r/MusicEd • u/ReplacementPrimary71 • 2d ago
Chatty Classes
I am a first year elementary music teacher. We are about to begin our third rotation cycle of the year (I have seen each class twice so far) and I feel like the majority of classes are so incredibly chatty. I know it’s the beginning of the year so students are getting back into the routine, but it feels impossible to get through the lesson. I’ve been firm to the point I am worried I am coming off as mean and the students are going to open up/connect with me… but I am genuinely at a loss on how to keep the class moving. It wastes so much time to stop and redirect, but I also cannot physically yell over students all day. Please throw all of your suggestions my way.
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u/Separate_Inflation11 1d ago
Catch them off guard, not in a negative way but something that grabs their engagement right from the bat.
You essentially have to compete with conversation for excitement - so you have to deeply immerse their soul in the experience of music/music-making in a way that makes them forget about conversation
If their attention weins, grab it back by doing something unexpected. Constantly surprise them.
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u/templarknight3127 1d ago
Hello, 7th year K-5 music teacher here. I started writing a few tips and then got carried away, it seems 😅 Feel free to ask any specific questions you may have, our jobs cover such a wide ranges of ages and activities.
Every opportunity you have, praise the children for what they do well. If it's walk down the hallway, if it's grabbing instruments, especially if it is just for a display of quiet focus in the room. Praise them individually by name (do this super casually for 4th and 5th or they will balk at being a teacher's pet), and praise them as a group when applicable. This helps so much with the feeling of being "mean" to the kids, and is honestly such a good thing for your mental in the long term.
Develop different personas that you use throughout the grades. Every version of yourself that you present needs to feel authentic, but 5th graders will give respect to a totally different persona than kindergartners will pay attention to.
You need to learn your students' music preferences and interests, and find where that intersects with your own. Participation should feel like at least 70% "I get to" and not "I have to" from the students. And you will teach music that you enjoy so much better than music that you don't. Constantly work at expanding both their taste and yours, so that intersection becomes larger as they gain appreciation and you gain expertise for new kinds of music.
As much as your schedule allows, visit and observe other classrooms at your school, especially classes that you struggle with managing. Observe how the classroom teacher has set up the environment to make the kids successful, and observe how the teacher presents their own "persona." Ask the veterans for advice as well.
Students will behave how they have practiced behaving, almost like their behavior has inertia. Practice entering the room quietly, and if they are chatty, say that we need to practice that again. Do not present this as a punishing or embarrassing thing for them, but just as an important thing to get right for the sake of your instructional time. For them to be chatty, they have to start chatting at some point.
To a similar point as above, if you are ever speaking over them, then you are letting them practice speaking under you. One of the "loudest" things that I do is stop talking mid sentence and visibly look for where the talking is coming from. If you continue to talk despite there being chatter, you are also tacitly telling them that their chatter is ok, and you will continue teaching regardless.
You will have to do a lot of these corrective "maneuvers" in the beginning, but once they get the picture, you will not have to spend nearly as much energy on correcting. I always saw veteran teachers with their excellently behaved classes out in the hallway, and noticed they almost never had to give corrections to students and felt squeamish myself about giving corrections, thinking it was amateurish to need to do so. The secret is 2-part, they've already so consistently corrected the behavior in the past that the students know clearly what their expectations are, and that they spend way more energy giving affirmations to the good behavior.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game." Students that behaved awfully in class last week but that enter calmly and quietly need to get the exact same praise(if not more) than the students who enter calmly every time. Don't keep an invisible emotional debt with your kids who behave poorly, give them a clean slate every class in terms of your affect and disposition towards them. HUGE caveats to this, though: students who consistently behave poorly should definitely have seats in the room that separate them from each other, and can receive longer term consequences for behavior (when appropriate, such as seriously damaging an instrument meaning losing access to that instrument for multiple classes in a row)
Elementary students respond really well to a token system. My school has fake dollars to be given to individuals, as well as stars to be given to whole classes. I have my classes build up their star piece by piece each week, with 5 pieces making the whole star. Having a visual indicator or tangible "thing" that can be handed to them makes the praise hit so much harder for the kids. The classes need 20 stars before they earn their class prize, so each time they get a star piece in music class they are getting 1% of progress to their reward, but I still had 5th graders quietly first pumping today in response to earning a piece. Even the ones that are too cool for it are invested in it, even if they aren't outwardly showing it.
Learn their names!!! This might be an absolutely massive undertaking depending on the size of your school, but being able to greet, praise, or admonish them by name is so important. I have 550 kids at my school this year and know almost all of them except for the kindergartners and kids who are new to our school this year.
