How To Teach Your Classroom Management Plan

Be Clear
Bring your classroom management plan into high-def focus for your students, making it clear and comprehensible—because ambiguity and confusion are the enemies of effective classroom management. Leave no doubt as to what constitutes following and breaking your rules by shining a light on even the most nuanced misbehavior.
Be Passionate
It’s rarely subject matter that motivates students. It’s the teacher and the passion she brings to the lesson. Given its importance, teaching classroom management is the time to let it out. Allow your students to see the real you, the one determined to create a classroom experience beyond the norm, the mundane, and the colorless—while reaching toward the extraordinary.
Be Dynamic
Teaching classroom management is a physical experience. To make it real for your students, to make it unforgettable, you must dramatize, model, and perform your way through your plan, vividly showing them what both following rules and breaking them looks and feels like. Walk them through each progressive step a misbehaving student would take.
Be Contrarian
Use the how-not strategy to demonstrate the most common rule-breaking behaviors students engage in. Sit at a student’s desk and show them how not to get your attention, how not to ask a question, or how not to behave during lessons. They must see and experience what isn’t okay in order to fully understand what is.
Be Interactive
Involve your students physically in teaching your plan. Let them role-play scenarios. Allow them be the teacher while you play the part of a student. Gather them around you, encourage questions, let them take an active role. After all, they have more at stake and more to gain from quality classroom management than even you do.
Be Thorough
Surprises lead to confusion, resentment, and ultimately more misbehavior. Make sure there is no misunderstanding. Make sure your students know precisely where your boundary lines are. Otherwise, they’ll be forever uncomfortable, unsure of themselves, and unable to relax and enjoy the freedom within your boundaries.
Note: The idea of allowing freedom within boundaries is a critical element of exceptional classroom management (a trade secret). To read more, see the first chapter of Dream Class.
Be Skeptical
For review, ask your students to show you how to ask a question or how to get up to turn in work or how to attend during lessons. Make them prove they understand. Have them demonstrate what following rules does and doesn’t look like. If you like, depending on the grade level, you can even devise a written test.

How Often, How Long

One of the most common questions I get is how long should it take to teach your classroom management plan. An hour or so a day forthe first day of the school should be enough for initial learning.
After that you’ll want to review every day for the next three or four weeks. Sometimes this review will only take a few minutes—or as long as it takes to read aloud your plan.

Other days you may want to review entire sections in detail. After three or four weeks, if you’ve been thorough with your teaching, chances are you’ll revisit your plan only occasionally throughout the year. Once per week being a good rule of thumb.

Make It Important

Students are quick to buy into and follow whatever the teacher deems is important. And so when classroom management is shown to be a priority, even if it feels like a complete cultural shift from what they’re used to, your students will go right along in agreement.
They’ll be on board, supporting your desire to make your classroom a special place, bereft of bad attitudes, negativity, rudeness, disruption, and disrespect.
Every student, deep down, when shown the way, wants to do well. They all want to experience the feeling of being more than what they thought they could be. They all want a chance to be a part of something unique and meaningful and remarkable. We all do