat in disguise.

This is what we’re going to look at for some examples, and as I’m going through these examples, I want you to think of. Lesson and maybe it’s even your first few days of school. How can you insert some of these choices into what you already have planned? Literally, these small choices can take you moments, if not seconds, for your students to decide and really won’t make a difference in your teaching, but it could make a huge difference in how your students behave in your class.

So, Due dates, you could offer two choices. Either one’s fine with you. You could have them turn something in on Friday, or you could have them turn it in on Monday and they get to choose. The greatest thing is, is that students, they think that they’re like pulling one over you because they get the entire weekend where you asked for it to be on Friday, but they have it on Monday.

You wanted it turned in on Monday. If you give them that option of Friday or Monday, you might have some students turned it in on Friday. Good for them. They get to enjoy their weekend. Other students, they’ll have it due on Monday. Either way’s fine with you. Music or no music. While students are completing independent work, What do you want them to listen to?

You don’t have to have them choose which station you can if you would like, but music or no music, time limits we went over before, but how much time do they need to complete a task? Two minutes or five minutes and allow them to make that choice? That’s, those are some whole class examples. Some individual ones would be working alone or working with a partner.

Maybe it’s how you greet them. If you are a teacher that likes to greet at the. The door, are you doing a handshake or a high five? If you would like them to sit or stand while they make a comment, totally up to you. Where they sit during independent work. Once again, you’ll want to make sure that this is something that you are okay with.

If your students are kind of talkers and they go next to each other and they’re gonna chitchat the whole time, that may not be a choice that you would like to give them. Some other ones that are gold are to give them, if you are teaching math or something that has quite a few questions that they can answer, you can say, Hey, there are 40 questions here.

You get to do the easiest five. And then they’re like, well, my gosh, I just got out of doing 40 questions. And granted, you don’t have to already. Make that many, but maybe it’s 10. You give them 10 questions and they only have to do five and they get to choose the easiest ones. Well, that’s higher order thinking too, because they now have to go through all 10 and figure out which are the five easiest.

Another one that my colleague had come up with. Was at the end of the class. When your students like to congregate by the door, you can give them the option of sitting in a seat or on a desk. You don’t want them by the door. They just need to be sitting so that they’re not milling around. But it’s okay if they’re sitting on their desk totally okay with you, but it keeps them away from the door.

If you are giving an assessment, you can ask them. They can either silently read or they can draw while they wait for others to finish. When it comes to phones, you can say that they can keep their phone in their backpack or they can have it somewhere else. That might be some place where it is in your possession.

And this is, you don’t want this to be a threat, but maybe you have the shoe racks or the shoe holders with the little.

Pockets for each phone, and they can either have it there or they can have it in their backpack. You don’t want it out, but either way is fine with you. If you are having students study for a test, they can review their notes before they take the practice test, or they can review their notes with the practice test.

You could have this menu of options of good study habits that can actually help them create better study habits. Another testing or summative assessment kind of question is that you could have three prompts if they are to have a. A long answer or an essay that you’ve give them three prompts and they get to choose the easiest one to answer.

So, very similar to the math problem one where there were 10 and you only had to do five. There’s another thought of like end of unit projects. The goal of this unit is for you to do this, and I would like you to show me demonstration of that, but you can choose how you would like to demonstrate that, and you could once again give them a menu of a few different options that they can choose to turn then or prove that they are proficient in that.

Concept. Your homework now is to come up with three to five choices that you could have your students make regularly, and it could be every class, or you can throw it in however you would like to. You can sprinkle it in every once in a while and allow them to make choices so that they’re able to fill their bucket and stay.

More involved, be intrinsically motivated, and hopefully minimize those classroom management issues. If this episode was helpful to you, it could be for others To help spread the word about this podcast, take a screenshot of this episode and add it to your IG stores and tag me at Khristen masek, K H R S T E N M A S S I C.

Until next week.