General Management

Previous Chapter

Short Answer

“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

God Entity, Futurama (2002)

As great as the quotation above is, sometimes being visible is what gets you noticed and promoted while not being visible may get you in trouble.

Put another way: the perception you know what you’re doing is as important as knowing what you’re doing.
You can still measure the “quiet” things.

The ultimate goal is managing time/deadlines, cost, scope/requirements, and quality. You make sure the work gets done correctly, legally, and safely.

In other words: clarity, ownership, and decisions over tasks. That’s management in a nutshell.

The easiest mistake is prioritizing speed over quality. Sometimes slower is faster, like the turtle beating the rabbit. You might meet deadlines, but it’s at high risk of rework costs and every other metric suffering.

There’s a parallel with “passing up students” and “failing upward” somewhere soon.

Soft skills, like communication, and hard skills, like technical knowledge, are how you meet goals. Do not ever neglect technical skills, even if you’re in a management role now or in the future. Core decision-making relies on technical considerations and business objectives, which is difficult and detrimental without appropriate background knowledge. In education, you may be able to manage people, but your curriculum suffers if you cannot effectively teach it.

Similar advice applies for managers in other industries, like engineering.

If you’re not sure how to set up a process or workflow, start with the minimum (or simplest) way that works. This could be sticky notes on a wall, a word document, or spreadsheet. Advocating for complicated processes when unnecessary often goes against your goals.

Prepare for the worst, but assume the best of people.

Cooking something at 1200 degrees for 1 hour does not produce the same result as cooking something at 300 degrees for 4 hours.

This is a joke, but if you apply this thinking broadly across multiple scenarios, you will have a bad time.

Long Answer

Education is anywhere from extremely hands-off, like how many online “courses” avoid interfacing with students almost entirely, to extremely hands-on, such as constant assistance for students in classrooms. At least some level of management exists across the entire spectrum.

Students range from a variety of backgrounds across multiple demographics. What may work for one student may not work for another, and how a student behaves in class varies from student to student.

Some students may also respect the authority of a teacher and be respectful to other students. Some students will actively undermine the education of their peers, interrupt teachers when an opportunity arises, or even resort to physical violence.

This is a reality of the environment many teachers and instructors deal with on a daily, if not hourly, basis in a classroom setting. You have to manage people.

Most management “training” is going to happen on the job. As much as you’d like to be the manager that says “just get your work done and I’m good,” that’s rarely, if ever, going to be the case in practice. Even the best plan still deals with accountability and autonomy issues.

This means you still need to plan for the worst-case scenarios.

If you can handle students at their worst, then you can handle them at every other degree of behavior.

Even if you can handle the worst behaviors, you’ll have to account for lost time anyway. If you’re estimating how long something will take, chances are you might be wrong. There’s additional overhead you may not have accounted for, or can control, which may incur delays. For example: just because you have 8 hours in a day to do work, you’ll rarely ever be using all 8 hours to get work done.

When in doubt, underpromise and overperform.
Involve your team/students/etc. because they may know how long something takes better than you.
- They can underestimate a lot though. E.g. If another teacher says 1 week, considering planning for 1.5 weeks in case of emergencies.

If a manager, or someone who manages, consistently encounters the same problem(s) over and over, then that manager is likely the problem.

Is Teaching (and Instruction) Hard?

Be advised this is heavily opinionated compared to other sections.

It depends!

For a catch-all answer: every role and its difficulties depends on the person in the role, the role itself, and the environment the role operates in.

In terms of environment, I’ll look at the 2024-25 Discipline and Behavior Data Release Summary from Colorado Department of Education (2025). Keep in mind any numbers in the list below also come from this same source.

Compared to previous year’s data, there’s a 2% decrease in disciplinary actions.
- Do note there’s also ~2% less students present (65791 -> 64538) in the same survey.
- Majority of issues result in suspensions given to student.
Most disciplinary actions (~80%) are results from detrimental behavior, conduct violations, and disobedience/repeated interference.
Drugs and alcohol account for 10% of violations.
There’s on average 2 disciplinary actions per student (132892 DAs vs 64538 students).

By these metrics, I have high confidence you will deal with troublemakers during any year of teaching. It’s possible one student, or multiple, can cause significant issues every single day of teaching.

