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    Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers: The Essential Classroom Management Guide
    Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers: The Essential Classroom Management Guide
    Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers: The Essential Classroom Management Guide
    Ebook180 pages2 hours

    Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers: The Essential Classroom Management Guide

    By Andrew Fuller

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    About this ebook

    Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers is a life-saving, career-preserving, sanity-building guide for teachers. Based on over 30 years of research, it is an essential collection of behaviour management and learning enhancement strategies that will help educators at any stage of their career.

    These are the methods that will help educators create an

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAmba Press
    Release dateMay 29, 2024
    ISBN9781923116726
    Author

    Andrew Fuller

    Andrew Fuller is a clinical psychologist and family therapist who works with people to create futures they can fall in love with. He works with schools, communities and organisations in Asia, the UK, New Zealand and Australia, specialising in neuroscience and learning, resilience and wellbeing. He is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

    Read more from Andrew Fuller

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      Book preview

      Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers - Andrew Fuller

      Cover of Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers by Andrew Fuller

      Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers

      THE ESSENTIAL CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT GUIDE

      ANDREW FULLER

      First published in 2024 by Amba Press, Melbourne, Australia

      www.ambapress.com.au

      © Andrew Fuller 2024

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

      Cover design: Tess McCabe

      Internal design: Amba Press

      Editor: Andrew Campbell

      ISBN: 9781923116719 (pbk)

      ISBN: 9781923116726 (ebk)

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

      About the author

      Andrew Fuller is a clinical psychologist and family therapist who specialises in resilience, brains, and learning strengths. Andrew works with schools, students, and parents across the world.

      Andrew is an author of many books, including: Neurodevelopmental Differentiation: Optimising Brain Systems for Learning, Your Best Life at Any Age, The A to Z of Feelings, Tricky People, Tricky Behaviours, Unlocking Your Child’s Genius, Raising Real People, From Surviving to Thriving, Work Smarter Not Harder and Beating Bullies.

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1 Starting well: An opportunity for madness or serenity

      Chapter 2 The 10 most powerful ways to manage classrooms

      Chapter 3 Keeping your cool and your stuff together

      Chapter 4 Managing tricky students and increasing motivation

      Chapter 5 Gang leadership and guerrilla dynamics for teachers

      Chapter 6 Wheeling and dealing

      Chapter 7 Time making

      Chapter 8 Curating great learning experiences

      Chapter 9 Extracting miraculously good marks

      Chapter 10 Keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs

      Chapter 11 What do I do when students …

      Chapter 12 The best guerrilla tactic of all

      Introduction

      A matador walks out to confront an enraged bull. The sun beats mercilessly down. The crowd yells support mixed with derision.

      A netball player shifts her balance from one foot to the other. Delicately poised, she tenses her body to shoot for a vital goal. The jeering and cheering from the crowd are deafening.

      A pilot flies over enemy territory, weaving and avoiding flak, and prepares for a dogfight.

      A teacher wanders to the front of a class of rabid, feral kids. It’s Friday afternoon, lunchtime has been wet and tense, there’s a howling wind, and a full moon is rising.

      Ha! There are days when teaching makes facing enemy gunfire, charg­ing bulls, and the major league sports look like a walk in the park.

      Successful teaching is about swashbuckling, feigning, acting, and sway­ing the crowd. It’d be enough to make your average pirate pale and run in the other direction.

      Guerrilla Tactics for Teachers is about achieving more with less energy expenditure and much, much less stress. It is a compilation of ideas that I have researched, over years. It is the secret knowledge of survival in a business that loses many great teachers to other careers when they decide it is too hard and walk away.

      This book is written in tough uncompromising language because hav­ing a sustainable career as a teacher requires tough clear-headed decision-making. At times it also requires ruthless prioritisation.

      I know you have a dream. Possibly it involves eager students who are exploring new ideas, making amazing discoveries in collaboration with a teacher that they trust and admire. There will be moments like this.

      Even those inspired and talented teachers with a passion for kids and learning will have days when it all seems too much. This book is written to help you sustain yourself so that you and your students can benefit from your passion, skill, and verve.

      Teaching can be great fun too. At its best it’s like running your own gang. A gang of sharp-witted, bright young people who will, with the assistance of your well-timed input, go on to improve the world. As Neil Postman once observed, Children are the living messages we send to a time we ourselves will not see.

      Let the vitality and the vigour of your own life act as a role model for them.

      Chapter 1:

      Starting well: An opportunity for madness or serenity

      Learning involves trying in a focused and strategic manner. It is not a spectator sport. Learning almost always involves challenge. Finding ways to make challenges worthwhile is the art of student engagement.

      Our brains are such greedy users of our energy that most of us like to conserve effort. Unless there is something new or exciting with considerable survival value going on, we tend to wander off. States of unfocused reverie are great for calm, creative insights, but effective learners have to be active participants in the process.

