Classroom Management Philosophy for Secondary Science Teachers [Episode 90]

Rebecca 0:00
You are listening to episode number 90 of the secondary science simplified podcast. The new school year is upon us and to help you prepare, I want to spend this month talking all things classroom management with you. I know that this has become much harder in the years post COVID, which is why I kicked off this series last week by interviewing a teacher who has been in the trenches like many of you these last few years, he shared so much wisdom that specifically speaks to the apathy of post COVID students. And so if you haven’t already, please please, please go listen to episode 89. Now, if you are all caught up, I’m extremely excited to share with you over the next few episodes, some tried and true strategies that were incredibly effective for me when I was in the classroom full time. But before we do that, we need to have a little heart to heart so to speak, just about my personal classroom management philosophy so you can know where I’m coming from and then how you can develop your own. Let’s get started. This is secondary science simplified a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca joiner from it’s not rocket science. As a high school science teacher turned curriculum writer, I am passionate about helping other science teachers love their jobs, serve their students, and do it all in only 40 hours a week. Are you ready to rock the time you spend in your classroom and actually have a life outside of it? You are in the right place teacher friend. Let’s get to today’s episode.

Rebecca 1:47
So I want to start this series on classroom management talking about philosophy because I think that sometimes it’s often overlooked how personal classroom management is, you must choose a classroom management style that is authentic to you and your personality. Okay, so let me give you some examples of what I mean here by this style. Back in episode 19, I interviewed one of my favorite co workers of all time Jamie Whitlock. And if you haven’t listened that episode, you totally should because she’s so wise. But I have referenced in the past Jamie kind of has this like mama bear energy in terms of her classroom management. I remember watching her as a new teacher and watching her down the hall for me. And the way that she engaged with students. She just gave off this kind of motherly but very direct and almost like a strict mom energy. But the kids responded so well to it. Like she felt like a mom in the most loving and disciplined way. I don’t know how else to explain it other than that Mama Bear style and it really hit her. I do not have Mama Bear energy. Okay. I don’t really have a maternal bone in my body. I mean, things have developed as I have become a parent myself, but like, that’s still not my vibe. So for me to try to embrace who Jamie is in my classroom management style, it just wouldn’t fit and it wouldn’t be natural. So yes, I can look to her and be inspired by what she does with students. There are things that she does and did in her classroom that I could take from her, which I absolutely did. But overall her style was different from mine because our personalities are different. Okay, another example if you’ve listened to Episode 3570, or 71 Those are all episodes I did with my own high school chemistry teacher, Zach Matson. And you can tell in those episodes, Zach as a lot of sarcasm, kids a hilarious self deprecating type of humor. And he uses that sarcasm and humor in the classroom and the way that he relates to students in a way that really draws them to him. And he can be sarcastic in a way that’s still really loving and funny because again, a lot of it is really self deprecating. But that doesn’t work for everybody. There are some people that are sarcastic and it’s extremely hurtful because they don’t have the right tone with it. And so, again, that’s his personality, it fits him. I can take things from him, but I can’t be Zach Matson because I’m Rebecca Joyner. And then another example of this is Casey from last week’s episode, Episode 89. You can just tell by listening to the episode Casey has such a calm, and I don’t know what the right word is. Maybe just like a reasonable demeanor. Like I felt like when I was listening to him, and you can probably tell him the episode. I talked like 10 times faster than him. And I’m like running on I sound like I had a Red Bull before the episode and he just sounds like he had like a cup of you know, calming English breakfast tea or something. Like he just has a very settled, secure, calming presence. It’s amazing. And the way that he gave examples of how he runs his classroom, I found so fascinating, because they sounded so effective. But again, I can’t I could try as hard as I want to be as calm and settled and reasonable as Casey. But that is just not who I am. I can’t walk in and be Casey because I’m not Casey. And so I give you these examples. Just to start off this episode, I feel like I just like jumped in headfirst. But I just feel really passionate about this. Because I don’t want you listening to this next month of episodes and thinking, I need to be more like Rebecca, I need to, you know, go plug myself in a battery pack and be jumping off the walls. Like, you don’t have to be like me, and you shouldn’t try to be exactly like me. But will I share specific strategies with you that were helpful for me? Yes. Will you want to adopt some of them? Of course, I