Additionally, disciplinary actions recorded above do NOT include redirection, warnings, etc. that happened before the action is issued, as well as any time lost during instruction due to behaviors. This can potentially mean at least 2 things requiring further investigation:

Disciplinary actions being down doesn’t necessarily correlate with improved behaviors
New systems implemented may affect how disciplinary actions are tracked to show things improved only at the surface level.

In terms of the teaching role itself, from what I’ve seen and experienced in addition to what I read from RAND (Doan, Steiner, & Pandey, 2024) and the School Pulse Panel (2025), I’d probably give you this ordered list in overall difficulty:

Special Education
Alternative/Disciplinary Education
- Some overlap with special education or behavioral intervention
Traditional/General Education
Online/Virtual
Tutoring
Corporate Training & Adult Learning
- EdTech instructional roles, like online teachers and facilitators, are included here

This ranking comes from many areas and metrics like:

Pay and benefits compared to hours worked
The type of people taught (1v1, large groups, special needs, etc.)
Bureaucracy and legality involved
How often you’re expected to work “outside contract hours”
Pressure from external sources, like administration, parents, clients, etc.
How much time is available to perform work in the roles
How they’re treated by society at large
Amount of stress in general
How often the work environment and initiatives change
Difficulties and/or lack of consequences with the students being taught
The level of support available and/or provided
The methods used to deliver content effectively and efficiently
- E.g. Online vs face-to-face teaching from CITE Journal (Stern, 2004)

Teaching is not a role one can easily excel at. Even people in highly technical roles may fail due to lacking proper pedagogy (for adults, andragogy) to teach and manage students effectively.

Alright, opinionated piece over and back to normal content below.

What does a Manager do?

Manage resources. People are part of resources and the source of many ideas and methods to perform well. That’s the simple, pragmatic answer.

What they actually do is handle communication and relationships between people, task delegation, creating schedules, define why something is important and setting context, and accomplish goals in their projects/work. Ironically, a manager should train employees under them to perform their jobs so well they don’t “need” a manager and become capable of operating without constant direction. Doing that successfully frees up time for bigger picture work like strategy and stopping problems before they happen.

Here’s more examples of what a manager may do:

Finding new projects and work to keep everyone in business and employed
Setting examples for people to follow
Ensuring you don’t exceed budget
Hiring people and retaining people in the company
Facilitating growth and mentorship of people
Setting clear and definitive expectations
Firing people who cannot meet performance expectations
Reporting to leadership above, and sometimes reports below or at the same level, about progress and results
Working with team and external elements, like stakeholders, to learn requirements and what work should be done
Eliminating blockers for direct reports
Securing resources to meet project goals
Distributing workloads across employees
Keeping a baseline familiarity with other departments to stay ahead of the curve
Staying up to date with what their direct reports do
Managing relationships between multiple teams, departments, people, and more
Setting up effective and efficient meetings and schedules
Understanding how to do the actual work of their team to better delegate work and explain technical topics to assist more customers
Ensuring everything is done legally

There’s a lot of things here. It reinforces the point that it’s counterintuitive to micromanage people because it means hyperfixating on one element at the potential detriment of every other element.

Everyday Management Rules

There are rules (that are more like “guidelines”) you should follow with every management style:

It must be legal for you to do.
Human behavior is surprisingly diverse, which means racing to conclusions may harm more than help.
No means no. If you do not allow something, you MUST be willing and able to enforce that. The moment you do not, it becomes a rule that students, adults, and minors know can be broken.
Appropriate punishments for appropriate behaviors. For example, a student talking out of turn can be resolved with a warning. That same student actively bullying another cannot be solved the same way and requires escalation.
Ignore any attention-seeking behavior, as not every quip or comment a student makes is worth your time or even a reply.
A management style you’re comfortable with is a management style you’ll enforce and follow more easily.
Determine where “the line” is and do not move it unless necessary. Regardless of age, if someone can get away with something, they will try to do it.
People listen to the advice of someone who knows what they’re talking about more readily than someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. If you lose the perception that you understand what you’re talking about, you also lose respect and weaken the ability to teach properly to students (or a group/audience in general).
You’re the filter and translator for requirements and what needs to be done for direct reports; the people in your team.
Clear and decisive action solves issues faster than delaying and festering.
When handling underperformers, it helps the rest of the team, class, etc. to address the issue(s) sooner rather than later.

