Teaching

New Releases Offer Classroom Management Strategies

By Amy Wickner — October 14, 2013 2 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

October is flush with new books about classroom management, two of which are featured in Education Week Teacher‘s new story package, Inside Classroom Management: Ideas and Solutions.

Anthony Rebora’s Q&A with Harry and Rosemary Wong, classroom management experts and authors of the foundational The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher (Harry K. Wong Publications, 1991; latest edition, 2009), also previews a forthcoming update to their routine- and procedure-based classroom-management philosophy. The Wongs assert that not once, despite four new editions and over 20 years of updating the book to reflect current research, have they needed to reconsider their principles of effective classroom management. Their new title, The Classroom Management Book, will be more of a practical workbook to help teachers plan.

The story package also includes my review of From Discipline to Culturally Responsive Engagement: 45 Classroom Management Strategies by Laura E. Pinto (Corwin, 2013). While Pinto, an assistant professor of educational leadership at Niagara University in New York state, offers several strategies in line with the Wongs’ procedure-focused approach, she argues that classroom management must be culturally responsive above all else. She urges teachers to improve their cultural competency by getting to know students, their parents, and their communities. The book’s central theme is that better understanding cultural expectations and norms can help decide what strategies might best engage a given group of students.

The student-engagement side of classroom management is also a major emphasis of Classroom Management Q&As: Expert Strategies for Teaching, newly published by Education Week Press. This title is an e-book collecting major conversations and roundtables from the popular Education Week Teacher blog, Classroom Q&A with Larry Ferlazzo. It features ideas and strategies from a diverse group of teachers, researchers, administrators, and authors in response to reader-submitted questions. As Ferlazzo writes in his introduction, the classroom Q&A concept stemmed from an interest in “looking at [the] classroom with ‘fresh eyes’.” Both blog and book emphasize the need for teachers to be more “proactive” than “reactive” in their approaches to classroom management.

Visit the Teacher story package for more coverage of – and opinions on – classroom management.

Related Tags:

A version of this news article first appeared in the BookMarks blog.