“Assuming the best is essential for long-term learning and positive connections to take place in our classrooms…The most effective classroom management comes in the form of strategies that prevent acting out before it occurs. And those strategies arise primarily from assuming that our students want to be here, want to participate, and, specifically, want to learn good behavior. When we internalize and act from this assumption, our students behave better and learn more” (Smith and Lambert, 16, 2008).

A picture’s worth a thousand words. If I had the choice, I would select the photograph of the teacher next to the title “You Want to Be a What?” (Brown and Knowles, 2007) as my MVP. Every middle school teacher knows that “Are you for real?” face, and there’s a 100% chance that it’s in response to a very adolescent behavior. Instead, I picked the quotation above, from Rick Smith, author of Conscious Classroom Management, and personal idol of mine. Smith was our guest lecturer at new teacher orientation in Fairfax County, VA, and I have employed many of his techniques over the years, including the 2×10 strategy, hand signals and sound cues, and behavioral (sometimes pictorial) rubrics. Classroom management (especially positive behavior reinforcement) has become a passion of mine, and I wish it were emphasized more in teaching programs. I believe that behavioral expectations must be modeled and practiced, just as content is. As Smith and Lambert state, behavioral expectations, and rules and procedures, are essential to a successful classroom: without them in place, very little productive learning will occur. It is easy to go down that rabbit hole of “I’ve tried everything!” with behavioral struggling students, but assuming the best will help us to realize that the possibilities are endless and motivate us to try, try again.