In this episode of The Teaching Show, The Classroom Management Guy, Gabriel Vigil, shares powerful strategies for successful classroom management, including:
How to identify predictable classroom triggers (like students walking around) and design routines that prevent small issues from escalating into conflicts
How schools can support new teachers to reduce turnover as they deal with the steep multi-year learning curve of teaching
How to reduce escalation by not taking student behavior personally, keeping your tone calm, and addressing the specific behavior rather than labeling a student as “bad”
Why teachers should anchor corrections in shared expectations (“school rules, not my rules”) and clearly name the next step (e.g., office referral) so compliance is tied to predictable boundaries, not emotion
How to build in a face-saving “out” by stating the expectation, then physically walking away—instead of staring a student down—which lowers the likelihood of public defiance
Links:
Follow @TheClasroomManagementGuy on Instagram and @TheClassroomManagemetnGuy on YouTube
Visit Gabriel Vigil’s website, TheClassroomManagementGuy.com
Full Transcript:
Justin Baeder:
Welcome, everyone, to The Teaching Show. I’m your host, Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to welcome to the program Gabriel Vigil. Gabriel, welcome.
Gabriel Vigil:
Thank you so much for having me.
Justin Baeder:
Well, I’m excited to talk about classroom management with you, and I know this has been a passion and an area of expertise of yours for quite some time. Take us into what you do on classroom management.
00:30 Gabriel Vigil:
All right, okay, well, so a little background by myself. I’m a teacher in Southern California. I’ve been teaching for 23, I think 23 years now. Mainly at middle school, 8th grade, but I haven’t done anything from 6th to 12th grade.
Justin Baeder:
Oh, the easy ones—all the easy grades. 😅
Gabriel Vigil:
Yeah, you know, definitely the easy ones.
00:47
I never taught elementary. I covered a sixth grade class one time, and I made the kids cry, so I’m not sure I should be promoting that, but...anyways, eighth grade is my field, so... and then about five years ago, I started a YouTube channel. I rebranded it. It is now called The Classroom Management Guy.
01:04
So, if you need to find me, that’s where you can find me on YouTube, The Classroom Management Guy, but my... My mission, probably within the past couple months, is really to help out new teachers, any teachers, honestly, but mainly new teachers, just kind of make it past those first couple years, because those are the ones that’ll either make it or break it for our teachers. So, that’s been my mission here for the past couple months.
01:23 Justin Baeder:
Yeah, absolutely, and I can certainly relate to that importance of classroom management in the first couple of years, and it was, I mean, it was a real challenge for me, especially my first year, and I’m grateful to have made it through that. But I think there is a very large learning curve when it comes to classroom management.
Before we talk about the needs of new teachers in particular, I wonder if you have any thoughts on what has changed for everybody in recent years? Because you’ve been teaching for a long time, you’ve got a lot of perspective, I’m sure you have colleagues who’ve been in the game for a while. How has the landscape changed, even for veterans?
01:55 Gabriel Vigil:
Well, here we go. Taking it back way back. I remember when I was going through school, discipline always seemed to be different than it is now.
02:07
The tools that teachers could use in the past to discipline are no longer there. I’m not sure exactly where we’re located at. I’m in California. But the game has changed. It’s no, no longer can you just issue a detention. Many parents aren’t there to support you.
02:22
Suspension, very rarely. And expulsion, pretty much unheard of. And so those were the tools that we, you know, teachers and administration used in the past, but they’re no longer there. And, and so for that reason, we kind of have to change the game that we’ve been doing. And so, when I first started teaching, up until now, It’s just been a learning process. It’s been a learning process trying to figure out what works in this new education system that we have.
02:49 Justin Baeder:
So take us into some of your frameworks for thinking about the challenge of classroom management. So we’ve got a different set of tools to work with. You know, there’s not the same fear of one’s parents that maybe kids had when we were kids. There’s not the same, maybe, fear of school-based consequences. So what’s currently in your toolkit in this kind of evolved climate?