Many rules that work with one group of students/people may not translate over to another group of students/people. Teachers across grades and school types operate in different teaching, management, development, and accommodation contexts, which means adapting your rules to fit these contexts is necessary.

Example 1: A Kindergarten teacher and a 12th grade teacher may share some classroom management rules and procedures, but how they’re best executed, written, and taught vary significantly enough it’s like handling two completely different groups.
Example 2: Accounting for differences in culture, resources, and student behavior between Title 1 schools and affluent schools require different types of rules, rule enforcements, and accommodations for learning.

Maintaining Appearances (Perception)

There are four levels of managers from best to worst in most environments (from what I’ve been around):

Competent and technical manager
Competent, but non-technical manager
Incompetent, but technical manager
Incompetent and non-technical manager

The first and last rankings are as expected. Competence means you do things well and “technical” means you have the background knowledge to properly inform your decisions.

When competence and technical skills aren’t aligned, that’s when things get messy. Non-technical managers are good if they can trust their team to make technical decisions and know when they should be hands off vs hands on. The issues occur when managers, technical or not, step in too much and try to dictate processes they’re not well equipped to handle themselves.

Remember, managing is a different job. Engineers may manage computers, tasks, and technical know-how, but managers manage people. Managers understanding the human element and the business impact helps more than knowing all the functions of a particular tool. They should get their team(s) the reach and resources to accomplish goals, justify why they’re worth the money/ROI to administration, and ensure their employees/peers/subordinates/etc. thrive in their positions. They also need to know when to divert, invest, or push back against queries and work for their team alongside meeting schedules and deadlines so their problems don’t run downhill to their employees.

Good managers can turn chaos to order.

Despite all this, it doesn’t contradict what I said earlier. Learning about technical skills, even just to understand business needs, is absolutely essential.

Now then, let’s say you’ve studied a field for several years, garnered a lot of experience, and you know what you’re talking about. You know how to put out fires. You can solve things previously deemed impossible to fix. In an instructional role, and many roles in education systems, you’re “leadership.” You might not have traditional employees, but you’re still managing people who are “beneath” you in a perceived power/knowledge structure.

This means you need to do the things leaders also do without weakening authority, such as:

Don’t be an asshole.
Not using stop words like “uh” and “um.”
Not leading into statements with something like “Just a quick thought,” “this may sound like a bad idea,” excessive apologizing, and so on.
Using the phrase “I believe.”
Turning your thoughts into words at the appropriate time and can tactfully interrupt/join a conversation.
Getting other people to confirm you know what you’re doing.

Despite how knowledgeable you might be, bad communication takes you down like a cat pouncing on a mouse. You can improve communication in less than a couple weeks if you put your mind and time to practice.

It’s how you say something, not just what you say, and getting people to see you do it right.

Let me use one item above in an example.

“This is a good idea, I think we should do it.” instead of “Let’s implement this idea.”

That one phrase, “I think,” in the former instills doubt and makes someone think you cannot stand behind your words. The latter cuts that doubt out entirely and makes it sound like you’re sure and ready to act.

You also want to avoid thinking outpacing speaking. It’s hard to detect at first, but I usually catch myself doing that when I say stop or gap words like “uh” and “um” even when I don’t want to.

You can pause for a bit. It’s ok. A couple seconds to stop, structure what you want to say into a framework, then say what you want to say. It’l help you. Even in extremely high stress scenarios, where seconds are on the clock until disaster, you will have a couple seconds to assess the situation(s).

Last part here is communicating impact. You can solve these amazing problems, but it won’t mean anything if people cannot see it was solved. This goes for other co-workers and peers, like other teachers, as well as students watching you instruct. The work you do should also speak for you, which means people should see you’re doing good work clearly and consistently.

The Rule of Two [Contracts]

There’s two things to remember when handling written communications

Replying in anger doesn’t help your case.
When in doubt, get life-changing issues, contracts, and important documents in writing.

For point #2, that includes all of them… or as many as is reasonable to get.