mean, I hope so. Will you reject some of them? Absolutely. I would be shocked if you take every single thing I do from these episodes, and embrace them yourself. Because again, we all have such different personalities. And that’s why I wanted to kind of really start this series will first with Casey’s episode, just so you can have something very different from me to kind of give you more ideas than I really want to start the rest of this month off talking about philosophy and how you can figure out what is best for you moving forward and how you can kind of put on that lens to filter everything you’re hearing over these next few episodes to make sure that you’re only really adopting and embracing what is best for you. Okay, he’s you have to be yourself. So I want you to think through these five questions as you’re moving forward. And considering how you want to handle classroom and management this school year, pay first I want you to ask yourself, what comes naturally to me. Okay, what are things that are just easy, they come off of me, for instance, Casey is just, I mean, reasonable. That’s such like a, that word keeps coming to me. He just seems like a very reasonable rational person, the way he was approaching his policy for cellphones, you know, how he handles going the bathroom, it was all just very reasonable, very rational, very settled, I think I’ve said that word a couple of times now to where as you know, what comes naturally for me, is maybe different. It’s a little bit more aggressive. I guess, I don’t know how to say, like I talked about last episode, justice and fairness is like so so so important to me. So sometimes I can fall guilty to getting into those Tug of War battles with students. And a mentor long time ago, told me you need to let go of the rope. As soon as you realize you’re playing tug of war with the student, like have the rope Rebecca, which is hard for me, because again, I have more of this combative energy that’s I’m a little bit more combative naturally than it appeared like Casey was in our conversation. So I think identifying what is going to come natural to you is very helpful, once you can lean into those positive things, but to so you can kind of be aware of where you need to step back of the things that aren’t as positive. Like for me, which is being a little bit more combative, a little bit more aggressive with students, which all stems from, again, a healthy desire to want to be fair, and to really want to do things, right with students. But again, that can become too much, and it can become combative. And sometimes I gotta let go of the tug of war rope, you know what I’m saying? Or the second thing I want you to ask yourself is, how would people just describe me in general? And if you don’t know, ask them people in your inner circle, and the people around you be like, Hey, how would you describe me? What are things you see in me? Not so you can get Nick this big, you know, ego boost, but just so you can kind of understand how people perceive you. And then you can kind of lean into those things. You know, those are the things you being your most natural version of you is a good thing. And here’s the deal is every student going to connect and resonate with you know, but that’s good. Your students probably have seven or eight teachers at a time. They don’t want seven to eight carbon copies of the same person, it’s good that they have seven or eight teachers that are have different personalities. Okay, and so some are going to have to do more, some are going to connect with another teacher more and that’s okay. What’s not okay, is you trying to be like the teacher next door because you think that they’re doing it better than you, all you’re going to do is and that being exhausted, being something that you are not, okay, so, really think about who am I how do people perceive me? What am I putting off there? How would people describe me and lean into those things? Okay, now, the next question I would ask yourself is something that I really have to think about a lot because I don’t know if you’re ended the Enneagram I don’t want to make this an Enneagram podcast because people have lots of opinions about it. But one thing I appreciate about the Enneagram is it kind of lets you know there’s these like triads, a personality types in different Enneagram numbers have kind of like a default emotion. It can be you kind of can default to shame. I know shame is one of them. I can’t remember fear and Then anger, I am in the anger tree had. So like, my default emotion when I’m pressed against when I’m put into conflict is anger. And so my question would be for you, is what really triggers you, maybe it triggers you to fear or shame or anger or whatever. But knowing kind of what triggers you will also help with your classroom management because we’re going to talk in a minute about how you manage a whole class versus how you manage individual behavioral issues. So knowing what’s going to anger you is important. And what’s going to trigger you is important because you need to be proactive about preventing those things for the sake of your students. Okay, and we’ll talk a lot about this in Episode 91. So stay tuned for that next week. The fourth thing I want you to ask yourself, Is Allah Kyndra hdaci, the lazy genius who I’ve referenced 1 million times on this podcast, but one of her big, lazy genius principles is asking yourself what matters most. And so I want to ask you what matters most