But just having these things in place is meaningless without ways to enforce rules and reinforce behavior. That, however, quickly becomes complicated, as this chart can show you (I will link the picture below as well). However, with the integration of modern tools and technology, along with good, old fashioned withitness and empathy, every teacher should be armed with the tools to manage his or her classroom.
To begin with, I'd like to talk about rewarding good behavior. This part seems the easier area, as it has less chances for confrontation with the students, but it is actually the trickier half of the prospect. You see, rewards can cause perverse incentives. If you only give rewards for certain behaviors, students may lose some creativity for things that are following the rules, but aren't blatantly following the rules, causing even more disruption as students try to get your attention with how good they're being. Or, they may get jealous at a student who is more obviously being rewarded, causing "bad" students to act worse as they try to get the chance to shine themselves by bullying the "good" student when you aren't around.
As such, you, as a teacher, have to make sure that students are rewarded fairly and, if at all possible, equally. This is why, personally, I would rather have students grouped together, giving rewards to the table or group, rather than the individual, for good behavior. This will allow students to police each other, as all of them work towards a common goal. Now, the actual act of rewarding comes in a few ways. Tokens or points (such as those awarded by Class Dojo or Classcraft) create an obvious, tangible thing that students can strive for. If these points are able to be traded in, either for a big prize at the end of the year, or little prizes along the way, students will naturally strive to get the points and do the right thing. If the rewards seem a little too much for you personally, verbal encouragement and pointing out students doing the right thing has an equal amount of positive effect on the other students, as everyone likes being praised for being a good student.
Now, for myself, I have another category, called a major reward. These would be very rare, but very big rewards. Things like a student who was doing badly getting a perfect score, or a student standing up to bullying that I had possibly missed, even if it was out in the yard at recess, or one student helping another or a table understand an idea that they were having problems with while I helped a different group of students. These kinds of large actions would get bigger rewards, and truly heroic ones would be rewarded with a call to the parents praising their student and letting them know how good the child is. It could change the entire dynamic at home and keep the praise and the good feelings going through the whole week.
Conversely, negative behavior has to be punished. There should be layers of punishment, with students being able to correct themselves before I step in. If they're in groups, I expect the entire group to keep tabs on each other, so that they don't lose points or anything, but I would look at the offending student while continuing with the lesson, or talk to them quietly if everyone was supposed to be silent and they realized they were caught. If they didn't realize I saw them, then I would get closer to them, until, if they are so oblivious with whatever had their attention that they didn't notice me looming, I would stop the class to punish them verbally. It wouldn't be anything big or scolding if it was a quiet disruption only for a couple of students, but just enough to let the students realize what they were doing wrong. If it caused a larger problem and there was a point or token system in place, they'd lose some, based on the rules, so they knew why they were being punished and how to fix it.
If they repeatedly broke the rules, or broke the rules in a larger way, such as obvious disruptions or bullying, I would stop with quiet warnings and moving over and begin positioning myself near them more often, giving full scoldings for repeated behavior, or a sharp warning to make them stop their actions before someone got hurt. Points would be deducted if it was an obvious problem, and if they were damaging books or desks or something, I would force them to fix their damage, as well as any other damage in the class, overcorrecting to let them realize what the initial problem was.
If these larger actions continued, or if they had a truly bad disruption, like trying to start a fight with another student, inciting a class to mock someone, or a huge confrontation with myself, I would immediately react with accordance to school guidelines. I would break up a fight or call security to do the same, and in the other situations, I would find the leader and, calmly but firmly, calm them down, explain what I needed them to do, and discuss why their behavior was bad and the consequences of their actions. Only as a last resort, should the problem not be able to be dealt with in the class or the disruptions are so frequent and large that there's no other option, will I actually send a student to detention or the principal's office, and I would make sure the incident was followed up by a call to the parents (a strong tool, whether positive or negative) to explain why it happened and hopefully help instigate discipline following the student home so it is drilled into them by people they do listen to and respect, since they've proven, at that point, that they don't listen to or respect me.
Discipline is a messy, complicated, not at all fun, but crucially important part of a classroom. You must, as a teacher, reward good students and punish bad, not only because these are how the rules are set up, but because this is how society works. You aren't just teaching students new information, these children are learning how to be responsible, dependable adults functioning in a society that has very clear, very strict laws with very clear punishment should you break them. You must be a force of order (sometimes, the only force of order) in the student's life so that they understand how laws and order work and learn to operate within those forces. A quiet, respectful classroom is just a pleasant side-effect to the larger mission of even this dirty job.
(The chart linked above:)
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