Guiding Children's Behavior: Developmental Discipline in the Classroom

This comprehensive guide to classroom management is also the only book to emphasize observation as the best way to determine developmentally appropriate interventions. By following a process for observing children, educators will learn how to see beyond children’s manifest behavior to focus on their motivations, needs, and interests. Featuring a series of chapters organized by age, from birth through elementary school, this book:

• Helps teachers to individualize discipline practices, including ways to use the curriculum to prevent and manage challenging behaviors.
• Offers supportive vignettes and a menu of developmentally appropriate strategies that teachers can choose from.
• Questions the effectiveness of frequently used discipline methodologies, such as time-outs and coerced apologies.
• Includes a training module to help teachers, administrators, and parents to work together to create more consistency between home and school.
• Provides useful forms to keep track of peer interactions, teacher and student self-reflections, parent observations, teacher disciplinary practices, bullying, and more.

Eileen S. Flicker has worked as a teacher, child care director, curriculum coordinator, college professor, program developer, and educational and mental health consultant. She currently works in schools where she facilitates differentiated instruction and social skills groups . Janet Andron Hoffman is an educator, teacher-trainer, licensed clinical social worker, consultant, and an adjunct assistant professor in early childhood education at Teachers College, Columbia University.