Trust me, you don’t want to handle the fallout of not having your metaphorical ducks in a line with every t crossed and i dotted when the law comes knocking.

As you scale up in size, you’ll want to review any legal contracts you wrote with past employmees, agencies, etc. This ideally happens at least once, if not more than once, somewhere before you reach 50 employees in a given company.

While a small company of a few friends may have contracts with lenient terms approved when everyone was a group of friends, that “group of friends” mentality is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to maintain as you scale in size.

I say this advice because you don’t want to fire an employee, like one of your original founders, and then find out they have significant leverage and/or working knowledge of, well, many interal systems. For example, giving them ownership to the code, tools, infrastructure, designs, and licenses they leased out to the company that they could pull out easily and leave the entire company out to dry if they’re no longer employed.

While this may sound detrimental, it’s also to protect everyone involved, ensured their importance is codified, and eliminating any single points of failure within your system.

Enforcing Control

Success varies greatly depending on the audience you’re teaching. Thankfully, some strategies are universal and applicable at various degrees of success with groups.

One single list will not solve all your problems. You’ll need to adjust strategies over time, and this is something you have to do in practice rather than just reading about it. Other times, you don’t have time to review the entire list mentally and may have less than a few seconds to get back control before chaos occurs.

Here are some examples to enforce control of the room:

Establish a routine. If students know what to do without constant reminders, they’re less likely to go out of turn.
Clearly define the rules. Explicitly stated rules are followed and enforced better than implied rules.
Shouting matches don’t work. The first one to shout loses, so don’t be the first one to shout.
Remain calm.
Determine where “the line” is and do not move it unless necessary.
Do not carelessly give away rewards for good behavior, as they can be detrimental to intrinsic motivation by replacing it with extrinsic motivation.
Be prepared to have a reason for why something is done the way it is. If it’s because “you said so,” it’s not something you should do.
Even if restricted by what you may teach, getting students to choose what they want to learn may increase their desire to learn and motivation to do well. (similar topic: “stakeholder buy-in”)
Calling out a student directly is more effective than simply stating “stop causing trouble” without calling out the person causing the trouble.
Use statements over orders. Short and precise is best. “Fix it, please.” “Do [thing], please.”
- If a statement is over 10 seconds long, it’s too long. You can shorten it.
Establish ways to set rapport. You don’t need to be–or should be–their friends, but you do need to earn their respect.
Be ready to “pull the trigger” when disciplining.
Decide where and how you want people to sit, stand, or otherwise in a classroom, whether by strict assignment or casually (i.e., “just sit in a chair”)
- For online teaching, decide what they need to set up on their computer, phone, etc. to receive information and do tasks you assign appropriately.
Regulate the use of AI by students when possible (more on that later).

Attention Economy

The amount of time a student can focus depends on many factors, such as age, disposition, and personality.

Generally speaking, the younger students are, the less time they can maintain focus before needing a break. One rule of thumb example is a student’s maximum attention span is 2 to 3 times their age (e.g., 13 years old = 26-39 minutes) before a short break is needed. The Pomodoro technique (Cirillo, n.d.) is one example of a management method capitalizing on attention spans.

Consider short-form content like TikTok videos and YouTube shorts. Due to their implementation of highly optimized psychological techniques to get your time, which are also found in similar apps and software (Qin et al., 2022). Basically, maintaining focus in a classroom is set to Hard mode by default. It’s not impossible, but you’re starting at a hefty disadvantage. In worse cases, allowing access to these applications in a school environment has a direct and significant effect on lowering grades and performance (Rozati, 2025).

If a student wants to learn something, they’ll at least try to learn something–which may not be what you’re teaching. It’s not always the case of the student intentionally doing something bad. Still, something else caught their attention more at the time, or they got confused about something and are now acting out.

Fighting for attention can be remedied with some of these techniques. They may not work perfectly and their effects vary, but it’s significantly better than not using any of them.

