End the Year Organized: Your Methods for Management [Episode 184]

Rebecca Joyner [00:00:00]:
Over the last two weeks, we have organized your resources both digitally and physically as well as your classroom teaching space. And so for our third and final week in this end your year organized series, we are now gonna end by reflecting on your methods that you use this year to manage your classroom. I’m gonna share six reflection questions with you to ask yourself so that you can be better equipped next year to manage your classroom based on what you learned from your experiences this year. Let’s go. This is secondary science simplified, a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca Joyner 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 forty 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.

Rebecca Joyner [00:01:07]:
Let’s get to today’s episode. Now you might be thinking, how do I organize my methods and why are my classroom management methods included in a series on organization? And the reason I wanted to include this specifically is because I feel like oftentimes we are so reactive in the way that we manage our classes and we just handle things as they come to us and we aren’t very not thoughtful. We are thoughtful. We’re doing the best we can, but we don’t take the time to slow down and really think about what we’re doing, what we’re putting into place, what habits we might be creating with our students unknowingly or, you know, not intentionally. And I really wanna take the time to do that because I think, you know, if you get your resources organized, that’s gonna help with your lesson planning and your day to day running of your classroom. If you get your space organized, you’re going to feel so much better again with running your classroom on a day to day basis. Now, what do we need to organize? The other variable we have, which is the people that walk into your classroom every day. And so that’s where it comes down to classroom management.

Rebecca Joyner [00:02:21]:
Now, so much of classroom management is personality specific and so many different teaching environments exist that are gonna require you to manage your classroom differently from other teachers. And so this is definitely a nuanced topic. If there was one way to do classroom management, then, you know, it wouldn’t be such a big problem. We someone would crack the code and make millions of dollars about it. So I wanna preface by saying that, and that’s why we’re gonna do this podcast episode being more a reflection on what worked for you and what didn’t, and we’ll take some action steps there as well. But I do wanna encourage you, I have a Spotify playlist. I know most of you listen to Apple, which same, but I can’t make playlist on Apple, but I can on Spotify. So if you have Spotify, I have a playlist and I’ll link it in the show notes.

Rebecca Joyner [00:03:07]:
It’s all of my episodes on classroom management and they’re all in one place. Now I will say that every guest I have on the podcast, I ask them some sort of classroom management question, but I didn’t put every guest episode in here. Just the ones that are really classroom management heavy, as well as any like individual episodes I’ve done. So that’s a great place to kind of, if you want more like action steps and specific tips and solutions, those are gonna be some great episodes for you. But to end the year, we’re not gonna fix every little thing, but we are gonna celebrate what was great, what wasn’t great, and we will take some clear action steps by the end of this episode. Okay. So first thing I want you to do is I want you to ask yourself, as you look back on this past year, what methods did you use that worked well? What were some procedures or routines or rhythms or refrains I’ve talked about here before? Things you said all the time that worked well in your classroom. And if you can’t think of any, then that even more iterates the point that like you maybe haven’t spent as much time as you should really being intentional about how you’re managing your class.

Rebecca Joyner [00:04:18]:
So if you’re like, I don’t even know what worked well. Then an alternate question could be, when were you most enjoying your time in the classroom with your students? What was going on? What was the vibe? How did you get there? What were you guys doing? Okay. So we’re gonna identify the highs with this first question. Okay? Those are the things we wanna really lean into and make sure we are intentional about those. Okay. So for example, if you found that the best times that you had with your students were when you were doing lecture and you had created space for there to be a lot of discussion, a lot of back and forth, there was room for them to go on tangents and you to research side topics, and that was fun for both you and your students, and it gave you both life, then that is something we wanna lean into as a method next year of saying, okay, Maybe if I normally block off fifteen minutes for direct instruction, next year, I’m gonna try to block out more like twenty five so we have more space for that organic discussion and conversation that flows. Okay? So we wanna identify what worked well because we wanna lean into that next year. Question two then is very obvious.

