Picture all the things you'd like to accomplish this school year as a bucket. In that bucket is your effectiveness, your sanity, your impact on long-term flourishing, your ability to facilitate a learning experience. It's a good, good bucket.
And then that one student misbehaves again. Or that after-lunch class starts running off the rails. Or someone disrespects us, and we lose our cool. And it's like a hole has appeared in the very bottom of our bucket.
For some of us, classroom management problems are a small hole. It's just a little dripping, and so we get by fine enough.
But for more of us, it's bigger than a pinprick, and it can get as large as a gaping hole. It's the kind of thing that gets us wondering if teaching is really for us.
I remember, early on in my career, thinking that if I could just have strong enough relationships with my students, then classroom management would take care of itself. And so I spent hours and hours and hours per week working on relationship-building. Special projects with kids. Study halls. Unofficial field trips. Group restaurant outings.
It kind of worked, too — until the job became so unwieldy that I had to quit it.
(Don't worry, I came back.)
Every year, thousands of teachers quit their jobs — for good — because they've got holes in their buckets that they couldn't figure out how to fix. Until yesterday, I did not have anything much to help them with, either. And that bothered me.
Introducing the Classroom Management Course
A year ago or so, an intrepid teacher from New Orleans emailed me asking for a job. Her name was Lynsay Fabio, and she was seeking part-time work during an extended maternity leave. At the time, I was drowning in support emails and hated the low quality of customer service I was giving.
One Skype call later, Lynsay was hired. (And I didn't even Google her! But my Mom did when I told her about Lynsay, and that's how I found this US World and News Report article that features Lynsay.)
As the months went by, I started to realize that Lynsay Fabio was way more than a rockstar at helping teachers use my products. Among other gifts, Lynsay really got teaching. At one point, she even helped me write some blog articles, like this one on getting students to turn in essays without bribing them.
And then she and I started talking about this foundational, bottom-of-the-bucket problem that so many of us have: classroom management. We don't want to turn into drill instructors, but we also don't want these persistent misbehaviors that tap into the learning potential of our rooms and the sanity potential of our school years.
And the more we talked, the more I realized: holy cow, Lynsay could teach this stuff.
Fast forward past endless hours of writing and re-writing and researching and revising and rehearsing and brow-furrowing and flying to Michigan and filming and editing and uploading and all the other things, and that brings us to today.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my privilege to present to you the Classroom Management Course.
Through that link above, you can learn all you'd like about the course and whether or not it's a fit for you or your school. We've designed it to be a comprehensive learning solution, and if you've taken any of my courses before there are some tweaks to this one that I think make it extra special. Registration is open for all of August, and the price is 50% off for this cohort only. Also, Lynsay will be holding weekly office hours for course participants starting next week, providing a high-value coaching to the learning experience.
Basically, it's cool, and I'm excited to offer a solution to such a fundamental problem. I'm in the course a bit, too — at the beginning and throughout the module on Warmth.
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