to you. A really big part of my secondary science simplified virtual professional development course is we walk through coming up with your core values. Literally, it’s like an entire unit. But it’s basically all centered around figuring out what matters most to you as an educator. And if you are interested in that course, I didn’t run it this past summer, just because I’ve been so busy with chemistry and writing that curriculum, I’m thinking about opening it up again in January. I’ve never done it during the school year. But I’m just trying to gauge interest. If you are interested, I’ll link the waitlist in the show notes. It’s just it’s not rocket science. classroom.com/waitlist. But if I see that there are like people joining the waitlist and interested, I might open it up in January, but really thinking through, I’m not going to do a whole episode on this, because it’s all in there. But what is most important to you in your classroom? And that kind of leads into the fifth question I want you to ask yourself, which is at the end of the day, what do you want your students to remember about your class? You know, I was thinking about I went home to my state of Kentucky this summer, and I hadn’t heard back in 10 years. And I visited with one of my best friends from high school while I was there. And we were just kind of like reflecting we met in Spanish too. That’s where we met. And so we were talking about that class and a few other teachers and just some things that stuck out in our memory from our our time in high school together. And it was interesting thinking about what I remembered about specific teachers. And a lot of times, you know, it was maybe a really specific memory, but sometimes to just how I felt like how that teacher made me feel in that class. And so at the end of the day, what do you want your students to remember about you and your time in your class? Do you really care most about them remembering the content, and being really prepared for future classes that they may need that foundational content? For? If that’s the case? Great, that is fine. There’s no wrong answer to any of these questions. But I think it’s important for you to know, if that’s your priority, then you’re going to approach how you manage your classroom, different from someone who cares and wants to prioritize most that their students feel safe in their classroom verse or their students feel prepared leaving their classroom or their students feel respected. I don’t know what you want that memory to be what adjective you want to use there. But I think it’s helpful to think about that before we jump into talking and making all these decisions about how you’re going to manage your class. Okay, so I want you to ask yourself, those five questions. And then I like to come up with some refrains, if you will. So if you think about what a refrain is, it’s a repeated phrase in a song, you know, you always have like a verse and then the refrain, and then another verse in the frame, and then maybe a verse into a bridge and then refrain, you know, so you’re saying it over and over again, my personal classroom management philosophy, kind of all comes back to five refrains, and they’re things you’ve probably heard me say before on the podcast, because again, they’re afraid they’re things I’m always saying. And I have refrains I use in parenting all the time. Like things my even my three year old can repeat verbatim that I say to her over and over again. And I think having these refrains is helpful, and you don’t even need to tell these to your students. This isn’t like something that’s outward that your students need to know. But for me, it helps in my brain, because as I’m making decisions on a day to day basis for my classroom, I’m thinking through these refrains and remembering them and remembering again, what matters most and what fits me. So these are some of my refrains. I want you to think of some for yourself after you’ve answered this other five questions, and you’re kind of looking over what you’ve written there. So a few of my refrains, and again, I’m like looking at this list right now. And so many of these all apply to me now as a parent of three kids, which is kind of ironic how much overlap I see from being a high school science teacher to being a parent of three tiny humans. So first is relationship overwrite. This is something I mentioned in the last episode, Episode 89. I got this concept from a friend. And it was originally parenting advice, but it is truly defines how I approach my students to and how I want to approach my students. Maybe this isn’t my natural default, but I want it to be I want to care more about the relationship with the student. Then being right, which goes against, again, my core being because I’m such a justice like seeker, and I’m so obsessed with being fair and right and doing things the right way, and knowing what is the right way and then executing the right way. So sometimes I have to remember again, let go of that tug of war rope, prioritize the relationship, that’s one of my refrains relationship over right. Another is, consistency eliminates chaos. I think so often, we don’t want to do routines, we don’t want to do procedures, we don’t want to have class rules or you know, whatever you want to call it. Because, again, we have high school students, they should be more mature, we want to prepare them for college where things are more open ended, where they have to have a lot of autonomy and