The Child Whisperer: Classroom Management Through Calmness and Consequences

By Alexander Zwick

One of the biggest challenges teachers face is also the most essential skillset to master: Classroom Management. Tons of techniques and strategies exist, but most are doomed from the start.

The Child Whisperer: Classroom Management Through Calmness and Consequences shows teachers how to keep student disruption and their own stress level down to a minimum. The program uses a simple, consistent, no-nonsense approach that incentivizes kids to behave according to the teacher's expectations, not how loud she yells.

Throw away your color charts and behavior contracts, and stop pulling out your hair. Become the teacher you've always wanted to be. Become the Child Whisperer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Dec 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781619849242

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Introduction: No Excuses

They call me the Child Whisperer. (Cue the spaghetti-Western music.) My fourth grade class is well-behaved, both in and out of our classroom, and when they work with partners or in small groups, they whisper. No, I don’t mean just quiet voices. I mean actual whispers.

In my fourteen years of teaching, I haven’t once yelled.

Truth be told, I don’t love that nickname. Child Whisperer. It sounds borderline creepy. It also makes it sound like my class never has any fun. They do. But things never get crazy.

Teachers and parents have asked me repeatedly over the years how I do it. All I can say is I’m consistent and have firm rules. But most teachers and parents think they already are consistent and have firm rules, leaving them baffled at my success.

They sometimes make excuses. Oh, it’s because you’re a man. No. I’ve seen plenty of male teachers in action who have no more, and often less, success than their female counterparts.

It’s because you teach the Gifted kids. First of all, most of the students I’ve taught are not Gifted. But even if they were, anyone who has had any depth of experience with children knows that the Gifted kids are often the worst behaved. Why? They get bored more easily than students of average intelligence, may be more inclined to challenge adults or authority figures, and just because they might be smarter than average, that doesn’t mean they necessarily have any more interest in learning than students with lesser IQs. The truth is that I’ve had students who struggle academically and those who thrive, students from wealthy, college-oriented backgrounds and those from lower socio-economic ones, students who were raised with English and those who are second-language learners, and students in the general education curriculum and those with Autism or other learning disabilities.

No, the keys to my success have nothing to do with my gender or the backgrounds of the children. What I’ve done can work for any elementary school teacher who is willing to work hard and stick to this this classroom management system. And after a few weeks, it will get much easier.

All that being said, I do have one disclaimer. I currently teach fourth grade, and have subbed in kindergarten through fifth. Based on my experience, and my knowledge of the developmental stages and cognitive abilities of elementary school kids, I know what I do works really well with first through fifth grades. But kindergarten? That’s its own beast. For those of you who teach it, I don’t know how you do it. I would say you could adapt what I do for your little ones, but how you do that for kids who forget what you told them five minutes ago is a mystery to me.

No matter what grade you teach, classroom management is the single most important skill you must have. You may have the most amazing lesson, or have come up with an unbelievably engaging project, but none of that matters if you don’t have the kids’ attention.

Chapter One: Real Consequences

There are some children who come to school on the first day, walk perfectly in line, sit upright, raise their hands to participate, and don’t talk in class. Who knows why they act that way? Sure, their upbringing and home life play into it tremendously, but there are certainly lots of other factors at play. Unfortunately for teachers, these model children are few and far between.

The reality is that most students need consequences for them to behave the way we want them to. As I explain to my students on the first day of school (and their parents at Back to School), consequences are simply the results of our actions. Despite the negative connotation of the word, not all consequences are bad.

There are many classroom management techniques teachers use that ineffectively use consequences or don’t use them at all. For some teachers, their technique is to yell a lot. Some teachers rely on saying, Sh! a lot. Some use bells or rhythmic hand claps to get the students’ attention. All have varying