When and if you decide to use ClassDojo with your students, it’s a good idea to think about how you will use it first. Do you have a projector that you can display ClassDojo on? If so, how often will you display it? Some teachers have it up all day, while others choose to display it at specific times, like first thing in the morning. Whatever you decide, I recommend following these steps:

1. Create buy-in

Let students design their own avatar. They’ll be much more enthusiastic if they can personalize their character. Get them involved in the process of creating a classroom culture, let them help choose which behaviors will go on ClassDojo, and what they need to do to earn points. Let the students have a voice in when they think people should lose points as well. Ultimately, you will make the call when it comes to awarding points, but giving kids ownership of the development process will increase buy-in. You can also check in with your group ever so often to discuss what is working and what is not.

2. Be consistent

Whatever you decide to do, stick with it. If you say you are going to give a prize to students when they reach a certain goal, follow through! On the other hand, if you say you are going to take away points when something happens, do it. Make sure your plan is feasible. If you promise to give points for certain behaviors, set up your space so that you can easily give points at any given time. If you have to find a computer and log in every time you want to give a point, you are unlikely to follow through. I recommend using the mobile app for this reason.

3. Make it a part of the culture

ClassDojo is a tool that works best when used in tandem with other classroom management programs. I used ClassDojo with my classroom economy last year. My fifth graders loved it. When they earned a certain amount of ClassDojo points they were able to “cash out” and get a cash bonus in their class bank account. We had an auction every month, giving students had a tangible reward for their behavior that was reinforced with ClassDojo. There are endless ways you can adapt this tool to fit your classroom management needs.

Gone are the days when you only had access to parents via one-way monthly newsletters or twice-a-year parent teacher conferences. Thanks to technology you can easily keep in touch with your students’ parents all year-round.

Here are some tips to get your communicating with parents in the digital world:

Keep a Class Blog

Rather than sending home a monthly or weekly newsletter to parents that might never make it out of the bottom of your students’ backpacks, try starting a class blog. Set a schedule for posting and share that schedule with parents. Allow moderated comments on the posts to get parents involved with the classroom.

Have your students do most of the blogging. Assign one student a week to be the class chronicler. Have that student take photos, record interviews with other students, and summarize what the class learned. Weebly is an easy platform for students of all ages to use.

Get your class blog linked to your school’s homepage to show all the exciting work your class is doing!

Use a Messaging Service

Sending individual texts or emails to parents is time consuming and not very private. Let a messaging service, such as ClassDojo Messaging, do all the work for you. Once students and parents opt into the system, it allows you to easily send text message blasts to update all parents at once, or you can privately message them to keep them up-to-date on their child’s progress. You don’t see their phone numbers and they don’t see yours. This is a great option for families who may not have home Internet but do have smartphones.

Set Up a Class Social Media Account

If parents don’t want to have their phones buzzing all the time, consider starting a class Twitter account or Facebook page. You can use the page to share updates, photos, and links to student work. If your students are under 13, be sure to set the account to private. To view the page, all parents will need to have Twitter or Facebook accounts (many of them probably already do). Before setting up any class social media accounts, review your school’s Privacy Policy and check with administrators.

Make Parents Feel Welcome

Let parents know that your classroom is a welcome space for them. Consider inviting parents to your classroom on days when students are giving presentations or sharing projects. Working parents can use Skype or Google Hangouts to visit virtually.

We have all probably been in classrooms where it seemed as if the teacher was teaching to the wall. Few students were focused, participating, or even in their seats. What these teachers lacked was a classroom management system. There are several basic tenets of classroom management that can smooth the rough edges of any school year, no matter what the student population.

Set boundaries. Discuss with students well-defined rules and consequences, as well as rewards. Help them build ownership in the rules by brainstorming reasons for each guideline.

Accentuate the positive. Recognize and reward worthy behavior publicly. This will sharpen students’ hunger to please you and be recognized in front of the class. Appropriate and positive behaviors should receive public accolades each time they occur. Consistent positive reinforcement will do more to curtail negative behavior than consequences!

Be fair and consistent. Negative behaviors should receive the same consequences every time. Let students know that any behavior that impedes learning is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Refrain from making threats without following through. This will do wonders for your credibility! Students need to know that you mean business.

Give warnings before giving penalties for negative behavior. We all need to be urged to step back in line at times without consequence. Simply say,“This is a warning,” and make sure the student understands what the warning is for. Use “the look”. All teachers inherently have this facial expression that warns students they are on thin ice.

Stay calm when negative behaviors occur. If students make bad decisions and you react as a “loose cannon”, they often do not know what to expect. As one of their primary role models, students need and expect you to be cool, composed, and consistent. Simply give the student who made the bad choice a consequence and move on.