I’d say to keep an overall level of focus (i.e. “utilization rate”) at 85% to 90%.
- Enough work to not be bored, but not so much work to incur undue stress and burnout.
- Some mental wandering, breaks, and loss of focus among students should be expected and accounted for.
- Multiple study techniques are designed with breaks, so learning and teaching techniques should incorporate breaks too.
Do not carelessly give away rewards for good behavior, as they can be detrimental to intrinsic motivation by replacing it with extrinsic motivation.
- This means less interest in whatever you’re trying to teach, as their goal is now the reward and not the knowledge you’re imparting.
Plan for potential breaks during classroom sessions.
- For example, a 45-minute lecture can turn into 2, 20-minute parts with a few minutes break midway for a significant boost in retention, attention, and learning.
- Just because a student can maintain focus for 50 minutes doesn’t necessarily mean they always should do that every class.
Get creative and use visuals to supplement material you’re trying to teach.
- Images tend to be far more pleasant to look at than large bodies of text. They are easier to digest information from when appropriately created.
For presentations and lectures taught with a presentation screen of some sort, limit it to <= 50 words on a screen at a time.
- If you have to present more than that amount of words at once, prepare a means to highlight, underline, or accentuate parts you want to call attention to.

Idle Workers vs Idle Work

Some people may see people sitting around, doing nothing, and wondering why they aren’t working. If someone saw someone not working, but hired them specifically to do work, they may think that work is not properly utilized and assign more work as a result.

It’s why “if you have time to lean, you have time to clean” may bring back traumatic memories for some readers.

What happens if someone is 100% busy, however, is they’re unavailable for other work if it comes their way. Say a new issue arises the person needs to work on, but they’re currently swamped with other, higher priority work.

That new issue sits and remains unaddressed, which forms a new kind of waste.

This is idle work.

You can afford workers having some idle time, but you cannot afford workers unable to address idle work. If work gets delayed, you incur the cost of that delay. The problem isn’t idle work; it’s lacking capacity to complete work or not having workers idle to assign to it.

If you think idle workers are bad compared to idle work, consider a relay race in track. You have multiple people, all part of a team, where part of their workload is literally standing around in an assigned location. While they aren’t actively doing something, they’re preparing to react to an important task when it arrives. This is a player getting ready to run when their turn arrives and ensure the other people in the relay get to their turns faster.

Keeping players, employees, workers, and people not 100% busy opens them up to do work as it arrives and complete their goals. Keeping them 100% busy, however, exponentially increases the backlog of things they need to do, but cannot do so without significant issues and pushes back the finish line further and further.

To remove idle work, you remove bottlenecks or things prevent work from getting done. That’s what you should do when you’re managing; removing obstacles and ensuring capacity/availability to do the work that matters when it arrives.

The Art of Meet[ings]

A lot of people hate meetings. Bad meetings are lost opportunities and real costs to everyone involved (Bernstein and Ringel, 2018).

People hate meetings so much we develop ways to mathematically show the cost of meetings.

The lesson is simple: if you don’t generate value greater than the cost of a meeting, do not host a meeting.

The typical formula goes like this:

Meeting Cost = [Average Salary (currency/hour) x Employee Count (people) x (Duration (in hours) + Setup time (in hours)) + Additional Costs] x Occurrences (per unit of time)

As for some conversions:

Average Salary (Annual) = Hours * 2080
Average Salary (Monthly) = Hours * ~173
Average Salary (Weekly) = Hours * 40
Meeting Duration (Minutes) = Hours * 60
Occurrences (Daily) = (2080/8) = 260 (or 262)
- This assumes 40 hour work weeks for each week of a year, no vacation, with weekends off.
Occurrences (Weekly) = 52
Occurrences (Monthly) = 12
Occurrences (Yearly) = 1

Simplified into variables, this is:

M = [A x E x (D+S) + Ac] x O

Say, for example, you have a 1 hour meeting with a team of 5 high-salary engineers and their average salary combined is 200,000 USD. You didn’t need time to set it up in advance either.

M = (200,000 / 2080) x 5 x 1 = ~480 USD

That’s just for one meeting.

Let’s say you decide to implement Agile/Scrum daily standups for 10 minutes every workday instead of a 1 hour meeting for the year with your 5 team staff from before.

M = [(200,000 / 2080) x 5 x (10/60)] x 260 = ~20800 USD

(10/60) = 10 minutes divided by 60 minutes in 1 hour

What about if you need to do daily standups, but it’s for 5 employees with lower salaries around 50,000 USD?

