Relationships are the whole job
Get in the lunchroom. Know the secretary. She's the one running the school.
With Tammy Striler · 2:26 · Filmed fall 2020
What to take away
- Colleagues, administrators, parents, students — you want good relationships with everybody.
- Knowing your kids well takes care of most of the behavior management on its own.
- Get to know your secretary and your custodians. Buy a little gift every once in a while.
- Make the aides and the substitutes feel welcome. It's easier to be kind than to look for problems.
Why it works
Tammy calls this the meat of the entire workshop. You spend more waking time at school than at home, and the quality of that time is set almost entirely by the people in it — which means the relationships aren't a soft extra, they're the working conditions.
Tammy Striler
Founder · classroom teacher
Thirty years in the classroom, most of them with the door open and a student teacher in the back. Tammy started these tips because the best things she learned came from other teachers over lunch, and nobody was writing them down.
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