Choose a management system that is easy to use and that students are interested in. Whether it is a program like ClassDojo, a clip chart with colors and clothespins, or card pockets with multi-colored cards, be enthusiastic and consistent when using it. Routine and structure are crucial here.

Communicate with parents. This should be an integral part of any management system. Begin the school year with a positive communication for every student. When you have completed one positive contact for each student on your roster, start again! The rewards you will reap are invaluable!

Make parents your partners. Consider making home visits to build a rapport with families and students. Keep the lines of communication open with parents throughout the year with positive phone calls, written notes, emails, ClassDojo messaging, and personal contacts. Not only will this help build your relationship, but it shows parents that you are dedicated to the support and success of their child. This will garner parent support and make things easier if you ever need to contact them with news about negative student behavior. If you have their support, half of the battle is already won!

Document everything. Negative behaviors, positive behaviors, as well as parent contacts need to be documented. This can become quite tedious, so find a system that works well for your teaching style and preferences. Choose something that makes documenting simple. If it isn’t easy for you, or you don’t have a system, you are more likely not to do it. For example, ClassDojo keeps record of specific positive and negative behaviors as well as what dates they occurred.This makes data collection easy when needed for RTIs, IEPs, or conferencing.

Being a strong classroom manager is never easy! Remember to be consistent, accentuate the positive, and make parents your partners. Utilize these tools to help make your school year as smooth as possible. Keep calm and teach on!

Are you wondering what you can do to improve your students’ reading test scores this year? Are you trying to supplement your lesson plans with Common Core-based resources? Maybe you’re trying to reduce or resolve the setbacks from summer?

Here are great online resources that will help your students in English Language Arts:

Subtext

This free app and web-based platform allows teachers to assign leveled readings that can be embedded with quizzes, writing prompts, polls, and comments. Subtext has many texts pre-loaded, but you can always search for and upload your own digital text (e.g. a free Google book). In addition to collecting students’ responses to the pre-embedded prompts and quizzes, the system allows students to make their own annotations to the texts. There’s also a speech-to-text feature that works really well for struggling readers and English learners.

Newsela

This free site provides current event news articles that are vetted and leveled (based on Lexile measures). You can assign the same reading to every student, but differentiate the lexile level based on your knowledge of individual ability. In other words, Jack might read the article at 780L while Jamal reads the same article at 1170L. Your students can then discuss the article as a group and you can be confident that everyone was equally capable of accessing the content. The best thing about Newsela is that it gives your students access to relevant and authentic non-fiction texts. It’s a great tool for bell-ringer activities.

ReadWriteThink

If you’re looking for new ELA lesson plans or interactive activities (for individual or whole group instruction), ReadWriteThink is a great place to start. This nonprofit is supported by the IRA and NCTE, so you know the reading pedagogy behind the resources will be sound. They also provide at-home resources, so if you’re trying to get parents more involved in students’ reading success, you can suggest they look here as well.

I always knew that reflection was an important part of being an excellent teacher. I teach reflection to my students when I pass back a test, essay, or other assessment. I stress the importance of it and I’m disappointed when my students don’t take it seriously. Harvard’s Business School hails the importance of reflective practice. Education gurus have written about it for decades. I always thought of myself as a reflective teacher, but last year I realized that I really don’t reflect too often. I was more of an, “I’ll do that differently next year!” type of teacher. Then next year rolled around and I forgot.

Last year I got in the habit of reflecting every day. Even if it was only for 10 minutes right after school, I made sure to reflect. I use PowerPoint almost every day during my instruction, so I decided to reflect by taking notes in the PowerPoint notes section. I would write what I would change about the lesson for next year. If I had time I would even tweak the presentation itself. Sometimes I would pull up handouts on my computer, make a few adjustments, and write a quick note in my planner. It never took me more than 10-15 minutes and was an investment that really paid off!

My 8th grade team meets as a group twice a week, giving us an opportunity to reflect on our practice with each other. If you are not given weekly collaborative time at your school, find someone in your content area to meet with regularly. Start the conversation in a safe place and reflect on the areas of your instruction that are working and areas that aren’t. For example, l was having a hard time teaching complex sentence structures to several students. After reflecting on this issue and talking with another teacher, she suggested an alternative way to approach the situation, and it worked! The experience of admitting you need help can be incredibly humbling and ultimately will help your students succeed.

There are many procedural-type of tools that teachers pick up throughout the year. Some of them are easy to implement at different types of the year, while some of them require a fresh start. I have a document titled “Do This Next Year”, where I keep a running tab of all the great things I want to try a bit differently. For example, I learned a great technique for forming student groups by giving each group a color and each desk a number of 1-4 , both noted by a sticker on the top right corner of the desk. This would allow me to group students in a variety of ways simply by saying “Get into your color groups. 1’s come up and get the papers…” This would work for an endless amount of activities. Though I adopted parts of it, the entire procedure was too much to implement in April. Into the list it went!

