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Shelby Wood

SPED 564-02

Positive Greeting at the Door: A Proactive Approach to Classroom Management

Traditional methods of classroom management have proved over time that they’re

ineffective, usually resulting in negative teacher-student relationships and/or negative classroom

climates. Traditional means of classroom management refer to reactive and punitive responses

teachers give to their students’ undesired behaviors. According to Cook et al. (2018), “Reactive

behavior management includes responses that may involve punitive interactions (e.g., public

reprimands that embarrass or shame a student) and the use of exclusionary discipline methods,

such as office referral, detention, or suspension”. Students should not be shamed and dismissed

for their actions, but rather given opportunities to learn from their mistakes and to replace them

with positive behaviors. If they’re not given these opportunities to grow, it can lead to negative

effects on students, the teacher, and the classroom climate as a whole. Teachers can be trained on

implementing positive greetings at the door (PGD) strategies as their students come in every day

to make a big difference in how their classroom runs! Although these actions may seem small

and insignificant, teachers can start to incorporate them into their classroom routine to improve

teacher-student relationships, foster students’ sense of belonging in the classroom, allowing for

easy transitions into the classroom, increased academically engaged time, and decreased

disruptive behavior.

Proactive classroom management strategies allow teachers to “briefly connect with and

welcome students, remind students of expected behavior, and motivate them to be academically

engaged in the learning activity that awaits them” (Cook et al., 2018, pg. 150). Positive greetings
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at the door is a prime example of these proactive classroom management strategies; the PGD

strategy was researched by studying teachers who were assigned specific tasks to focus on using

with their students at the start of each day. These tasks included the following: “(a) positively

connecting with each student via a verbal or nonverbal greeting, (b) delivering pre-corrective

statements to remind the whole class of expected behaviors as they transition into the classroom,

© privately pre-correcting and encouraging individual students who struggled with their behavior

the previous day, and (d) delivering behavior-specific praise statements to certain students to

reinforce desired behavior” (Cook et al., 2018, pg. 151). Specific examples include standing by

the door and greeting students individually by their name as they enter, giving them a fist bump,

delivering statements expressing their interest in the student, etc. Teachers can also greet the

class as a whole, reminding them of what they should be doing as they enter the classroom in

preparing them for the lesson they’re going to be taught.

Teachers who implement PGD strategies find that their students gain more academically

engaged time and display less disruptive behavior. In an article by Cook et al. (2018), the results

of the teachers using PGD strategies had their classes evidence a “20% gain in AET

[academically engaged time], which corresponds to an extra 12 min of on-task behavior, per

instructional hour or an hour of engagement over the course of a 5-hr instructional day” (p. 156).

By beginning each class or school day on a positive note, teachers will find that they spend less

time nagging students and using reactive methods of classroom management, and that they will

get to spend more time on instruction. Not only do teachers benefit from this, but the students’

learning and their class as a whole will benefit as well. Positive greetings at the door work
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because they’re simple, straight-forward methods that are “relatively quick, easy to implement,

and effective” (Cook et al., 2018, pg. 156).

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References

Cook, C. R., Fiat, A., Larson, M., Daikos, C., Slemrod, T., Holland, E. A., … Renshaw, T.

(2018). Positive Greetings at the Door: Evaluation of a Low-Cost, High-Yield

Proactive Classroom Management Strategy. Journal of Positive Behavior

Interventions, 20(3), 149–159. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098300717753831