Rebecca Joyner [00:05:24]:
Okay. What did not work well? What are methods maybe you tried? Maybe you tried some sort of reward system or ticket system or exit slip or some sort of bell ring or something, and what did not work well. And let’s get really granular here. Okay. Not just like, Ugh, the whole entire bell ringers just don’t work for me. Okay. What about it didn’t work? Was it the passing back of the papers? Was it the collecting of the papers? Was it having the questions already prepared? You know, really get granular about what did not work well about each thing that you’re going to highlight here that did not work well. Now again, if you’re like, I don’t even know because I didn’t even have intentional methods, then ask yourself, when did I get the most frustrated in my classroom? What triggered me to lose my patience or have a harsh tongue with my students most consistently? Like, what were some of those things that would make me feel that way? What were things that just kinda sucked the life out of me when I was with my students? So we’re not talking about just like grading things at home.

Rebecca Joyner [00:06:22]:
We’re talking about like in your interactions, in your class periods when you’re teaching, what was very hard? So we’re gonna write all of those things down. Now, the third question we’re gonna ask, again, we’re gonna try to get really granular here, is looking at those areas that didn’t work well. I want you to review them and say, okay, are most of my issues here, if I’m gonna summarize them or if I’m gonna put them into two categories, are they whole class issues or individual issues I was having? And whole class, I would apply to, like, groups of five or more students this is applying to. That’s gonna be like a whole class issue. Individual issues are gonna be, you know, problems, things that didn’t work well with individual students or really small groups of students. Like, you had this group of three or four that was really hard. I would categorize that as like an individual issue. Okay.

Rebecca Joyner [00:07:11]:
So I want you to look at that because here’s something I’ve said over and over. This is one of my refrains here, it’s on Arcascience and on the secondary science simplified podcast. I fully believe that whole class classroom management issues are best addressed procedurally and that individual classroom management issues are best addressed relationally. So that leads me to questions four and five. And I want you to consider both, but really consider which one most applies to where you’re having the most issues. Okay. So number four is for those of you who, especially who are struggling with individual behavior issues and individual management problems, How can I prioritize relationship building better next year? Now, if you’re like, what does this look like? I would go to teachers that you know, that excel at this, that have great relationships with students, that don’t have a lot of issues with students on a one on one basis. And ask them, hey, what are you doing that’s working? And like I said at the beginning, some of this is just gonna be personality.

Rebecca Joyner [00:08:17]:
Some people are gonna have personalities where things just roll off their back or management comes easy to them. But regardless if it comes easy to you or not, or if you have a natural personality to handle conflict better than others, anyone can learn to do this and anyone can improve their classroom management practice. Okay? But I think with these individual issues, it’s going to come down to those relationships. So I’d be asking around, I’d be getting ideas. What are things you can do to improve this? Do you want to DM me on Instagram also? I don’t have a Spotify playlist about relationships, but I do have a couple of guest interviews I’m thinking of right now that I feel like we’re with teachers who I know personally who do this really well. And I can point you to those that you can listen to. And I’ll link some of those in the show notes as well. I also have a relationships mini course in my secondary science simplified virtual PD bundle that that might equip you too.

Rebecca Joyner [00:09:10]:
But I also think you can just learn a lot from the people that you know personally that you feel like are doing this well. And I want you to write down ways you can prioritize this better. For example, for something really specific you can take right now, I’ve interviewed my personal high school chemistry teacher so many times on this podcast because he’s hilarious and I love him so much and I respect him so much as an educator. And one of the things he did that I just thought was so simple and great was he always created space at the beginning of class, like after the bell ringer, like when you’re in that transition period for like two to three minutes of news of interests. And this was the opportunity for people to kinda share, you know, what was going on, proms coming up, so and so is, you know, ask this person to hoe co, you know, this game, we have this tournament, I won this golf thing, you know, whatever. They can share what’s going on. And he could also specifically call on individual people and say any news of interest. And you didn’t even have to share anything personal.

Rebecca Joyner [00:10:07]:
It could be anything you’ve heard going on in the world for those that don’t wanna share something personal. But it was such a simple way that he created space for us to kinda get the chatter out, especially because I know one of the years that I had him, I had him after lunch. So we were all coming in just like gabbing, gabbing, gabbing. And I think it was a great way to kinda like let us get a few things off our chest, laugh with him. He was always very sarcastic and funny before we got into the chemistry stuff. So that’s just one simple idea, but how can I prioritize relationship building next year? Question number five, this is for everybody, but especially you feel like your main problems when it comes to management and what doesn’t work in terms of your methods would be how can I be proactive procedurally next year? I believe that every single pain point you wrote down for number two of what did not work well, that has to do with your whole class, all of those things can be fixed proactively. We just need to write a procedure for them and then you need to clearly communicate those procedures to your students and consistently reinforce them. Clear communication, consistent reinforcement are the game changing implementation strategies for effective procedures in your classroom and routines.