Reflecting is an investment that is well worth the time. It will improve your practice, professional growth, and most importantly, student achievement.

Schools throughout the nation are embracing the Common Core State Standards as a guide for developing curriculum across the content areas and designing assessments to measure student performance. It’s important that teachers have an understanding of what students need to be able to do at the level they are teaching. For educators who reach a wide range of students in their everyday workload this can be an especially daunting task.

There are great resources for helping teachers access the Common Core State Standards. The Common Core State Standards has a fantastic website for teachers full of useful information. They have a clear outline of all of the standards in addition to resources for parents and frequently asked questions.

If you are operating most often with the screen of your mobile device you’ll definitely want to download the free mobile app from Mastery Connect (iOS / Android). By having this app on your tablet or smartphone, you can easily access the Common Core State Standards in a meeting, planning session, or just to answer a quick question.

One helpful feature is the ability to type in a keyword and search through the Common Core State Standards. If you’re in a school that is new to these national standards this option will definitely come in handy. You can type in a phrase like “comparing fractions” and figure out which grade and standard applies to this particular skill. As you prepare for the upcoming school year definitely add this app to your homescreen for easy access to the Common Core!

I’m not sure about other teachers, but I found talking to parents particularly intimidating when I first started teaching. Having no children of my own and being in my early 20s, I was unsure of myself and it showed. Here are some tips to get the most out of communicating with parents:

1. Make contact before official events such as parent teacher conferences or report cycles. Get in touch to let parents know about your class, your expectations with regards to homework, and show them their child is in good hands.

2. Do not bombard parents with information. People these days get a lot of emails and text messages. Keep it short and to the point. Rule of thumb: The older the students are, the less the parents really want to read about what they did in class.

3. Praise students to parents. Send pithy emails or postcards about how great their child was. I sent a few off at the start of the year with what turned out to be a difficult class of 15 year olds. The most difficult of the students actually carried that postcard around with him for months. You can usually find something that a student has done well.

4. Don’t try to soften the blow with teaching euphemisms if you need to convey difficult or hard-to-hear information. I ran some of my best jargon past a friend of mine and she had zero idea that I was even giving bad news. If you need to say, “Your child is ruining every lesson with their poor behavior,” only sugar-coat this information lightly. Consider, “Johnny’s poor choices often mean he does not make any progress and makes learning harder for other members in the class.”

5. Don’t be a ‘yes’ man. If a parent is wrong, it is okay to let them know. Obviously you would not talk to them like they were a child. However, an adult-to-adult professional conversation should not always end with you agreeing to whatever the parent says. I watched in awe as my old boss talked down a parent who was insisting that his son should not have been suspended for a disciplinary issue because ‘everyone else was doing it’. She was masterful. She was gentle and polite but she was firm and gave no ground. And in the end, the parent agreed with my boss.

Keeping the lines of communication open between teachers and parents is the key to unlocking a wealth of support and favor that will most certainly increase student success. However, the relationship between teachers and parents is often a tenuous one. How and when should teachers contact parents in regards to student behavior issues?

As a precursor to contacting parents, be sure that you have a set of clear expectations for students posted in your classroom. This gives students a visual reminder of the rules with no question about what is expected. You might also want to send a copy of those rules home at the beginning of the school year for parents to read and discuss with their children. Start on the first day of school! This lays the groundwork for you and your students’ parents to be on the same page.

Next, make parents your partners! Start the year off on a positive note by contacting each parent within the first week or two to praise their child. You may want to try ClassDojo Messaging for this! This will help you build a positive rapport with parents, which they want! Traditionally, parents only receive communication about their children when there is a problem. Parents don’t like negative surprises. Turn the tables and pleasantly surprise them! Build a positive classroom environment and culture of respect by bragging about students to those who love them most. The amount of support and cooperation you will receive following these acts will be astounding!

In the case of a student who is repeatedly making poor choices, he or she should consistently receive the consequences listed in your behavior plan. A grace or warning period is traditionally granted before consequences are given. Every school setting has a different protocol, so it is important to be stay on the same page as other teachers.

Behavior that is consistently impeding the student’s learning and disrupting the learning environment is unacceptable and must be addressed. Behavior that is deliberately aggressive and malicious toward other students cannot be tolerated. Parent communication about the student’s behavior choices is often effective when trying to curb or curtail the behavior. If the unwanted student behavior continues, repeated parent communication or a referral to administration has proven to be effective.

If you’ve already shared positive feedback with parents previously, sharing negative student behavior becomes more impactful and more deeply understood by parents. Start by expressing gently your concerns over the poor choices being made by the student and provide concrete details. This puts you in the role of the supportive teacher who only wants success for the student.