take ownership of things. But at the same time, we have to balance as high school teachers, the fact that they are still children, in a sense, they are still adolescents, they are still not 100% independent, you know, and I think they have a lot of chaos in their lives. And I think that chaos has only increased over the years as the noise in their life has increased as their access to technology has increased, as their circles of influence, and the input in their life has increased. When we were growing up, the people that impacted you most were like the people you lived with, and your teachers and your friends at school like the people you saw on daily basis. That’s where you were getting your input of information about the world. And now you can get input of information from a stranger on the other side of the internet, because on the other side of the world, through the internet, is what I mean, because you can see what they’re saying on Twitter, or what they think in their stories that they’re talking about on Instagram. And so I just think there’s a lot of noise. And I think that creates chaos. And I think our students need routine, and they need consistency, more than you think. And I think creating that for them makes your classroom a safe space. I want my students to walk into my classroom. And even though it’s very high energy, and sometimes it can be loud, I want them to walk in and take a deep breath. Because they don’t need to be in fight or flight in my classroom. They don’t don’t need to be assessing threats in my classroom. They don’t need to be distracted by a ton of chaos and noise from all these different sources in my classroom, I want them to walk in and be so confident in what they know, I’m going to expect of them that they can just be themselves because they know how to be in my class. And that again, I think that comes with this consistency in how you run your class. They’re not walking in with their defenses up like wondering what sort of nude you’re going to be in? Do you all remember that? Do you remember those teachers who you were like, I don’t know what mood you know,

Rebecca 17:35
Mr. Green is going to be in today? Like, is he going to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed? Or not? Are we going to be on tiptoes with him? Is he going to be in a good mood and be joking with us? Or is he gonna yell at us and, you know, make us read the textbook and take notes by ourselves, you know, those teachers that were kind of all over the place that way, I think that created chaos. And I think when you can be consistent and be again, which is why you need to be yourself and not try to be someone else. If you can be yourself be consistent with how you run your class, it’s going to eliminate a lot of chaos. My third refrain is be the calmest person in the room at all times. I think that’s the best parenting advice I’ve ever gotten and extremely hard. Especially when kids are like literally screaming in your face. And it’s the same for being a teacher, when students are literally screaming in your face. It’s your job to stay calm, you are the adults, you are the authority. And I think it’s hard with high schoolers because they can feel like adults, and they can feel like they are at your level in a sense, especially if they’re like, at your height or taller than you I think there’s a different relationship with a high school student than like a five year old or a six year old, where you automatically feel a sense of authority, because you’re four times their size is different in high school. And I think for me personally, it’s easy for me to forget, I am an in charge and I’m the adult here and I need to be the calmest person, I should be the most mature person in this room and not get into this engage with, you know, these bombs that my students are dropping, trying to like, rile me up. So be the calmest person in the room at all times. Fourth thing that kind of is a refrain in my philosophy is enthusiasm is contagious. And I think this again, is really specific to my personality. I can really I am an introvert by heart, but I am very outgoing. And I can really turn up the energy and then I just need to like, get home and go into sensory deprivation room for like three hours and recharge while I read my Kindle or take a bath. But I do think the enthusiasm is contagious. Like looking back. I’m like, Wow, all my kids hated learning about electricity and magnets because I hated teaching about electricity and magnets. But all of my students loved learning about, you know, cells in evolution and even some of these topics that may not be as fun for all teachers because I got fired up about it. And so I really think that’s a huge refrain of my philosophy is enthusiasm is contagious. Your students feed off of your energy And then the last refrain I have is make it memorable. I’ll never forget something that again that Matson said when I was in his classroom. So I was his student 17 years ago, 18 years ago was a long time. But I remember him saying, and again, this comes from his personality, his sarcasm and his kind of humor, with he said, You remember traumatic events. So it’s my job to make this class as traumatic as possible. So you’ll never forget chemistry, you know, give you these traumatic experiences. And obviously, he was joking, he wasn’t like literally trying to traumatize us. But I took that to heart in this idea of make it memorable, if you make something memorable, they will