M = [(50,000 / 2080) x 5 x (10/60)] x 260 = ~5208 USD

All these calculations also assume you don’t need additional setup time, purchasing venue space, buying materials, and other additional costs for specific meetings as well; only personnel showing up for X amount of time.

Though meetings may seem like low-cost methods of communication, they quickly add up if not controlled. Even if you’re in the camp of championing collaboration and “quick meetings,” you still have to prove the value of a meeting is greater than the cost of doing one. This is especially true for meetings taking away time spent on other essential work projects.

To repeat once again: As soon as a meeting is deemed invaluable, people will not respect the meeting.

Making Meet[ings] Simple, Effective, and Efficient

There’s multiple ways to do this.

If you need to make a decision now, one of the fastest ways is allowing people to vote more than once. For example, you have 5 options people can choose from, but only the most popular option is selected. You don’t need an agenda, timekeeper, scrum master, other random person, etc. to manage it. You go around, ask yes/no questions for each option, tally votes, and pick the option with the most votes.

If done right, this takes less than a minute.
Don’t use this method for critical or life-safe items.

There’s also blocking out meetings on schedules for 1:1 meetings or meetings with multiple people at once. You can block out 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, etc. Even if there’s time blocked out, you want to minimize how long the meeting lasts. Though these statements may sound conflicting, it’s in your best interest to convey critical information quickly and clearly to reduce waste, stay on schedule/budget, and ensure people can do what they need to do.

For most meetings, you’ll want an agenda of what to cover. This could be an essay or a short, bullet point list; the format the agenda takes doesn’t necessarily matter here.

If it needs to be shared, then it does matter because you’ll want the agenda in written form.

The agenda is like a compass pointing you towards the direction of topics you need to focus on and communicate with everyone present. It’s goal is to discourage bringing up unnecessary things in the moment or sidetracking and wasting time.

What this means is hosting a meeting without an agenda is a recipe for wasted time, effort, and money. Don’t do it. Send an email instead like a normal person.

There is one notable example that breaks this rule: a dial-in/coffee meeting or “happy hour.”
- Manager sets up available times, in advance, employees can come in to vent, discuss ideas, or talk casually.
- They MUST be optional to attend.

Positive and Negative Student Behaviors

This usually applies to younger students, but older and adult learners can have behavior issues too.

Two categories I’ll put behaviors in are positive and negative.

Every student wants to be understood and accepted, but each student has different ways of getting that acknowledgement. Negative behaviors can be replacements for a lack of attention or acknowledgement for many people.

Positive behaviors are behaviors you want to enforce and reward, such as giving attention to, providing random acknowledgements, and compliments. These behaviors vary across teachers, but generally, they are things you want students to do and how you want them to act. For behaviors you want to see, you provide a clear path to reach them and indications that they are reaching positive behaviors along the way to the goal.

Negative behaviors are any behaviors that put you, the classroom, or other students at a disadvantage and threaten the sanctity of the learning environment. Whenever a negative attention-seeking behavior occurs from a student, I prefer three ways to handle it.

Shut it down immediately.
- All it takes is a few seconds for control to be lost, your authority diminished, and the rest of the class/audience to see an opportunity to make it worse.
- Best when, you know with certainty, something goes against the rules of the school/classroom, etc.
Let it play out for a bit before deciding whether to ignore or act.
- Mistakes are likely in the first 5-10 seconds; a delay may put out a fire and not add to it.
- While this carries some risk and can escalate a situation, it can also provide context to the negative behavior, let you collect evidence, and inform how you should handle it in the future.
Make it boring.
- Usually only works for memes or trends going amongst students at the time.
- The idea is that something an older person, like an adult, may participate in becomes something a younger student does not wants to be part of anymore or becomes uncool.

I’ll talk more about these when I reach learning methodologies, but these negative behaviors require stern management. Negative behaviors tend to have these traits in common:

Acquiring social attention
May start mild and innocent, but devolve into something worse
A reason behind the negative behavior

If a student shows signs of one of the following, or something related, do not feed into the attention they’re seeking, or it will spiral out of control:

Overly dramatic reactions
Dramatic or provocative behavior
Fishing for compliments
Excessive noise-making
Pushing boundaries
Bullying others in the classroom
Talking out of turn

Even if you mitigate negative behaviors, it doesn’t always mean they’re gone entirely. There is a reason behind the negative behavior. It is up to you to figure it out and see if a feasible solution exists, or else the negative behavior will repeat. These negative behaviors also occur outside of a school setting and aren’t limited to students; your fellow staff, other adults, and children may also show them.

