Band Director

If you are struggling with kids and routines and what they need to do, a great thing to do is have an agenda up on a big whiteboard. This one's just kind of on my computer, but I have what they need, the day, what class it is, what we're doing for the day, we do enrichment opportunities that they can go do, and what they have to do for their bell ringers, what their warmups are. This has saved me a lot of time and sanity. It gets rid of, what are we doing today? It's on the board, and I don't even address kids when they ask, what are we doing today? I just point to the board. If they want to know any further details, like if they're going to be gone, you can post it in Google Classroom and have everything there all in one shot. On the next slide are any warmups or recordings that I want to show, and this is called the daily agenda.

Classroom management is a biggie and it's a toughie. The best things you can do right away are learn everybody's names, make sure that you make contact with their parents, hopefully on a good news type of call or email so that you have the parents on your side if the next week you need to call with a report of misbehavior with their child, and always try to keep the students engaged as much as possible. Even if you're working with trumpets, give the clarinets and flutes a task, number their measures, write in translations of the stylistic markings in the piece or in the book, ask them to name the letters with their partners if that's a weakness for them, but give everyone a task for them to do while you're isolating a group to work with them.

So my tips for classroom management would be to complement positive behavior. I have a class this semester of 67 7th grade junior high kids and they're first year students, so you can imagine how crazy that classroom gets. And so what I do, a lot of time is when I want the classroom to calm down and I, you know, I have a visual cue that I use with the students to get them to stop, but as I'm waiting for that I just start complimenting the students that are doing the proper behavior and I say, hey, good job, you know, Timmy, for doing that, for being ready, right? It gets all the other students, they take a look, they see what they're doing and then they, they model, they, they do that behavior as well. So anyways, it's a great tip for getting kids to calm down quickly and to listen.

Here's a classroom management tip that has saved me a lot of time and energy in teaching grades six through eight. I was explicitly a sixth grade teacher for eight years teaching band, and one of the things is jobs, and this is for my section leaders and my librarians. Yes, you can train kids to do this. It takes a little while, but it works. Anytime I hand out new music, a new handout, anything, it goes in their folder with their instrument name on it, and the section leaders and librarians pass them out to kids and make sure that they put them in their binders. If anyone is gone, they write the kiddo's name on it or keep any extras in their own binders. When that kid comes back, they hand it to that kid. Another thing that happens that I've done in the past is they will give me the music of the kids that are missing. I'll write their names on it. It goes on a clip, and then it goes on my magnetic whiteboard for them to collect when they come in.