03:11 Gabriel Vigil:
You know, and what’s interesting, when I started my YouTube channel, like I said, five years ago, it forced me to think what I’m doing. Because, you know, you just go through the motions. As a teacher, you put things in place, and you’re doing things, and you find out what works, and you keep doing it. But you never really, very rarely do we sit back and actually think, what are we doing? Why is this working? Why is this not working?
03:30
And when I started my YouTube channel, it forced me to take account of everything I’m doing, and why I’m doing it, and why does it work, and how can other teachers use this as well. And what I realized through... Oh, and I’m trying to think where I heard this. I’m not sure if it was on Instagram or TikTok.
03:48
I don’t know. One of those things. But someone mentioned that rules and procedures is kind of like the pre-discipline, you know? If you have things in place, a lot of the negative outcomes can be avoided altogether. I was interviewing Mr. Dr. Woodley, I think his name was, and he mentioned something about triggers.
04:10
I’m like, what do you mean by triggers? And he was talking about how... The classroom has triggers in it. If you can somehow avoid those triggers, or mitigate those triggers, you’re gonna have less problems down the road.
04:22
And I listened to it, and I thought, what... How do I apply to my classroom? I realized that that’s what...
04:27
When we first started teaching, you’re always gonna hear rules and procedures, rules and procedures, that’s it, rules and procedures. And I said, okay, that’s...I didn’t understand rules and procedures, but what exactly is that? And you put those things in place, those rules and procedures, to try to get rid of as many of those triggers as possible.
For example, if a kid walks around the classroom, that’s not the worst thing in the world, walking around the classroom. But almost always, that walk around the classroom leads to them talking to somebody, which leads to them poking somebody, which leads to an altercation.
And so if you take care of the problem at the very beginning, you avoid that outcome to begin with. So kind of for me in my class, I really take it down to the basic thing.
I have solid routines, solid procedures, and it pretty much runs on its own with me just kind of the background, you know, taking care of things here and there.
05:16 Justin Baeder:
I remember, as a new teacher, going to observe someone else who was much more experienced, very good at classroom management, and I remember thinking, this guy has a totally different job than I do, because his kids just don’t misbehave. And if my kids would just act the way his kids would, then I would be just as good a teacher as he is, but, like, we’re just not doing the same job here. This is unfair comparison.
And I think what was really hard for me to pick up on as a new teacher was all the things that you’re talking about, like the preventative, the subtle things, the solid routines and procedures that prevent the kinds of things that I was having to deal with more than I wanted to, and that didn’t come up at all in this peer observation. What are some of the things that you do in the moment? So, yeah, we know about the routines and procedures.
06:01
We know about the kind of systems in place that are supposed to prevent behavior. What are some things that you do in the moment that keep things from bubbling up? You know, like, if something is in the microwave and it’s bubbling up, you stop the microwave and you let it simmer down. What do you do in the classroom? Like, how do you see that happening and what do you do?
06:21 Gabriel Vigil:
Well, first, back to the rules and procedures, and I know exactly what you’re talking about, because I was in the same boat. I mean, I almost got fired my first year. You know, the principal came up to me and said, you know, we need to talk. You never want the we need to talk thing. He said, I don’t think this is working out. And I’m like, oh, man, I got a family, I got kids, a house.
06:39
I got to figure this out. And he connected me, like you mentioned, with a mentor and somebody else to kind of guide me along. And it’s been a process. It’s been a process. And what was my weakness, I would say now is my strength. But, you’re right.
06:52
Those rules and procedures, and I was talking with a new teacher, and he’s, like, three years into it, and I asked him how things are going. He says, much better this year. And I go, what’s the difference? Because, you know, like you mentioned, you walk to that classroom, that teacher that you observed just seemed to have it. Whatever it is, they had it. I’m like, how do you quantify it?