Negative behaviors will rarely resolve in a single day as well. They can take a week, a month, or even years to fix–or at least get better compared to before. Controlling behaviors amongst students is an exercise in management you cannot avoid, nor should you avoid.

Additionally, if you’re a teacher, there are specific actions that only other staff, such as principals and security, are equipped to handle and legally allowed to handle. If it reaches that point, do not hesitate to contact one of them to try to get the situation under control. The longer it takes to control the problem, the more likely something bad will happen.

Remember: All it takes is one disruptive, mismanaged student to ruin a classroom.

What about Restorative Justice?

Restorative justice exists both inside and outside of education systems. It’s been explored back at least one generation before today (as of February 2026).

This system addresses the needs of the offender, the needs of the victim(s), and the needs of the community. The community is also involved as it holds some responsibility for why the offender committed the crime in the first place due to social conditions and relationships. Restorative justice is also intended as “a complementary process” to add onto an existing justice system rather than a wholesale replacement for justice systems (Marshall, 1998). Even across several decades, there’s still criticism about restorative justice and its effects may be only small changes in recidivism and victim satisfaction with varying factors at play (Fulham, 2023). Regardless, it must also be victim-focused; the victim gets what is reasonably desired to ensure the offender is held accountable for their actions.

The concept works well in theory, but in practice it requires sufficient personnel, workflows to follow through with it, and a lot of available time from everyone involved to support it. Without any of these resources, it will fail. There’s also two other factors:

While victim-offender meetings can provide restitution, they can mistakenly focus on the offender instead and reintroduce a victim’s trauma.
It asks of offenders to care about the problems caused and whom they affected. If there is no buy-in, it is ineffective.

For teachers and other employees involved in education, the absence of troublemaker students can make a night and day difference in productivity and improve the education systems at a school. That is a short term solution, but it is an effective solution as it improves the community aspect in educational systems. Restorative justice is a long-term solution, but if it doesn’t have the proper supports or works well in practice, it should not be implemented (or discarded if already implemented).

Employing Negotiation Tactics

Though it’s a bit extreme of an application, you can utilize hostage negotiation strategies in a classroom setting. Don’t do this everywhere, though; there’s a time and place for this.

Another way to think about negotiation is emotional contagion, where people nearby may generate the same energy you project. If you mismanage self-control and create a crisis situation out of something mundane, other people may react like it is a crisis. This likely leads to a situation that is actually out of control rather than one which was previously in control.

One book I’ve personally read, if you’re curious about these strategies, is called Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss (2016). To explain two examples from that book, there’s a section talking about how compromises aren’t always the best solution and how keeping self-control is important. I’ll paraphrase the following from those sections below.

A win-win strategy–or a compromise–isn’t always the ideal outcome, nor is it always a moral good to compromise for the best outcome. Compromises are easy to do and seem fair, which is why compromising is often the first thing people employ when negotiating. Better solutions require creativity and have a higher payout for all sides. Still, they undergo a heavier risk and potential conflict as a barrier to reaching those solutions.

A significant risk involved in compromises is you’re often assuming, as a teacher, a student is thinking like you. That isn’t empathy; you’re not understanding their point of view. Instead, you’re projecting your perspective(s) onto them and making a potentially dangerous assumption, which can escalate the situation in neither party’s favor.

Unless you have self-control and can regulate emotions, you won’t regain control and negative behaviors will affect the student, which causes them to spread to other students. Control also includes tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions.

Delving into this area further brings you into the world of psychology and subjects such as calibrated questions, leverage, empathy, negotiation, deflections, and more. Keep in mind that while negotiation and manipulation seem similar and have a shared goal, the methodology used to reach that goal is vastly different. Negotiation seeks mutual benefits and understanding amongst all parties. In contrast, manipulation seeks control and tricks for one party to get what they want. Negotiation helps people, and manipulation harms people.

