The 9 Biggest Classroom Management Mistakes Teachers Make

Much of your classroom management success is dependent upon your ability to avoid making big mistakes. Make them often enough, or repeatedly, and you’ll lose control of your classroom quickly.

Before long, you’ll begin to believe teaching in a chaotic environment is just part of the job.

It’s not. At least, it doesn’t have to be. The truth is, you have the power to create the class you really want, regardless of where you teach.

But classroom management must be a daily commitment. It must be your top priority if you hope to build a classroom of happy, well-behaved, and motivated students.

Use the following list as a way to evaluate how close you are to reaching your classroom management goals. When you’re finished reading, you can score yourself on a five point scale.

Some of these items have been covered in previous posts, so if you’re interested in more complete explanations, I’ve included a link.

1. Not enforcing classroom rules 100% of the time. This is by far the biggest mistake, and it’s a common problem for a majority of teachers. For every time you let something go, you create more misbehavior in the future.

2. Lecturing, pleading, scolding, and reminding students instead of letting your consequences do the job they’re intended to do. Lean exclusively on your classroom management plan, and you will eliminate the need to use these ineffectual methods.

3. Taking poor student behavior personally. Revenge isn’t sweet, it’s self-sabotage. Letting your emotions get involved in classroom management will cloud your judgment, make you do things you will regret, and alienate your students.

4. Yelling at students. Raising your voice creates tension and ruins rapport. It also provides a poor model for your students by showing them the wrong way to behave when things don’t go their way. Most important, it communicates to your students that you only mean what you say when you raise your voice.

5. Preaching your classroom management plan instead of teaching it clearly through detailed modeling, role-play, and practice, practice, practice.

6. Not smiling or showing your personality the first month, semester, or, for some, the entire school year. Likability is the key to building rapport. And rapport makes everything easier, especially classroom management.

7. Praising students for what is a common expectation or praising them in order to influence other students (i.e., caught being good). These are dishonest methods. Teachers who rely on false praise typically do so shortsightedly to get through the day, the week, or the year. But false praise doesn’t change behavior; it’s a momentary fix devoid of meaning. Students are perceptive and see right through inauthenticity.

8. Having weak consequences. This is often dependent on who the teacher is and the amount of leverage he or she wields with students (i.e., likability, orderly room environment, honest and direct classroom management, exciting lessons, and many others. See Dream Class). This is one reason why time-out works well for some and not for others.

9. Talking too much. Having clearly understood routines and procedures is critical to effective classroom management. Not having enough of them results in constant explanation and a boring, teacher-centered classroom. Your students should know exactly what to do, and be busy doing it, every minute of the school day. Otherwise, their eyes will glaze over, and they’ll grow tired of you and your shtick. Inattentiveness and troublemaking will ensue.

Avoiding these nine mistakes will help you attain the classroom you’ve always wanted. A worthwhile exercise is to rate each one on a scale of 1 to 5.

A score of 1 = The mistake is a daily occurrence.

A score of 5 = You never make this mistake.

Work on raising each score to a 5, and I think you’ll be a happier and more successful teacher.

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