07:08
How do you explain it? And he actually said this. He says, you know, I knew about rules and procedures. I had rules and procedures in my classroom, but they weren’t part of me. They weren’t the, they weren’t part of the classroom. It was something I was doing in the classroom, but they weren’t built in, baked in.
07:24
And that’s the difference. But that, that takes time to get in there. And so when you, the question was, you know, what do I do if something really does bubble over, you know, pop off? Once again, you lay everything to the foundation to hopefully avoid that as much as possible. If something does come up, and it does, I mean, we’re humans. I mean, I have my moments where, you know, I kind of lose it a little bit.
07:46
But the best thing in the classroom is when you’ve been doing this a while, you find your little, the tricks that work. You know, you’re able to dig into that little cookie jar and find out what worked in the past, and you’re able to apply it again. And what you’re going to find out is the things that work, first of all, is you’ve got to make sure you don’t take it personally. Which is hard to do. I mean, it’s hard to do if a kid’s calling you something, not to take it personally, but you gotta learn not to take it personally. And then that’s the first thing, because if you don’t take it personally, then you don’t get all worked up and emotional about it, and you’re able to keep it calm.
08:17
And then the next thing is, when I address the student, I don’t address... the student directly, meaning that I don’t call them out as a bad person or a bad student. I address the behavior. And the ultimate goal in all of this discipline and dealing with the students is to change that behavior.
08:34
That’s the ultimate goal. It’s not to vent and not to seek revenge, not to get into that. It’s just to change behavior. And so you lay the foundation, the routine procedures in, to hopefully...
08:44 Justin Baeder:
Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like one thing you’re getting at here is the idea of avoiding a power struggle, right? And I think maybe the old school way of approaching classroom management was to just, you know, wield the most power to, you know, to be the scariest voice in the room. And of course, that’s, you know, that’s not what we do. That’s not how it works anymore. And often, kids will try to get us into a power struggle. They’ll try to push our buttons and see what happens. You know, for their own entertainment, if nothing else.
09:31
What are some of your recommendations for getting out of that power struggle mindset and avoiding those power struggles that students may be perfectly happy to engage us in?
09:40 Gabriel Vigil:
So, regarding the power struggle, I do everything I can in my classroom not to make it a power struggle. Once again, the ultimate goal is to change the behavior. And you’re not going to change it by going head-to-head, you know, with somebody. You’re just not. As adults, I have a student that we were talking, and I basically made a thing. I said, it’s easier to make a point than it is to make a difference.
And so, with your students, you can make the point of trying to be right and tell them what they’re doing wrong, but it’s not going to make the difference. And so, the best thing for me that I found is I have something called progressive discipline, where you kind of just catch a behavior at the very beginning and try to do a small correction with it, maybe just a quick name, call the student out, maybe put the name on the board, maybe see if the classroom, and it kind of just escalates.
It’s a little bit each time, because it hopefully gives them the out. And you always want to give the student the out. For me, the most extreme case, the most time, would be, let’s say, a student, cell phones. They have a cell phone out. And so I’ll tell the student, hey, please put your cell phone away. And they don’t.
10:44
So now, we kind of start the power struggle, the defiance. I can immediately just lose it, and I can’t believe you’re treating me, you know, but you don’t do that. So, I’ll go to them, maybe a minute later, they haven’t done it, I’ll go to them and say, hey, maybe you didn’t hear me. Real soft, actually get down to their level, on their desk, and say, hey, maybe you didn’t hear me, but...
11:00
We’re not allowed to have cell phones in the classroom. Could you please put it away? And then I walk away. Because I could be in that moment just going back and forth and not getting anything. So you have to give them that out. And then 90% of the time, they’ll, like, and they’ll put it away.
11:13
If they don’t, then I’ll go back to them a third time and say, hey, I gotta let you know the rules of the school. It’s not my rules. It’s, you know, the rules of the school is you can’t have cell phones. If you don’t put it away, I gotta send you to the office. Can you please put it away? And then walk away.
11:26
Quiet. The tone is there. It’s not saying they’re a bad student. These are the rules. We gotta follow. And so each time...