      This is why the role of a teacher in a brain-aware classroom is a little like the conductor or arranger of a piece of music that engages the audience. How to raise or lower the tempo, where and when to place the crescendo, and where to position the refrain, are all essential. This is using neuroscience to intersect with the art of teaching.

      Starting

      You enter a classroom with all your senses tingling on high alert. Greet­ing students as you enter, you read the room. Who looks weary? Who avoids eye contact? Who is chattering and distracted? Who looks about to slump into a dispirited or comatose state?

      Your aim is to convert the restless and the uninterested and inspire the motivated into a class of engaged, knowledgeable learners with a resilient mindset. This book aims to help you do this.

      Stephen Covey rightly pointed out it is always a good idea to keep the end in mind. In other words, start the year in the way that you want it to end.

      Let’s start by talking about building good relationships with all the key players:

      Getting to know your students

      Getting to know their parents

      Getting to know your colleagues

      Getting to know yourself.

      Getting to know your students

      For teachers to have a happy career, they need to get on well with the people they spend the most time with – their students. For this reason, your students are your number one priority.

      When students are asked what sorts of teachers they like, boys say they like someone who is fair, who can control a class, and who can take a joke; girls say someone who is friendly and is personally interested in them.

      From the first moment you meet them, hit the ground running with respect and dignity. Greet your students at the door when they come in. Be welcoming and upbeat. Model enthusiasm and excitement.

      Greet students by name. Get to know the students fast! Make a game of trying to remember as many students’ names as you possibly can.

      In this chapter is a Getting to know you survey that you may like to use to get to know your students.

      Several activities that you might like to use to help everyone in your class get to know one another are outlined below.

      Bio poems

      Start the year with a biographical poem. This might be a series of lines with each line beginning with a letter of their name and a digital photo for each student.

      Pizza portfolios

      Give each student a pizza box. The student decorates the box and writes his/her name on the top and each side. Throughout the year, students place pieces of work inside the box, creating a portfolio. This can be shared with visitors and parents. At the end of the year, they are able to take it home.

      Time capsules

      Begin the school year by creating time capsules with your students. Time capsules may include personal details such as their height, favourite foods, a handwriting sample, a timed math test (multi­plication facts), some predictions (both individual and class), as well as resolutions. Wrap them in wrapping paper to seal them, then put them all into a large, taped box, kept in plain sight. Open it during the last week of the year.

      Birthday cards

      Have students get to know each other by making birthday cards. They sit in groups and design a card for the person across from them. They have to find out what hobbies that person enjoys, books they like to read, games they like to play, places they have been, and design a birthday card accordingly.

      The card should have the student’s name, a greeting, and their date of birth. Keep the cards by the classroom calendar and post the birthdates. When someone’s birthday comes up, the card gets passed around the room for everyone to sign. Give it to the birthday student on their special day along with a birthday pencil. Make up a half birthday for those who were born during the summer holidays. This makes handling birthdays much simpler. The kids love to read their cards.

      Getting to know you survey

      Name

      1. What are your main interests?

      2. I like school:

      □ Always □ Mostly □ Sometimes □ Occasionally □ Never

      3. What we learn at school is interesting:

      □ Always □ Mostly □ Sometimes □ Occasionally □ Never

      4. What time do you normally go to sleep on a week night?

      5. What time do you usually wake up?

      6. What do you usually eat for breakfast?

      7. How many hours would you spend watching screens on a usual day?

      8. How many hours would you spend playing computer games on a usual day?

      9. How many hours do you spend messaging/in chat rooms/on apps on a usual day?

      10. In a usual day at school is there a particular time of day you find it most difficult to concentrate? If yes, what time of day?

      □ Start of the day

      □ After morning break

      □ Just before lunch

      □ Just after lunch

      □ Towards the end of the day

      □ Other (please say what time)

      11. I read books for pleasure on average (tick the answer that is true for you)

      □ Once a day □ Once a week □ Once a month □ Rarely □ Never

      12. Last question! If you could learn more about anything you could think of, what would it be?

      Thank you for doing this!!!

      Procedures

      One of the easiest ways to get to know students is to start by creating procedures and delegating roles to students such as rotational classroom manager.

      Get to know the kids and then give yourself six weeks to teach all the classroom procedures. Don’t cram it all into the first week.

      The sorts of procedures you might want to outline include:

      How students enter the classroom

      Activities when first entering the classroom (students should always do something that raises curiosity, piques interest, reinforces/reviews, or practises a skill, e.g., journal writing – DEAD TIME IS DEADLY TIME)

      How to take the roll while students engage in some activity

      How to obtain students’ attention in 10 seconds or less

      What signal will be used to get their

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