Choosing the best means of communication to a parent is often situational. Phone calls seem to be the time-tested favorite method of contacting parents. Many parents use technology daily and prefer emails. However, some parents do not have a consistently working phone number, or Internet access, so written correspondence would be the most appropriate. Many educators use student agendas or planners as a communication tool with parents. Some teachers even allow parents access to their personal cell phone numbers so that they may communicate by text messaging.

The use of ClassDojo as a means for parent communication is also very effective, if parents have any internet access at home. In fact, if you use ClassDojo as a behavior management tool in your classroom, parents can create an account that allows them to view their child’s behavior progress and receive messages from teachers. ClassDojo’s Messaging feature is extremely effective, convenient, and free. Parents love ClassDojo because they receive instant feedback during the work day, and are more involved in their child’s school life.

There is no handbook on parent communication. However, if parent communication is frequent and positive, it will play a large role in the success of their child in your classroom. Your proactive behavior in the realm of parent communication sets the stage for supportive attitudes and smoother communication throughout the school year.

Ever hear the phrase, “Birds of a feather flock together”? How about, “Like attracts like”? Or…“You reap what you sow”? All of these sayings loosely describe an incredible phenomenon that fortunately is becoming more and more acknowledged in our society: the Law of Attraction. For those of you who have read The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, you probably have a general idea of what the Law of Attraction (LOA) is about. For those of you who haven’t or could just use a refresher, LOA basically affirms that we are all made up of energy fields and we are constantly giving off energy. The type of energy we give off at any given moment simply depends upon our thoughts and beliefs.

The type of energy we give off draws certain experiences into our lives. For example, if we give off positive energy we tend to attract positive experiences. If we give off negative energy, we tend to attract negative experiences. Most people don’t recognize that they hold such power over their own lives and often find themselves stuck in the revolving door of negative experiences. “Why me? Why do I always have the worst possible luck?” — these thoughts contribute to the situation.

Our thoughts about ourselves are just as powerful as our thoughts about others. It’s time we use the LOA to shed positive experiences on our students. “Kids live up to the expectations we have of them.” This sort of belief can result in tremendous growth from your students. The old saying, “You have to see it to believe it,” is more accurately put, “You have to believe it to see it.” Teachers must focus on the strengths instead of the weaknesses of their students. In doing so, students will be better equipped to succeed and teachers will create a better classroom environment for everyone. If you change the way you see things, the things you see will change. After all, it’s the law!

Let’s face it, kids are human, and some of them are more easygoing than others. We’ve all had that one kid in our class who knew exactly how to push our buttons and seemed to make it his or her mission to ruin our day. Sound familiar? If not, you are lucky! I have at least one student every year who pushes all the boundaries and tests my seemingly endless patience.

There is definitely a spectrum of bad behaviors and I’ve seen them all. From subtle eye-rolling and forgetting to raise one’s hand, to literal assault and blood-shed. I could write multiple volumes about what works and what doesn’t, but for now I’m going to focus on the low-level, everyday annoyances that can disrupt learning and derail your class on a daily basis.

Just like you have tiers of intervention for academics, think of behavior management as having multiple tiers as well. Tier 1 would be your run-of-the-mill, whole class point system. This is the level that generally keeps things moving along and relies mostly on peer pressure to be successful. Tier 2 is an additional level of behavior support, think star charts for individual students, or weekly communication to parents.

If you feel like you need more behavior support for a particular student, ask yourself a few questions first:

1. Does the disruptive behavior happen at a particular time, or during certain types of activities?

If you can identify what is causing the behavior to happen, you are halfway to solving the problem. If you can determine that a student is bored, struggling, or having a hard time at home, you can try and adjust your teaching or help them in another way. Preventing the behavior from happening is better than constantly doling out consequences.

2. Does the student respond to positive reinforcement?

If so, try to capitalize on this. Give praise every time they do something right, even if it feels excessive. Make sure your positive comments are more frequent than the negative. Using a classroom management tool like ClassDojo is great for this, because you can actually see the breakdown of positive to negative feedback for each student.

3. Is their family supportive of your efforts?

If so, try to communicate with them frequently. The most powerful tool you have to improve student behavior is a good working relationship with their family.

4. Still not improving?

Don’t reinvent the wheel! My first year, I had four different students on four different behavior plans which was almost impossible to maintain. If you need to implement a behavior plan, use your existing structure, and focus on 2-3 behaviors at most. For example, if you use ClassDojo, or another point system, come up with a contract that states how many points for a specific behavior a student must receive each day or week to earn a prize. The prize doesn’t have to be fancy, it should be something that is easy for you to provide on a weekly basis. It also helps immensely if there is a reward at home as well. Your student should help design their behavior plan. Students are much more likely to buy in if they’ve had a voice in its creation.

Like I said before, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to behavior issues, but this is a good place to start!

This is Part 4 of a 4 part series by Emily Dahm. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.