Yelling in the classroom

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I stumbled on a YouTube video about calming down a classroom, which reminded me about this article, Why You Should Stop Yelling at Your Kids.

When I started teaching I had a problem with classroom management. I still have it, but I am getting better. One of the enablers to my bad classroom management was my voice. See, I grew up with 5 siblings, so I learned early on how to be loud and project my voice. This is great today, I can be in a relatively large room and people can hear me. Unfortunately, this is not so great in the classroom.

For the longest time my go to move was to get louder than the class. I could do it with a pretty loud class, but in the end the students always won out. It took a lot of practice and concentration, but now I know that when I want to get a class’ attention, I don’t have to yell.

The article sums it up pretty well. If you’re yelling at a class, you’ve already lost. It makes you look weak and don’t have control of your class. Some of your students are being yelled at when they’re at home, and have gotten to the point where they know to tune it out.

There are two basic rules to follow for when to yell:

• If someone is in immediate danger.
• If you need to get the students attention quickly.

If you’re yelling to much, how do the students know when you really mean it?