Breaux and Whitaker Do It Again

The gurus of educating educators, Annette Breaux and Todd Whitaker, have produced another gem. 50 Ways to Improve Student Behavior should be added to the library of every educator, teacher or administrator. As the title indicates, the book offers fifty nuggets of wisdom to help teachers improve student behavior.

Here's the beauty of the concept of this book: student behavior in the classroom improves as teaching improves. This book doesn't present fifty gimmicks to make students behave better. This book offers fifty ways to improve teaching, to improve classroom instruction and classroom management. As a teacher implements these fifty strategies and becomes a better teacher, voila!, the students behave better than ever (and they learn more, too).

This book would be valuable for teachers, obviously. However, this book would be great for educational leaders, too. Heads of school, division heads, disciplinarians (assistant principal or Dean of Students), and department chairs, all would do well to help their faculty implement the strategies included in this book. Breaux and Whitaker present the fifty nuggets of wisdom in only a few pages each, thus making them great mini-lessons for faculty meetings, in-service days, department meetings, weekly email communications to faculty, etc.

If you have teachers who are struggling with effective teaching, which includes classroom management, you will find those teachers' shortcomings and errors addressed in this book. If every teacher in your building will practice these fifty strategies consistently, your school climate will change, student behavior will improve, and learning will increase. I'd stake my next paycheck on it.