Demystifying Montessori Classroom Management: Part 1

 

When I first started teaching and I asked about classroom management, I was told 'work'. If the children are working, your class is managed. 

Wrong. So what does this tell a new teacher? Get the children to work at all costs! Which can turn into an adult who begins telling the children what to do. While engagement is really important, there are many other factors at play in a well-managed class. It is a good thing that all we needed to know was in our training-we just had to put it together!

I would like to make this post part of a series on connecting the theory to practice.

Let's start here. I consider classroom management to consist of 6 elements that can be fairly interrelated.  

Planning

The forward planning and preparation that you do for the classroom and for individual children will go a long way in your management.  

Transition Times

You probably have some plans for transition times (arrival to the classroom, moving from work cycle to group, transition to lunch, lunch to the playground, playground to inside, cleanup to go home). But how solid is your plan? Transition times are a typical 5-10 minutes that can cause the day to go sideways. So really plan for them!  What do you want them to look like?  Walk through those moments from start to finish. What skills/lessons do the children need in order to be successful in those transition times? What can be planned to occupy the children waiting for those who are still cleaning up? Involve your classroom assistant in the planning.  What songs do you want to sing/books or poems to be read/movement activities?

Routines  & Procedures

What routines or procedures feel sticky to you or feel like they just aren't as smooth as you would like them to be?  Think through them step by step and identify the disconnect between what you are asking the children to do and what they are actually doing. After that is identified, what do the children need to know to be able to move through those routines/procedures independently?

Predictable Behavior

After you have a group of children settled in the classroom for a while, you learn who exhibits predictable behavior or behaviors that you can anticipate.  A child who takes forever to clean up lunch, a child who won't come in off the playground, a child who really has difficulty leaving their activity, or even a child that struggles to manage themselves at group time.  You can plan for all anticipated behavior so interventions are in place before the child reacts in that predictable way. Plan to have the child that cleans up slowly start a few minutes before the group. Give the child who doesn't want to come off the playground a job.  A responsibility like making sure the sand toys are back in the bin. This will ease the transition from play to lining up. These are just a few ideas of how you can plan for predictable behavior.

The next piece to the classroom management puzzle will be in the next post: Part 2!