How to Manage Constant Chatter in Your Classroom

Linda here. Teachers have been dealing with chatter in the classroom for many years. But it's an issue that really can sidetrack your class and disrupt your ability to teach. So it's something that we do need to tackle if it's causing your classroom to be really chaotic.

Let’s make a plan for dealing with chatter and students blurting out in the middle of class. In particular, what I want to do is share what worked in my classroom. Now this is just one strategy, but I want to share it because it has helped a lot of teachers that we work with in our Classroom Management 101 program. So let’s start off by thinking through some of the mistakes we make when it comes to students talking when they are not supposed to!

Classroom Management Strategy Mistake

One of the mistakes we often make is letting little things go, particularly with chatter and blurting. I remember when I first started teaching, students were whispering a little bit to each other, or talking just a little bit. And I didn't have a plan for how I was gonna deal with that. I was prepared to teach math. I wasn't so prepared to deal with students talking. 

I just let it go, partly because I didn't think it was a big deal and partly because I didn't know what to do. But unfortunately, little problems don't stay little, especially when it comes to chatter and blurting in the classroom. So students are just naturally going to push that talking boundary. And they're going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing until they find where the boundary is. 

A lot of times, we are way past the line where we want to be by the time decide to handle it. In my first year, I found myself, probably by October- definitely by November- trying to start my first period class and barely being able to get my students’ attention above the noise. A couple classes were okay, but in most of them, I was fighting to keep attention. It was so chaotic and it definitely affected my ability to teach and be effective in the classroom. So I went to my mentor teacher and asked for help. She gave me an idea that actually came from the First Days of School book. 

We've adapted the warning system from that book and updated it a little bit over the years as we've worked with teachers and heard how they use the system. But the core of it is really still the same. 

Setting Boundaries

First, we need to clearly define what the boundary is. (We teach teachers to do this in Classroom Management 101). You have to start by clarifying your expectations. That means you have to think about what is not acceptable as far as talking in your classroom. Is it literally no talking ever? Probably not. There's probably times when they're allowed to talk and times when they're not.

Think about that with blurting, too. Are there times where you want them to be able to say something and times that they're not or should they always raise a hand? Basically, you need to be clear in your own mind of where exactly the line is so that you know when a student has crossed it and the student knows that, too. So make sure you step back and ask yourself, “Am I actually clear on when students can talk and when they can't, when they can blurt and when they can't?”

Communicating Expectations

Then you need to communicate those boundaries and expectations with them so that everyone is on the same page. By the way, talking levels can sometimes be helpful for this. You might discover, yeah, sometimes I want to absolutely silent. Sometimes it's okay. I might allow them to talk, but it needs to be quiet. So, sometimes it's good to have different talking levels so that you can then say we're at level one or we're at level two. That can be a helpful way to clarify expectations. 

The Warning System

Now, here's how the warning system works. When a student is talking, even if it's just a little bit, if they're disrupting or if they're over the boundary, give them a warning. Even if it's just a little bit, they get a warning. 

Now, the warning needs to be able to be given in a way that does not interrupt your flow of teaching. That's really important because you might be giving out 20 warnings in a given class period or more. So, you need to be able to give the warning without interrupting your flow of teaching.

So how you're going to give the warning is going to depend on the age of your students. The old school way of doing it for any age would have been to put names on the board. But here's some alternate options. These kinds of different warnings are more appropriate for different ages.

Ways to Give Warnings

Some teachers use ClassDojo, especially if students can see that right away. It is important the student can see it. So if you're putting a ClassDojo point and they're not going to see it until tomorrow, that's not going to work. But if it's somewhere where they could see it, that could work. 

My favorite idea for older kids, but this would work for younger kids too, is to take little yellow cards and laminate them like a yellow card someone would get in soccer for a foul. So you can take that, print out a whole bunch of those, laminate them, and cut them out. Then when a student needs to get a warning, you simply walk and just set it on their desk. 

Elementary teachers, especially lower elementary, sometimes use something they can keep on students' desks. So one teacher laminated three bubbles and that lived on the students' desks, and she would take a dry erase marker and just go over and put an X on one of the bubbles to pop the bubble. Wet erase could be better so they can't as easily delete it without you. 

The key is you need to be able to give it in a way that you don't have to stop teaching and the student can immediately see it. Now when you give the warning- and this is very key- nothing happens. There is no consequence. The student is not in trouble and you need to explain that to them ahead of time because they need to understand they're not in trouble and you'll have to remind them of that. 

I even use those words. “You're not in trouble.”  You don't need to argue with students about warnings because they're not in trouble. All you're doing is making them aware that they were interrupting the class, that they were being disruptive. 

The goal then is that the student sees that warning and thinks, "Okay, I need to self-correct because if I get, say, three warnings in one class period, then I’ll have a consequence. So I need to be more careful." Then later, "OK, now I have two warnings. Now I really need to be careful." If they do get three warnings or whatever number you choose, you do need to be ready to hand out a consequence. That is an important piece of it. 

The goal is to teach students to notice that they're being disruptive because you gave them a warning, and to self-correct. And this system allows that without needing to give very many consequences at all. So that's the gist of how the system works.

Now, one thing I want to talk about is what if you have a student that is getting so many warnings that they would get consequences within the first five minutes of every single class?

Well, what you can do is adapt it for that student. So you might say, you know what, this student gets 10 warnings. They're going to get more warnings because basically your goal for that student might be different than the rest of the class because it might simply be improvement, right? So as you're deciding the number of warnings and how often they reset, in high school and middle school, it's fairly easy. They can reset every period. In elementary, you're probably going to have a few reset periods throughout the day, but it's really up to you how you want to set it up.

But it's important that you feel like this is attainable for your students. They should be able to get through the class period without this number of warnings. If you don't feel like it's attainable, increase the number of warnings to start, and you can always decrease it as the student's self-control improves. And once again, just to be clear, it is okay if you have some students that have big behavioral needs. It is okay to adapt the system for them, to give them additional warnings. And the system is very easily differentiable in that way.

If you want to find out more, listen to this episode which has more detail about what you might run into when you start using the warning system. However, this is one of the things that's hard about an episode like this—I'm giving you one system, but there's so many other pieces that tie in together. So if you have not yet, watch our free training, How to Reduce Disruptions So You Can Actually Teach. It really talks about the whole system and how you can work things together to reduce disruptions in your classroom. And then of course, we always have Classroom Management 101, which is our comprehensive online course where we walk you through step by step, help you create a plan and implement it so that you can really reduce disruptions in your classroom. 

Remember that in order to reduce chatter you need to set boundaries, communicate expectations, and follow through with your warning system. Let us know how it works for you!

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