11:33
You’re trying to give the student, because they don’t want to lose face in front of their friends. And so this, by doing this approach, hopefully gives them the out, and eventually they put it away, and then you change the behavior. Now, the other part of it is, how do you do that long-term? You’ve just got to be consistent with it, and that’s a long-term perspective. But that’s how I would deal with students where things seem to be more of a power struggle.
11:55 Justin Baeder:
Yeah, so you’re literally walking away. You’re saying, here’s my expectation, but you’re not then, like, staring them down, waiting for them to comply, inviting them to challenge you. Like, you’re giving them an out, as you said. They can kind of save some face. They don’t have to just give in, but they might as well give up on the cell phone, put it away, or else you do have a next recourse. And I think that’s a really crucial piece, too, there, is you’re not just asking and hoping, and then that’s it, right?
12:18
You do have a next recourse in your progressive discipline system.
12:21 Gabriel Vigil:
100%, 100%. Oh, I like how you break it down. You think what’s up here and you make it make sense. I love that.
12:27 Justin Baeder:
Well, and I think that progressive discipline idea has become unpopular in recent years, or people have kind of pulled back from that because they think, well, I don’t want that student to go to that next level, right? The next level is worse for the student. I don’t want the student to go to the office. Sometimes the office says, we don’t want you to send the student to the office. We want you to keep him. And I feel like that doesn’t really work because there has to be that next recourse.
12:48
If I’m going to not get in a power struggle, if I’m going to set my expectation and walk away, when I come back... I have to have some sort of recourse, right? So you feel like you, you can send students to the office, you can have that next recourse if a student is, is really gonna not, you know, not do what you ask them to do.
13:05 Gabriel Vigil:
I know for me, for my school, for sure, for sure. And that’s because I have a good relationship with the administration. But here’s what I noticed. For a while, that actually was, I think, for three weeks, the dean left. I had to take the dean of students role on for three weeks. It was the most exhausting three weeks of my life.
13:22
Besides having a baby at first, with a wife. But beyond that, it was the most exhausting thing. And what I noticed is that most of the referrals, we call them, came from a few select teachers. And so, what I would think from administration’s point of view if they see that there’s only a few students that you ever send to the office, then they know that, okay, this kind of went to the next level. He did his best to handle it in the classroom. And so, for me, I have that luxury of having the rapport and the relationship with admin, and they know how I, you know, my classroom manager, my classroom, so I do find the support from them.
13:58
But for many teachers, you’re right. That becomes a problem. And you hear about this all the time, you know, how the administration sends it back with lollipops and everything else. And so that’s why it just becomes so critical to really master this classroom management thing. And what frustrates me so much is...
14:17
I’ll see new teachers come on our campus, and there’s all this talk about curriculum and testing and everything else. I’m thinking, my gosh, this new teacher’s just trying to survive. They’re just trying to make it through the day. The biggest thing on their mind is the students and their behavior and how they manage that behavior. And I think we’re doing such a disservice to teachers and definitely our new teachers if we don’t help them with that. Because until you get that down, nothing else matters.
14:40
It just doesn’t.
14:42 Justin Baeder:
And I want to acknowledge something kind of remarkable. Having this interview, we’re talking at the end of your school day, right? Like, you taught all day today?
14:48 Gabriel Vigil:
Yes.
14:49 Justin Baeder:
So, if you’re a new teacher right now, you know how amazing that is, because as a new teacher, I remember just the, like, the full-body exhaustion. Like, I fell asleep on the floor of the living room one day after school, like, it was a Friday, and, like... Just the fact that you’re able to have a conversation with me at this time of day tells me that you have figured out a lot of those things about just, you know, just managing the day, managing energy, managing the personalities, not taking things personally. So for someone who is in the midst of that learning curve in their first year, their first two years, their first three years, they do feel the exhaustion.
