Part 9: Review of Laurie Boyd’s “Beyond Classroom Management: Building Your Schoolwide Discipline System”: Chapters 9-12

Chapters 9-13 of Boyd’s book relay her key ideas about individual classroom management. Since this site focuses on schoolwide discipline, we’ll gloss over most of this. But here are some key points from these chapters that are relevant to our work here:

• every class needs a clear classroom management plan with pre-planned consequences
• teachers should over prepare for how they will introduce their classroom management plan (Boyd even suggests mandating all new teachers write out a script for exactly how they will introduce it)
• teachers should plan for every tiny thing that might disrupt learning (no matter how small) and coach students on how to act to avoid these
• teachers must practice all routines regularly with students and give targeted feedback as necessary
• administrators should create a set of common rules for all classrooms
  • This would definitely be controversial in some schools. But Boyd’s reasoning is that if every class has the same rules, parents will develop a clear understanding that if a student is consequenced, it is not the result of one teacher’s arbitrary will but the result of not following a school-wide rule
• in reality, it doesn’t matter exactly which rules you list as long as you actually enforce them
• she suggests a school-wide 4-step progressive consequence system with a warning, phone call home, detention, and office referral

Nothing out of the ordinary if you’ve read the literature on classroom management, but I appreciate Boyd’s insistence on consistency throughout classes and schoolwide standards and expectations.

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