Do you love teaching but hate your job because the class is making it impossible to teach? Are you spending 50% or more of your time trying to keep the class quiet? Are you drained of energy by all the effort you put into controlling your students?

Don’t fret. Follow these simple instructions and you should quickly experience a dramatic improvement in your classroom atmosphere.

1) Teach as though there are no problems going on around you.

Think about this question: What do teachers who have no discipline problems do to stop discipline problems?

The answer: Nothing, of course! Because there are no discipline problems to stop!

In other words, when you have good discipline, you are actually doing very little to get it. On the other hand, if you are busy handling discipline problems, it means you don’t have discipline. In order to get discipline, therefore, you have to be doing next to nothing about it. Use the following guidelines:

1. Ignore the fact that the students may be talking to each other or engaging in extraneous activities.
2. Teach in a quiet voice. Do not raise your voice to be heard above the students. Do not tell them to be quiet. Let other students tell their peers to be quiet if they are having trouble hearing the lesson.
3. Choose at least one child in the class who is interested in what you have to say and teach directly to that child, maintaining eye contact. Make the conversation interesting, and show that you care about what the student(s) has to say. Enjoy your interchange with the student and don’t be fazed by whatever else is going on around you. You should discover that before long, the rest of the class quiets down and tries to hear what is going on between you and the student(s) you are talking to.

2) Put plenty of notes on the board for the children to copy. It is hard for students to misbehave and copy important information at the same time.

3) Give frequent pop quizzes. Students will discover that if they don’t pay attention in class, they will get lousy marks.

4) Call on children to answer questions. Kids do not like to be embarrassed in front of their peers. Do not discriminate. Call on kids who are paying attention as well as on ones who aren’t. Do not be nasty or sarcastic when a child can’t answer because he wasn’t listening. Just call on someone else.

5) Refuse to get angry with kids for their behavior. You aren’t getting paid to be upset, and being angry does not make your teaching any better. When you get angry, the offensive student scores a victory against you, and is likely to continue doing whatever gets you mad. Furthermore, if you are mad at him, he will be mad back at you, and will not want to learn from you. If a child is misbehaving, his report card should suffer, not you.

6) If a student complains that another student called him a bad name, ask, "Do you believe it?" The child will almost certainly say "No." Then say "Good," and the matter is over. If he says, "Yes," tell him he can believe it if he wishes, and immediately go back to teaching.

7) If a student complains that another student hit him, ask in a concerned voice, "Are you hurt?" He will probably answer "No." Respond with "Good," and the matter is over. Immediately continue teaching. If he says "Yes," send him to the nurse, and handle the matter according to school policy for incidents in which students injure each other.

8) Have students work out problems with each other after class. Do not spend class time for working out problems with each other. If the above two actions do not succeed in ending the matter and the students insist that their problem needs attention, use the following procedures:

1. Invite them to deal with it during lunch, recess, or before or after classes. You will discover that many of them just forget about it because their real concern was to waste class time.
2. If they do come back, refuse to play judge between them. If you do, they will only end up hating each other more, and at least one of them will hate you as well.
3. Tell them they are not to leave until they have come to a mutually acceptable solution.
4. Tell them they are not allowed to become angry when they are resolving their problem. Anger is a feeling one has for enemies, not for friends. So the ground rules should be that they treat each other like good friends who have a difference, not as enemies.
5. If they are not able to talk without getting angry, ask them to write down their complaints to each other. It is much harder for disputes to escalate into angry fights when they are conversing through writing.

9) Keep a record of misbehaving students on your desk. When a child does something he shouldn’t be doing, look at him, and make it obvious that you are marking the incident down. Don’t be angry with him, and don’t discuss the incident during class time. Use these records as a guide for the students’ report cards.

Good luck. Keep in mind that you may not see improvement immediately. The students will initially try harder to get you off the teaching track, and will give up their efforts only after they see you have changed for good.