How to Use Class Meetings: Classroom Management

Table of Contents

1. How to Use Class Meetings
2. Prevention-Oriented Classroom Meetings
   1. Planning and Goal Setting Meetings
   2. Improving Academic Skills
3. Problem-solving Meetings
4. Improving Classroom Meeting Facilitation Skills

Problem-solving Meetings

Students and the teacher may request a class meeting about a problem. Students may want ideas on handling conflicts with friends. Elementary students often have class meetings about things that happen at recess.

Class meetings can help individuals or the whole class determine what to do about issues like gossip, bullying, teasing, name-calling, excluding others, tolerance for differences. Teachers may want a class meeting to discuss interruptions during instruction, problems with homework assignments, or other classroom behavior. You can see an example of a teacher calling an quick classroom meeting with her 3^rd grade students to address a class room problem, in this case cleaning up, in this video from the Whole School Online project. (Quicktime required for video playback)

You can view an example of a middle-school classroom meeting explained and then demonstrated by students in this video produced by the LightBridge Project. Note that to see this video you'll need to have Quicktime installed on your computer.

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Reactions to Videos What reactions did you have to these classroom examples? Did you notice the greater degree of control and responsibility exhibited by the older students? Students who begin to run their own meetings are learning important skills for later life. Let's move on and take a look at some additional materials of possible interest.