Automating your Workload

You can automate or improve efficiency with solutions that aren’t AI and probably already have before. All automation is is predefined rules to perform tasks consistently without human intervention. It’s not trying to emulate human (and beyond) thinking to complete tasks like AI might.

All this is to say there’s a good chance you need an automated solution and not an AI solution for your problem(s).
With any automation (and AI), ensure you understand how its underlying mechanics work or you may become someone with 30,000+ HIPAA/FERPA/GDPR violations in less than 30 seconds.

My rule of thumb is that if something can be automated, it isn’t as costly to do so, and it has strictly, pre-defined rules to ensure consistent output/quality, you should consider automating it. For example: why spend hours grading multiple-choice questions by hand when you can instantly grade them in a fraction of the time by supplying an answer key. This can be done with low-cost software or even hosting the assignment on a platform like Google Forms to do most heavy-lifting for you… without any AI involved whatsoever.

You want to make sure you don’t automate yourself out of a job, however. I’m assuming you’d probably want to get paid for your work.

As an instructor, whatever you do should be optimized to free up more time. The more time you have, the more time you can dedicate to your other students–or matters outside of teaching.

Automation–and AI (Artificial Intelligence) by extension–is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Not everything can–and should–be automated. If you’re unsure of what existing technology can automate, I’ll provide examples below:

Grading questions with discrete, well-defined, and objective answers, like the results of math equations
Progress report submission and filling
Sending multiple emails at once
Tasks with repetition
Formatting of documents
Generating ideas and prompts
Shortening text and summarizing

Remember: Time is your most valuable resource. Once gone, it cannot be restored.

Also remember: automation (and/or AI) can get very expensive very quickly and may not always solve EVERY problem.

Scaling Culture

As systems grow, such as classrooms, companies, and so on, what seems fine with only a small group of people doesn’t work with a larger group of people. Additionally, the “personality” of said group could affect how things operate; an aggressive group of people holds different values over a passive group of people.

These aspects of group culture can be many things. It could be having dinners with everyone in your group on a set day. It could be one person doing a set of tasks for the organization. It could even be an all-hands meeting with everyone in the group. Some aspects you can scale surprisingly well, while other aspects work well only with specific group sizes.

E.g. operating at a micro level, meso level, and a macro level are separated into three distinct categories (Wagner & Hollenbeck, 2009).

You can also measure “success” by growth; it’s a valid metric, afterall, and can evaluate many things such as wealth, status, and size. Should you evaluate the quality of a culture by its size/growth? Generally, no. Look for cultures having the values you value, redundant as that sounds. If it’s a culture for work, aim for leadership that is visionary and looking forward, rather than looking backwards; the kind that inspires you to dream of greatness.

As your group changes, procedures also change. For example, you may understand why a person in the group has extra benefits provided, whether it be an accommodation or a reward for excellent work. When more people from outside the original group get involved, you’ll have to define ranges and provide further context to avoid unwanted fires.

For example, it may’ve been fine to call everyone a teacher when it was just a couple teachers, but now you have an entire cohort and you need to redefine teachers by their topic specialty. While it’s not incorrect to call everyone a “teacher” instead of a specific kind of teacher, lumping too many people into one category may cause ambiguity and issues later on as you scale in size.

This also applies to seniority. Two people may be “engineers,” but there’s a vast difference in experience, time done, and wisdom between a “junior” engineer and a “senior” engineer. It’s not wrong to generalize those two as engineers, but the distinction is needed to remove ambiguity and reduce multiple issues as you bring on more and more engineers later.

One other thing you may think scales well, but actually doesn’t, is teaching things to others. You may have the resources to teach someone how to use a particular tool, understand a process, and so on without impacting work significantly (and do it quickly!). You may not, however, have the resources to train an entirely new mindset to settle down into an educational system, adjust to a classroom setting, or develop critical thinking skills. From a personal observation, it may take years to change those aspects and people may not be equipped or willing to dedicate resources to fix these issues on a particular person.

Lastly, if you’re considering bringing in someone new into the culture, you should give them time to observe the culture first before they make any changes to that culture.

You may see me echo similar advice multiple times in this book.

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