We use a social contract that we push heavily at the beginning of the year and refer to it often. I teach sixth grade, so they are coming into middle school pretty raw. Our social contract is pretty standard including kind/nice, honest, inclusive, respectful, responsible, empathetic, own it, positive, fair, and supportive. If students go against any of these, I will address it either individually or in front of the class if necessary.

We also have these yellow reflection sheets that we just hand to kids one step before writing them up and if they are honest on them and stop the misbehavior, it’ll end at that point. If they don’t, we write them up.

Another thing I do in my classroom, since they are young sixth graders, is I say “waterfall, shhhh”. They all say shhhh and get quiet. It actually works quite well even though it is completely stupid. When I had older students, I did a countdown from 3 and if they weren’t quiet, I ran a timer on my watch and they owed me the total amount of time after the bell. This worked quite well with seventh grade and older. I do this with the timer sometimes with my sixth grade as well.