Rebecca Joyner [00:11:18]:
And I’ve shared so many times what I think are some of my, the most important routines to have. I’ll link some of those in the show notes and they’re also going to be on that classroom management playlist of all those podcast episodes. But I would get really, really specific about this. Like if things that are stressful are lab days, okay, then let’s get really specific about how we’re gonna manage lab day behavior and how we’re gonna do this. And let’s think through some solutions now when you’re not in the trenches, like, in the midst of it and you have no margin to think about this. Unless, think about what we can establish at the beginning of the year and hit really strong when your students aren’t as comfortable with you, when it’s a fresh year, fresh start, and you can kinda set a new precedent. You can always start new procedures mid year, but it just goes so much easier when you start them at the beginning of the year. So I highly recommend that.

Rebecca Joyner [00:12:07]:
And then the sixth question is, I believe the lazy genius Kendra Adachi calls this her magic question, but I’m I hope I didn’t misquote her. But it’s this idea of what can I do now to serve future me next school year in these topics? You’re already serving future you by organizing your resources and doing the classroom reset challenge like we talked about last week. But in terms of your classroom management, besides answering these questions, okay, let’s find some solutions now that you can have ready to go for next year. This could be as simple as maybe putting some of these things in your syllabus. Like, Hey, these are some different ways we’re going to do things next year and I want to make sure we cover them at the very beginning. It could be taking a professional development course on this. Like I mentioned, my first three mini courses of the secondary science simplified bundle, their core values, relationships, and culture, that’s really covering what you need most in terms of classroom management. I’ll link all those in the show notes.

Rebecca Joyner [00:13:06]:
But like I said, also just ask people that you see doing this well and see what they’re doing. Some of my best tips for this came from other teachers learning what they did and what worked for them. And then a little heads up for next week’s episode that I’m really excited about is I know sometimes you’re like, I feel like sometimes I prep so much in in the beginning and it doesn’t even matter. Like, it’s just a pipe stream. Like, I’m spending all this time making lesson plans, and then it doesn’t even matter because we have so many interruptions or so many hurricanes or tornado drills or whatever that things never go to plan. It’s like wasted time. So next week, we’re gonna talk about, hey, what prep is worth it and what isn’t. But I’ll go ahead and spoiler alert you right now, taking the time to reflect on this now at the end of the year while it’s all so fresh is worth your time.

Rebecca Joyner [00:13:55]:
And investigating solutions that you can apply next school year is worth your time in terms of classroom management. So I highly recommend taking the time to do that. Okay. So that’s your take home challenge. Go through these questions, reflect on these five and then answer number six. What’s one thing you can do now to serve future you and let’s knock that out so you’re setting yourself up for success next school year. I will link that podcast playlist with all of my episodes about classroom management in the show notes at itsatrocketscienceclassroom.com/episode100 and 80 four. And hey, I mentioned this last week, but this is year 10 of It’s At Rocket Science And I would love it if you would celebrate with me, whether you’ve enjoyed the podcast or you’ve enjoyed free resources or you’ve invested in resources or curriculum over the last almost ten years.

Rebecca Joyner [00:14:45]:
This is the start of year 10. I would love to hear from you. So what that can look like is ways that you can like really practically do this is to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, to follow me on Instagram, TBT, and YouTube. I’m so close to 10,000 followers on those three platforms. And I just think it’d be cool to hit 10 ks on year 10. Also leave a review. If you’ve ever purchased any TpT products, you get credits on TpT when you leave reviews for those products. And so take a few minutes and leave reviews.

Rebecca Joyner [00:15:17]:
It really means a ton to me, and I know all the other curriculum writers and content creators out there. And if you’re like, I don’t have Apple Podcasts, I don’t, you know, purchase on TBT, then just shoot me a DM. Like, honestly, your words just bless me there too. So I would love to hear from you and celebrate year 10 alongside you. Alright, 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 itsnotrocketscienceclassroom.com/challenge to grab your classroom reset challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free.

Rebecca Joyner [00:15:55]:
Thanks so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you here next week. Until then, I’ll be rooting for you, teacher friend.