15:22
They do feel the strain of dealing with behavior and dealing with all the challenges that kids like to throw at us. What would you say is some of your kind of starting point advice? Like, throw us a little bit of a lifeline, if you would, if we’re in that stage.
15:37 Gabriel Vigil:
All right, first of all is...
15:41
You gotta have grace for yourself. I mean, you have to. One thing, my story is, first year of teaching, almost got fired. Second year of teaching was not that much better. Third year of teaching, it was a struggle. I was so many times, I went home crying.
15:55
I was, I’m a grown man. I go home... These middle schoolers make me cry, you know? And so, as a new teacher, the first thing I would want them to know is they should give themselves grace, because this is extremely hard.
16:06
And... Most likely, they probably feel like they’re alone in this, you know, because they’re in the classroom by themselves with these students to think, what’s wrong with me? Why is this not working? And it’s not the case.
16:17
The number I hear over and over again, and we kind of briefly mentioned before, is 44% of new teachers never make it to year six. That just tells you how hard this is. And you mentioned... It was extremely hard for me those first couple years.
16:32
So, the first advice I have for teachers, give yourself some grace. Just do, and just know, hang in there. Nothing’s wrong with you. It is a learning curve. It took me, honestly, about seven years before I finally felt comfortable being in the classroom. But then once you hit that learning curve, it just, it gets better.
16:49
So, just hang in there for that part. Just hang in there for that part. And the second bit of advice I would have is just know that each year you want to kind of just take something away with you, positive, whatever that might be, because you’re going to find yourself getting back to that as the years progress. It may be something wonderful a student said to you, maybe it’s something that worked in the classroom. You’re just going to find yourself holding on to that and bring it back out again when you need it the following year. And just kind of keep building upon that.
17:17
So that would be my advice for new teachers is focus on classroom management. You’re going to hear a lot of talk about everything else. You’re going to hear a lot, and you have to kind of play the game. You got to play the game. You got to go through the motions. But honestly, classroom management, that’s what you should be focused on 90% of your time, working on that, improving that, making the tweaks, learning from it.
17:38
And then by year two, three, once that’s locked in, then you can bring everything else in that the district and the school really, really wants you to have.
17:45 Justin Baeder:
Love it. So you said a couple of things there that I think are really worth echoing because they’re so powerful. Have grace for yourself. You normalized the fact that there is a substantial learning curve to this job, a multi-year learning curve. It’s not like, you know, any previous job people might have had where you get, you know, you learn the ropes in a couple of weeks and then you’re good to go. I mean, it is a multi-year learning curve in this job.
18:06
And then the third thing I wanted to highlight that you said was, you know, about kind of building your bag of tricks, building your repertoire of strategies that you use. and celebrating what you’ve accomplished in that time. Did I get that last one right? 100%.
18:20 Gabriel Vigil:
I didn’t use the word repertoire because I can never say it correctly, but that is right. That’s exactly what it is.
18:26 Justin Baeder:
Well, I love the hope that you’re giving people there. And I wonder if you could tell us, Gabriel, a little bit about what you teach in your course. I understand you have a course on classroom management. What are some of the things you cover in there?
18:39 Gabriel Vigil:
All right. So, here’s where it gets hard, is how do you help... teachers that are struggling, right? And I developed a course to give the best I could for students to, or for teachers to take what they can from it and hopefully transform their classroom.
18:53
It’s called Classroom Transformation, to transform the classroom in 20 days. And it kind of just gives them the foundation of everything so they can hopefully get in the right trajectory, you know, so that’s it. But I’ll be honest with you, probably the best thing I would recommend to stay in contact with me or to pick my brain is go to that YouTube channel. I mean, hundreds of videos on there. Any teacher can always reach out to me if they have any questions. I’d be more than happy to help.
19:16
And that is truly where I feel my calling is the next 10 years is just try to get as much as I can, help as much as I can. And so, I definitely hope people reach out to me, watch the videos, the Classroom Manager Guy YouTube channel, but... Yeah, anything I can do, I’m happy to help out with.