genuinely remember it. And that really has guided a lot of my decisions in terms of how I run my classroom. So all of that to say, those five questions I started off with, or how I kind of developed my personal philosophy and came up with these little refrains, that inform how I make every practical decision in my classroom. Okay, and how it informs again, my overall strategy. And so from there, I think when we’re talking classroom management, there’s kind of two ways you can look at it, you can talk about your day to day and how you’re running your class and spending your you know, 50 minutes, your 40 minutes, your 47 minutes, your 90 minutes or 80 minutes, whatever it is you have with your students. And then there’s also how you deal with conflict and drama with your students, either one on one or in a group. And of course, some of this does overlap, like the how you’re on your day to day will impact whether or not maybe you have conflict or drama. But I do want to make that distinction. So really, over the next few weeks, I’m really going to be leaning in and sharing strategies for that first part, for how you do the day to day operations of your classroom, and not as much with the dealing with individual conflict. And here is why I genuinely believe that individual behavioral issues are best fixed on a relational level, on a one on one level of the relationship that you’re developing with your students. And something that Casey mentioned last episode, which I thought was so spot on, in wise, was that, yes, if you have 3035 students in your class, you’re not going to have this like personal relationship with every single one. But you can identify the students that are causing the most trouble in your class. And those are the ones you start really leaning into building relationship with first. And then as you have more time and capacity, you can grow relationships with other people. So that’s how I feel like individual behavioral issues are best manage, I can think specifically back to one student, and my first year teaching, I will not mention his name, he would never find this podcast, but just for his own, you know, privacy, we had so much conflict, it just felt like every day he’s coming in class, and he like wanted to pick a fight with me. And I was taking it so personally. And eventually I finally was like, we need to have a one on one conversation like, outside away from all these people. I mean, because it was getting to the point where it was extremely combative, I was worried he might be become physical with me, it was a pretty rough teaching situation I was in. But when I started to get to know him on a personal level, I mean, again, I started to remember, Oh, I’m the adult here. He is literally a 15 year old child, and he has had a lot of trauma in his life that has led him to be at this point. And as much as this feels very personal and very about me, it’s literally not about me at all. And so getting kind of to the bottom of that. And did it make our relationship perfect? Absolutely not. But even having that individual conversation, it helped defuse it for me, so that when he did attack me verbally, I would remember this is not about me. And it helped me again, stay the calmest person in the room, move forward in my procedures in my routines that established in the school policies, and move forward with handling those issues from there, even if sometimes, he got to the point where it’s like, Okay, at this point, now, I have to call the admin to come get you and remove you from my class, because it’s becoming a safety concern. But I can handle those calmly, because we had that relational level there. And I got to the bottom of that. Now, I believe that whole class behavioral issues like if you have an entire class that is like wild, or really, it’s like, you have this giant chunk of students, I think this whole class issues and the whole class, drama and conflict are best prevented with well established, communicated and reinforced procedures. Because having those set procedures and routines, they allow you to be proactive, rather than reactive when it comes to classroom issues. And when you teach these procedures and routines to your students, then when a conflict arises, they aren’t surprised when you remind them and you say, hey, remember, this is our procedure for late work. I have taught you this, this is the consequence. And so now I’m just going to do what I said I was going to do and it makes you a trustworthy person. Even if they don’t like you, they trust you because you do what you say and you say what you do. Okay, so that’s what we’re gonna get into. over these next few weeks, I’m going to help you with these whole class behavioral issues, we are going to manage them with procedures and routines, and really specific strategies I’m going to teach you and share with you. But before we get there, you need to do the action step from today’s episode, which is reflect on those five questions I mentioned at the top of the episode. And then try to list out your own little refrains, you know, your three to five statements, that you want to define your overall classroom management philosophy or strategy that you want to keep in your brain. So that as you’re making decisions for how to manage your class on the proactive point, and when you’re figuring out how to respond to a student, when you have to react to something that’s happened, you can think through those refrains and use those to inform