Running the Room: The Teacher’s Guide to Behaviour

Do you teach? Do you love teaching but feel like “this shouldn’t be this hard?” Do you want to keep teaching without getting burned out? This book is for you. It is packed with ESSENTIAL facts and skills for any teacher. It combines detailed research with practical advice. Teaching is hard work; now more than ever. Understanding behavior is key to managing a classroom. The author has a gift of writing humorous but not frivolous prose that will keep you engaged while delivering the classroom management skills you have been desperately seeking.

This wasn’t the book I had hoped for. I wanted guidance that would let me walk into a chaotic school and create order, but this book doesn’t do that. Yes, it gives me a handful of tips about how to manage a particular classroom, but nothing that scales to the larger organization.Moreover, the useful stuff is embedded in lots of other wordy material that I felt was off-point and often repetitive, and I found myself skimming most of the time. It wasn’t until the last 15% of the book that I started reading closely.I’m pretty sure I could remove about half of the book’s prose without losing anything important and, in the process, create a more tightly focused product. I reference Cognitive Load Theory as to why that would be a good thing.

Excellent and practical book on helping to manage the classroom. I highly recommend it to teachers, especially teachers who are not naturally gifted at management. The point is to manage correctly you must run the room! The teacher is in charge.

I listened to the audio book twice this summer. I will now purchase a copy of the paperback to refer to. The information is nothing really new. But, it was extremely helpful to remind me how to fine-tune my behavior management. I usually start the year out strong, and then by the end of the school year, I let things slide a little, since I am worn out. I am going to work really hard to use all of the strategies I learned about and try to be extremely consistent this year. I really think this book is great and good for all teachers to read and work to implement its strategies. There is no magical trick in the book to make classroom management super easy. From my years of experience, you need to consistently use all of the strategies Mr. Bennett presents to have a well run room.

With characteristic wit, Tom Bennett has written a behavior book that is rife with (get this) common sensical guidelines for creating and maintaining a behavior curriculum that will help any teacher “run the room.” This joins one of a few books that I will recommend to new teachers, to help them avoid the prolonged headache that classroom management results in from the knowledge deficit produced by their teaching programmes. Excellent read.PS: The writing found on page 254 is easily some of the best in any book written on the subject of education. Just terrific stuff, really.

Valuable information that should be taught in every teaching college.

This is a truly excellent book on promoting good behaviour. Teachers just joining the profession and teachers with many years under their belts will both find useful ideas and practical advice in Tom Bennett's superb book. I've read several books on promoting good behaviour in the classroom, and this is the best there is: drawing on psychology, philosophy and educational research. The reader is informed, entertained and guided. As well as providing theory and philosophy, Mr Bennett describes effective processes for teaching and maintaining good behaviour in class. He suggests important areas to focus on and pitfalls to avoid, he enumerates useful routines and norms to promote. Throughout this the author always keeps the enabling benefits and reasons for promoting good norms prominent.I'm sorry to resort to capitals, but if you are a teacher, i would strongly recommend you toBUY THIS BOOK.

I recently, after 16 years teaching, started a new, more behaviour-challenging school and I love it. I did however find myself having to re examine my approach to behaviour and refresh my learning- this book is excellent. This is the book I wish I had 16 years ago when I began my career.A solid foundation in behaviour management for anyone, no matter what stage of career or what level you teach at.Can not recommend highly enough. Thank you Tom!

Great book for teachers. It was delivered timely and I learnt alot. Thank you

I was so frustrated by the end and felt as though I had wasted my time. By the last quarter I resorted to skim reading in the hope of finding something useful. The book says the same things over and over again, is bulked out with lots of irrelevant stories and waffle, is very disorganised (it jumps around so much) and my biggest gripe is the complete lack of practical advice or examples. The author frequently tells you what you should do; such as establish routines, teach behaviour like you would an academic topic, write down your rules etc but very rarely gives actual examples or case studies. A bit hypocritical I thought! For example, there was one chapter on "scripts" (what to say in certain situations) but there were no actual examples - what use is that!? I guess I'll just continue to say what I have prior to reading this book... It was as if the author did not want to make specific practical suggestions in case he was wrong. Very disappointing.