Behaviour Management Course for Beginning Teachers | Chaos to Calm | Prep to Year 6

What to say when a student mutters “Or what?” and the whole class leans in to see who wins.

For beginning teachers who were never actually taught how to manage a classroom (which, let’s be honest, is pretty much all of us).

There’s a very specific silence that happens in a classroom right before things go sideways. A kid is standing on his chair. Twenty-five heads swivel toward you like owls. Everyone wants to know what happens next, including you, because your brain has packed up and gone to recess without asking.

That moment is what this course is about: the three seconds where you’re supposed to “do something”, the part your degree skipped and every PD session waved at from a safe distance. Theory has its place, but this is about what you actually say and do while a real child pushes back in a real room.

It’s built on simple methods I pieced together over 12 years teaching Prep to Year 6, starting as a 21-year-old grad who had no idea what she was doing. They work whether your kids are 4 or 12, and you won’t need a reward chart, a points system or a single gold star.

The bit nobody showed you

On prac, your mentor teacher’s class just... worked. Kids lined up. Kids put their hands up. What you never saw were the routines and expectations she set up in Week 1, long before you walked in.

Then you get your own room, shut the door, and a child refuses to do any work. You hesitate. You react. On the drive home you replay it, trying to work out what you should have said.

You aren’t bad at teaching. You’re new, and nobody handed you the in-the-moment piece.

With Chaos to Calm, you won’t have to:

• Laminate a 20-rule poster that nobody (including you) can remember past rule four
• Raise your voice over a room that has already decided you’re background noise
• Spend your weekends Googling “how to make children listen” at 11pm
• Pretend a sticker chart is going to fix a kid who’s having the worst week of his life

And it still works even if:

• You’re a grad who has never once been taught how to run a classroom
• The only class you’ve ever “managed” was a prac class someone else had already trained
• You’re on a contract and worried that asking for help will make it look like you can’t cope
• The previous teacher handed over a student with “good luck with that one”

So what is it?

Chaos to Calm shows beginning teachers exactly what to do when behaviour is actually happening. You get the words, the routines and the structure, laid out through realistic classroom scenarios so you can see each strategy play out before you try it on Monday.

It focuses almost entirely on the one thing you can control, which is you: your language, your routines, your reactions. Kids follow that.

Using this, you can:

• Walk into your room knowing what you’ll say when a child refuses, argues or pushes back
• Stop escalation before it spreads to the kids watching from the back row
• Build transitions that hold together instead of collapsing into a stampede for the bookshelf
• Handle the hard stuff without wrecking the relationship you’ve worked so hard on

Four things you’ll discover:

• Why co-creating class rules with your students, the thing every uni lecturer seems to love, can quietly set you up for a frustrating first year
• The one-sentence opener that turns a defiant kid from opponent into teammate (it starts with “I have a problem and I need your help to fix it”)
• The three expectations that cover almost every behaviour from Prep up
• The real difference between a punishment and a consequence, and why one makes kids work harder while the other makes them give up completely

Here’s a bit more of what’s inside:

• A simple routine for student requests, so three kids aren’t yelling “Mrs Hodgson!” across the room every time they’re stuck
• The two parent emails (the first one and the follow-up) that stick to observable facts and keep emotion out
• What to write down after a serious incident so you’re covered
• Why you should only ever put up one expectation poster at a time
• How to run a morning routine so the day starts calm

Everything you get:

• 5 self-paced video modules: short, practical training you can come back to whenever you need it
• The Chaos to Calm eBook: everything from the course written down, so you can flick through it on your desk five minutes before class
• A printable reflection journal to spot patterns, track what’s improving and log toward your PD hours
• Expectation posters, ready to print and stick up tomorrow morning
• The private Chaos to Calm Facebook community, with Set It Sunday, Wednesday Wins and Fine-Tune Friday every week
• A certificate of completion for your professional development records

How you’ll access it

The course is hosted on my website. After you buy it here, you’ll download a PDF with step-by-step instructions and a code to set up your login, so you can start straight away. You get lifetime access, and you can come back to it whenever a new class throws you a curveball.

Not ready for this yet?

Start with the free lesson on setting clear expectations, the foundation everything else in Chaos to Calm is built on. You’ll find it in my Shareify store.

About Sarah

Built by a real teacher, for real teachers. These strategies worked for me as a classroom teacher, and again as a teacher librarian teaching every class in the school, every week. I’ve been a Classroom Teacher, Teacher Librarian and Curriculum Coordinator across Prep to Year 6 for over 12 years, and I hold a Bachelor of Education and two Masters degrees.