your decisions and how you respond to your students. Okay, so that’s what you need to do. First, you need to find your personal philosophy, you may adopt some of mine, you may trash all of mine and come up with your own. There’s no right or wrong answer here. It just needs to be personal to you. Okay, the only way you can do this wrong is if you just tried to be someone you’re not. So do that. And then circle back next week, we’re going to start over the next three weeks, we’ll dive through some more specific things that you can apply to your classroom. And I mentioned a couple of links, not many. But if you want to check those out there in the show notes, which are at it’s not rocket science classroom.com/episode 90. And if you’d like, I know when you’re an apple, if you like, kind of click the podcast episode, it kind of stretches out for you, you can kind of see in there, there’s a link that you can click to grab though that and then something new before I let you go. I want to try this. I don’t know if any of you listen to the carpool podcast, very nice, very specific, I really enjoy it. It’s kind of like a guilty pleasure podcast I just listen to while I’m cooking dinner or something like that. But one thing that Kelly and Liz do at the end of their episodes, which I think is really fun, is they kind of shout out different people and ask them to leave reviews for each episode. So they are car influencers, which sounds like so weird and specific. But there’ll be like, Hey, if

Rebecca 27:09
you drive, you know, a Honda Odyssey minivan, leave a review. If you drive, you know, a Ford truck, I don’t know, leave a review. And I think it’s really funny and interesting. And so I want to do that here. But obviously not a cars with science teacher. So here’s why y’all reviews seriously, make my life they genuinely spurred me on to keep going and recording these episodes. I’ve said it before, like, I know that you guys listen, because I can see the number of people who listen to the episodes. But there’s something about hearing from you. That just really keeps me going. And I want to encourage you and maybe gently remind you to leave review, I think sometimes it’s easy to forget, like you’re listening in your car, and you’re like, I’ll do it later than just kind of forget. And so I think their idea of shouting out someone specific to leave a review is helpful to kind of spur you on. And then the reason that it helps to actually leave it like some of you DM me or email me all the time, which is great. And I love it, you don’t need to stop doing that. But the nice thing about leaving a reviewer rating is it does help other science teachers find the podcast and see like they can read the reviews and say like, oh, this is something I’d want to listen to. And then the ratings like if you just do like the five star rating, the more you have those the higher up you come in search. So if someone searches, you know, secondary science teacher or high school science teacher podcast or something, it will push me up. Now I can only see the reviews and stuff on Apple. I don’t know why I can’t see them and other podcast players. But I have heard that it still helps with rankings and searchability. So if you’re listening on Spotify, or you know, if you’re listening on Google or iHeartRadio, or if you’re listening just directly from that player on my website, you know, whatever Stitcher, there’s so many different places, you can listen to the pod, you can still rank and leave reviews there. It will apparently help in search, like it’ll help boost me up higher, I don’t know. So it’s not pointless. Just know I won’t be able to see it. But if you can leave one on Apple, I can definitely see that it really helps. So first week we’re doing this this week. If you’re listening to this, and you are different from me in personality. If you listen to me describe my personality at the top of the episode and you’re like, wow, we are not the same. Rebecca, I want you to leave a review. I want you to leave a review and let people know that this podcast is still for them. Even if you know they are not exactly like me. You know I’m a little bit dramatic. I told you I’m a little bit combative. I have been known to stand on a lab table or two to get my point across. I will say having cell phones and students having them all the time is hard for a teacher or the personality like me because I’m like I’m going to end up on the internet somewhere. I’m going to be like a tick tock that goes viral or something terrible like that. But Hopefully that’s not you. Because it’s not good for everybody. So if you’re different from me, I would love for you to leave a review on the podcast this week, it would mean so much. And be sure to tune in over the next few weeks. As I shared those specific strategies I mentioned, that helped me manage my classes. We’ll talk routines and procedures. Specifically, we’ll talk about pacing and transitions in your class and that you can really maximize your time with students. And then of course, just a lot of simple strategies to get started. So I’ll see you next week. All right, teacher friends. That wraps up today’s episode. If you’re looking for an easy way to start simplifying your life as a secondary science teacher, head to It’s not rocket science classroom.com/challenge to grab your classroom reset challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you here next week. Until then, I’ll be rooting for you teacher friend.