Ultimate Classroom Control Handbook: A Veteran Teacher's On-The-Spot Techniques for Solving Adolescent Student Misbehavior

After 15 years as a school librarian, I am now in a 7th grade classroom. My greatest struggle has been with classroom management, not content. This book has given me some great ideas to help with discipline issues.

Looking at Dave Foley's picture in the back of his book, Ultimate Classroom Control Handbook, one might mistakenly think the man is the normal "veteran teacher" advertised on the book's cover. But after reading the book, no one could continue to believe that. Instead, it becomes clear that Foley is an artist, who brought his creative mind to the color wheel of his classroom every day for each of the 29 years he taught middle school. Or he's a scientist, using classroom laboratory to discover what makes kids tick, five days a week times 29. Or he may be a magician, pulling student success after student success out of the tall black hat he has carefully prepared. For those who, after reading Foley's book, still think he is a "normal veteran teacher," I have only these words: "the love line" (p. 53) and "specimen cup" (p. 195). Foley's wonderful book of ideas is important for any public school teacher. Ultimate Classroom Control Handbook is more than a set of helpful tips on topics ranging from what to do when students lie to how to help them turn in assignments on time. It shows what a teacher who brings his imagination and deep respect for his students to work every day can do, if he is guided by the two. At its heart, this book is a story about approaching the teaching day with creativity and compassion and an anthem about what such an approach can accomplish.

If I only purchased one book on classroom management, this is the one I'd buy. I teach older students in late adolescence and early adulthood, but I found Dave Foley's book to be packed with great advice and practical tips for classroom control. The guy obviously knows his stuff! The humor, the wisdom and perspective, and most of all, the real understanding of HOW to teach with class control, made this book a winner for me. What a pleasure to read. With topics as varied as 'lost homework' to bullying to attention seeking clowns, no teacher will be disappointed with this book. I will recommend it to my colleagues and give it to recent grads.

There are lots of books out there on classroom management. As a school psychologist I have read the majority of them. This is now the one I recommend to teachers and I do so with complete confidence. Teachers find it readable, amusing, and very insightful. Several reported to me that it not only has good ideas, but it has "personality" in the writing which convinced them it was written by a real teacher rather than an academic. If you are a teacher wondering about how to make your class, and your professional life, more manageable this is the book to read.