As a teacher, you’ll know the importance of developing great classroom management skills. After all, in each lesson, you only have a short time to deliver your educational content, develop your students’ key skills, and assess their learning. Keeping things running smoothly and students on track is vital to developing as an effective educator. But which classroom management strategies for high school should you prioritize?
In this article, we break down some of the most important classroom management techniques and how to introduce them with confidence, so you can spend less time researching effective ways to teach, and more time working with your students.
Key Takeaways
- Effective classroom management is necessary for ensuring you create the best learning experience for students.
- Setting and sticking to clear rules is an important classroom management technique.
- Tailoring your teaching to students’ academic abilities and interests can help engage and motivate them.
- Technology can help you assess student understanding and adapt your teaching accordingly. It can also enable you to deliver immersive and engaging content.
The Role of Classroom Management in High School Education
Each lesson represents a new opportunity to help your students grow—but students don’t always come ready to learn. They can bring their messy, teenage emotions to the table, alongside social problems, worries from outside school, and the general stress of juggling everything they have to handle. Managing this while motivating them to learn is a key part of effective teaching.
Teens in particular can also struggle with responding to authority and may challenge you when given the opportunity. That’s why clarity and boundaries can be extremely important in high school classrooms, as well as making sure things are perceived as “fair.”
Furthermore, the advent of new technologies brings particular challenges. For example, device addiction can be particularly prevalent in teens, and heavy technology use may be linked to lower academic performance. We’re also still dealing with the after-effects of the COVID-19 lockdown, which may have shifted student behavior for the worse.
Teens can also be distracted by their social lives, as friendship groups and dating dramas can take center stage. In the most extreme cases, teens can display risk-taking behaviors like skipping class or cheating on tests.
With these teenage troubles in mind, finding the right classroom management techniques can make a huge difference to your lessons, by making them run more smoothly, with the right environment for learning. They can also help you shape resilient and self-motivated learners who are ready for a bright future.
5 Effective Classroom Management Strategies for High School Teachers
Managing student behavior can require you to use a range of strategies, depending on your subject, your physical environment, the exact age of the students, and what else might be going on outside school (every teacher also knows the urban legends about the full moon!). But with a few key techniques in your repertoire, you can begin to establish a calm and effective teaching style.
1. Set the rules… and stick to them
It’s worth taking a few minutes in your first lesson to set out your rules. These can range from “Don’t speak when others are speaking” to “Keep your mobile phone out of sight.” You could also introduce more complex rules about working together or asking questions, for example, “Always ask for support if you need it.” It’s good to get students to agree to these explicitly, perhaps by signing an agreement.
While that first statement of the rules can be powerful, it’s also very important to uphold them as time goes on. High school students in particular will test your boundaries by seeing what they can get away with. You must therefore make sure you follow up on rule-breaking and respond consistently, or you will undermine your authority, and students will see that it’s possible to break the rules without consequences.
Additionally, if 2 students have broken the same rule, it’s not effective to punish one and not another. Students will lose trust if they suspect you have “favorites.”
2. Consider classroom layout and logistics
The layout of your high school classroom can have a powerful impact on student behavior and learning. You could consider using rows of desks facing the front, which can establish you as the authority in the room. This can also reduce distractions, especially from off-task socializing, and can help teens develop a more “grown-up” sense of independence.
Conversely, you may decide that groups of tables are more appropriate to foster collaboration and conversation. This can help develop skills that will be useful at college or in the workplace, where young adults will need to work with others. Or, change between the 2 setups as needed.
You should also factor classroom layout into your lesson plans to make it quicker and easier to distribute resources. Preparing sets of worksheets or textbooks for each row or group can make this part of the lesson much simpler and help you get to the learning rather than wasting time on logistics. Consider assigning helper duties to 1 or 2 students to support this.
3. Tailor your teaching to their level
Each of your learners is an individual, with their own strengths, weaknesses, and personal tastes. Meeting their academic level is key to engagement. If the lesson is too easy, students may become bored and act out; if it’s too hard, they may lose motivation. The key here is regular assessment to gauge their level of understanding and where there are gaps to address. You can then adapt your instruction accordingly.
Technology can be a fantastic way to introduce adaptive learning. Platforms like TAO allow you to adapt question branches based on student responses, making a test progressively harder or sticking at an easier level as needed.
Formative assessment, which helps you understand student progress as you go, can also be digital. Options like electronic polling or collaborative documents can help you test students quickly and easily, so you can then address gaps and misunderstandings swiftly.
4, Leverage technology
Technology can also help you create memorable learning experiences that fully engage and stimulate learners. For example, digital tools can help you add elements of gamification to your classroom, as students collect virtual points or interact online in game-like environments such as quests, simulations, or chatbots. These can mimic the types of technology students enjoy using outside school.
Technology also makes it easier to create multimedia lessons and assessments. For example, computer-based assessments can draw on text, video, and audio to allow students to respond to a range of stimuli as they would in real life, rather than just a paper and pen exercise.
A blended classroom, using tech alongside traditional techniques, also gives students the option to review and study the material outside the classroom. This can increase confidence during lessons—especially important for teens who may want to preserve their standing with their peers. It can also encourage students to speak up, which is essential in preparing students for college and work, where having the confidence to voice opinions will be important.
This kind of “flipped learning” model can also help you maximize your in-person time by reducing the need to run through lots of content in your lessons—students will do this outside school, and you can use your lessons for discussions, role-plays, experiments, or interactive assessments that will push your students’ understanding and skills.
5. Teach and assess social-emotional skills
When working with teens, it’s easy to forget that they may not yet have all the personal skills they need to interact positively with you and each other. While you have academic content to cover, it’s also important to make time to work on social-emotional skills. This can make the learning process smoother and help your students prepare for future life beyond school.
For example, before conducting a conversation exercise, you could ask students to draw up a list of guidelines for a successful discussion. Before an upcoming exam, you might teach some simple relaxation and meditation exercises. Or you might introduce elements of moral debate into your class—for example, looking at the question of animal testing in science, or debating how literary characters could make different decisions. This can support students in reasoning and decision-making.
Finding opportunities for students to collaborate is also key. This can be as simple as asking them to share their thoughts with each other before answering a question. Technology can also facilitate working together, even in the realm of assessment, where digital testing can allow you to set collaborative exercises.
Turning Strategy into Practice
Smooth, well-planned lessons and consistent rules can help you manage student behavior more effectively, and make your life as a teacher much easier.
Tailoring your teaching to their academic level and interests can also increase student motivation and engagement and make the learning stick. By implementing the classroom management ideas above, you can set up and run an effective learning experience for your students.
As a next step, consider how you will measure learning success in your classroom so you know where tweaks are needed. You could also try experimenting with engaging techniques like micro-learning.
FAQs
What makes classroom management effective for high school?
Effective classroom management should be based on clear rules and consistent responses. Additionally, you should consider practical aspects such as classroom layout and logistics. Effective teachers will also adapt their teaching to students’ academic levels and interests to keep their lessons engaging.
How can technology support effective classroom management for high school teachers?
Technology can support effective classroom management by giving you the tools to quickly and easily assess your students so you can teach to their level. Additionally, tech can make lesson logistics smoother, and help you deliver content in more engaging forms, such as multimedia and gamified activities.
