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Insights

Navigating Management Challenges

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Jeff Starr

Relay Graduate School of Education

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Effective classroom management systems provide the foundation for a strong classroom culture to flourish - a culture where students feel safe, are willing to take risks and are motivated to meet high expectations. The shift to blended and personalized approaches presents new management challenges as teachers design dynamic learning environments that introduce a range of learning modalities to students.

The role of facilitating learning in a classroom with many moving parts can - at first - feel intimidating. Teachers frequently wonder: “How do I keep everyone on task, help someone who is stuck, or hold individuals accountable during group work when I’m teaching small groups? With all these transitions, how do I squeeze everything into my schedule?”

Plan and practice. Modify and create.

We provide specific recommendations for how to navigate these challenges. Among the first things graduate students at Relay learn is how to plan and practice techniques for teaching and reinforcing the procedures and norms that fuel strong classroom cultures. These strategies help to set up classroom culture, student movement, and expectations. Though many of these same techniques are instrumental to effective blended implementation, there are also blended specific strategies that are important to note. Relay has codified some of these specific strategies and added them to the TLA practices site to help educators round out their repertoire of management best practices and aid in effective blended implementation. The highlighted strategies include: attention getting signals, transition routines, and procedures for getting help from peers.

In addition, Relay offers free Blended Learning courses on Canvas that feature a number of other named, high-leverage strategies for building classroom culture and routines. We hope that you will explore the full courses on Canvas and apply these techniques to your classroom!

Opinions presented in this Insight are those of the author and do not necessarily represent TLA's opinion, nor should be considered an endorsement by TLA of any organization or product.

Jeff Headshot

Jeff Starr

Relay Graduate School of Education

Jeff Starr is the Director of Personalized Learning at Relay Graduate School of Education. He has taught math, coached teachers K-12, co-founded a teacher residency program and helped design and launch an ed-tech startup.