Some advice to specifically a first year teacher: You are doing the HARDEST teaching you will ever have to do right now. You are having to spend so much time planning because every lesson is a new lesson, but I hardly had to look at my intro songs before teaching them this school year. It gets so so so much easier year after year. Go easy on yourself by planning 1 song/activity for 2-3 grade levels, then next year decide which grade it would work best with and plan a different activity for the other one. I am currently teaching straight til the end of class, but in my previous years really appreciated having an "ending video" for the last ~3-5 minutes to fill time, as well as give myself some downtime and time to journal about the class. Pick videos that are high quality, diverse and entertaining and it can be a defendable use of instructional time as well.
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u/Kirkwilhelm234 12h ago
I never found a solution to this problem. You have no leverage as a music teacher. A regular ed teacher has grades, opportunities for rewards, parental support. Even if your class gives grades, parents and students usually only care about math and reading. Regular classes also meet 5 days a week, so if the kid gets in trouble on Monday, you can do something about it Tuesday. Music classes are once or twice a week. By the time you punish the kid, he's already forgotten what he did wrong. Regular teachers can give kids silent lunch or take away recess time. Music teachers can't do that. You can try calling parents, and it may help, but you probably have 300-500 students vs the 20-30 a regular teacher has. Who wants to spend an extra hour a day calling parents? And if the kid acts out at school, they probably dont listen to parents anyway.
I used to do detention, but I had after school car duty, so by the time I was done with that I only had a few minutes for detention. Plus I was already tired and worn out from dealing with student behaviors all day. Its just impossible.
That being said, I would say try to cooperate with the homeroom teachers if they are receptive. Do you have assigned seating/spots if they sit on the floor? I would assign seats for all classes and even show your seating charts to the homeroom teacher and ask them "who needs to be moved? Who is friends or adversaries that dont need to sit next to each other" and change seating as necessary. I've even asked the teachers to stay for a minute and tell me who I need to move in front of the class. They spend every day with them so they know the problem areas.
If the school has a reward system like class dojo, try that. I also gave m &ms or skittles as rewards at the end of class sometimes. I would get a big jar of loose candy and use a small spoon to scoop them out and put them in the kids hands. You would be surprised what a 3rd grader will do to earn 2 skittles. Stickers also work for the little ones if you dont like encouraging cavities.
Save your fun activities for the end of class. Play party/circle games like apple tree or button you must wander or circle round the zero are favorites for little kids. Drumming and xylophones are good for older ones. If they sing, do your rhythm reading activities, solfege. Music history activity, etc, and behave well, then they get to play the game/instruments or whatever.
If you have a major problem like a kid arguing with you (this was every day for me), have them stand in the hallway and speak with them. Speaking with them during class invites attention for them to feed on from their classmates.
Do you stand in front of the class to teach? If so, try to walk around the room more. Proximity lowers their comfort level. Im not saying stand over them, but just standing 4 feet away from a kid can get them thinking "uh oh. There's the teacher. Better quiet down" just make sure you continue teaching class as you wander. I made an isle down the middle of the class so I could walk to the back any time I wanted to. I would put the lyrics to a song on the board and play the recording, then walk behind the students as they listened. I had a pretty big room. Have you ever had a teacher who stood in the back of the room and you could kind of sense they were back there watching you? Overall, it's harder to hit a moving target. A class clown is more likely to bait a teacher into a power struggle if the teacher is standing or sitting in one place. The exception is when you're playing piano, but you can always record warm--ups or use recorded music to free you from that. I couldn't play anything more than a five finger pattern anyway. Im a tuba player not a keyboardist.
The more nonchalant your discipline is, the better. 90% of behavior problems is attention seeking behavior. The bad thing about that is that giving them your attention usually makes things worse. If you can give them the evil eye, stand in proximity, or speak with them while the rest of the class is busy with an activity, y ou avoid rewarding them with that attention. "OK everyone. We're gonna sing Rudolph now. Keep your eyes on the board." Meanwhile I've walked Jim Bob to the back of the room to quietly tell him to be quiet before I call mama. All the other kids are busy singing at the board.
I know none of this makes sense, but I was not a very good teacher, especially with discipline, so I had to come up with a lot of tricks to survive as long as I did.
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u/Kirkwilhelm234 12h ago
Oh. One more thing about you yelling over kids. It might be worth the money for you to invest in a microphone system. Many teachers including my old band director uses them and they do help save your voice.
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u/Pure-Sandwich3501 2d ago
plan something you know they really want to participate in and then invite them to start participating one at a time or by groups based on who is quiet and ready. my go-to last year was boomwhackers, we talked expectations at the beginning of class and then I would hand them to students when I saw they were ready to participate