If we can agree on anything, it’s that COVID-19 made its mark on education. Good, bad, and indifferent, our classrooms were thrown for a loop and are still settling into what the “new normal” actually means. I’ve spent the past several years training K-12 teachers across the country, and the question I hear more than any other, the one that comes with a visible weight behind it, is how to approach classroom management after COVID. It’s a slippery slope, balancing grace with structure, empathy with accountability.
What I’m offering here isn’t a list of quick fixes. It’s what I’ve seen work, what I’ve seen fail, and what I’ve had to unlearn alongside hundreds of teachers who are just as exhausted and committed as I am.
Let’s start with something we all know but rarely say out loud: the old playbooks don’t fit anymore. Before the pandemic, classroom management often meant teaching routines during the first two weeks and then mostly enforcing them. That model assumed students already understood the unspoken social contract of a classroom…how to raise a hand, how to wait their turn, how to read a teacher’s tone. But when students returned after the COVID shutdown, many had spent over a year interacting primarily through screens, with muted microphones and chat boxes replacing the daily, messy work of navigating social skills in real time.
Those habits lingered.
I remember working with a teacher in a middle school language arts class two years ago, a veteran teacher who had calmly explained the same transition procedure three times, when a student looked up and said, “Wait, we all have to do the same thing at the same time?” That wasn’t defiance. That was a kid who had genuinely forgotten what in-person instruction felt like.
Why Pre-2020 Classroom Management Strategies Are Failing
We’re not just managing behavior anymore. We’re rebuilding something that was disrupted at a developmental level for students of all ages. If we try to apply pre-2020 strategies without acknowledging that shift, we end up frustrated, students get labeled as “difficult,” and the school environment becomes more adversarial than it needs to be. Recovering classroom culture after the pandemic is a long-term process, not a two-week sprint. Based on what I’ve seen across the dozens of school sites I’ve coached, teachers seeing sustainable progress aren’t the ones with the strictest consequences. They’re the ones who rebuilt their classroom structure, assuming students need to be taught, not just reminded, of how a collaborative classroom operates.
I want to be transparent about where I’m coming from. I started teaching high school history in 2007, entering the classroom right before the recession, watching the rise of one-to-one technology, and teaching through the slow creep of standardized testing pressure. The most formative part of my career was teaching in two very different public schools…one a nationally ranked academic school, the other a Title I CTE school.
Over my tenure, I taught over 1,700 students, and since 2018, I’ve been training K-12 teachers on how to implement student-centered learning. That shift from my own classroom to watching hundreds of others navigate theirs gave me a perspective I didn’t have before, when all I saw each day was inside the 4 walls of my own classroom.
A Unique Perspective: What I’ve Learned from Teachers Across the Country
Here’s what I’ve come to realize: I have a unique perspective because I’ve been working with teachers from all walks of education since COVID began. I started training teachers in 2018, so when the pandemic hit, I was already deep in conversations about student-centered learning. But when schools shut down, everything changed. Suddenly, the teachers I was working with weren’t asking about differentiation strategies or project-based learning. They were asking how to reach students who never turned their cameras on. How to grade work that might not be the student’s own. How to manage a classroom that existed entirely through a screen.
Then, when we returned to in-person instruction, a whole new set of questions emerged. Over the past several years, I’ve worked alongside teachers from every imaginable context…rural, suburban, urban. We’ve done something collectively that doesn’t get enough credit. We’ve worked together to figure out what’s working and what needs to be thrown away in the classroom. I’ve suggested techniques to teachers in rural Nebraska that are working in the Bronx to try. Teachers have sent me videos of themselves trying something I mentioned in a training, and I’ve watched those ideas get adapted, rejected, refined, and sometimes transformed into something I barely recognize but that works beautifully in their specific context.
Collectively, we’ve tried, tweaked, and changed with the collective. That’s the piece that doesn’t show up in research studies, but it’s the piece actually moving the needle.
The Student Apathy Crisis Is Real
I need to name something directly: the Student Apathy Crisis is real, and if you’re still trying to teach like it’s prior to 2020, you’re going to find yourself frustrated, and fast. I’ve sat in classrooms where a teacher is doing everything right…engaging lesson, clear instructions, genuine enthusiasm…and students just sit there, staring at their desks, giving nothing back. It’s not defiance in the traditional sense. It’s something more disorienting. It’s a kind of learned passivity that came from spending formative years in front of a screen where participation was optional, and the stakes felt low.
One of the biggest mistakes I see (and I made this myself early on) is assuming students remember how to “do school.” For instance, a student who was in first grade when the COVID shutdown happened spent nearly two years outside a traditional classroom during a critical period of social development. They didn’t get the daily, low-stakes practice of navigating behavioral expectations alongside peers. They didn’t have a teacher redirecting them fifteen times a day, building muscle memory.
So when they show up now and struggle with basic classroom procedures like waiting to speak or staying seated during instruction, it’s often a skills gap, not oppositional behavior. We don’t typically think of social skills as requiring direct instruction, but in the post-pandemic classroom, it absolutely does.
That’s where veteran teachers become so critical. New teachers entering the profession now are often thrown into classrooms with very little preparation for the behavioral realities they’re facing. I’ve watched new teachers burn out by November because they were trained on pre-2020 models of classroom management and then dropped into a school environment where student behaviors look fundamentally different. Meanwhile, the veteran teachers who are surviving (and honestly, some are thriving) are the ones who’ve accepted they need to teach things they used to assume students already knew. How to enter a classroom. How to ask for help. How to use Google Classroom without being reminded six times.
It feels elementary, but when you’re working with high school students who spent formative years in online classes, you have to meet them where they are.
What Actually Works: Rebuilding Classroom Structure
Let me give you a concrete example from a training I led last school year. A high school teacher came to me frustrated because her students would not stop talking over her during direct instruction. She was a good teacher with clear expectations and solid relationships, but she was fighting the same battle every day. We watched a recording of her class, and what we noticed wasn’t defiance. Students had no clear signal for when teacher talk was happening versus when discussion time was open. In the virtual environment they’d come from, the mute button handled that distinction.
Even fast-forwarding to today, so many of them are used to “commentary” over the majority of the videos they watch on their own time, so this seems like appropriate behavior.
We redesigned her classroom structure to include a physical and verbal cue (a specific light on her desk and a consistent phrase) that marked the shift. Within two weeks, interruptions dropped by about eighty percent. That wasn’t a personality change. That was a procedural fix addressing a gap they didn’t know they had.
This is where educational technology can either help or hurt. During remote learning, learning management systems like Google Classroom became the central nervous system of instruction. But when we returned to in-person instruction, many teachers kept using digital platforms in ways that actually reduced face-to-face interaction…and many were doing it to purely replace paper, not enhance the learning experience. I’ve seen school districts invest heavily in technology without investing equally in training teachers on how to use it to build, not replace, collaborative skills.
The sweet spot is using digital platforms for efficiency, feedback loops, and accessibility while protecting in-person time for the things screens can’t replicate: reading body language, practicing verbal negotiation, experiencing the productive discomfort of disagreeing with someone face to face. Those social skills took the biggest hit during the COVID shutdown and beyond, and they require intentional rebuilding.
The Mental Health Factor We Can’t Ignore
The other factor no one can afford to ignore is the significant increase in mental health issues among students. I’m not talking about a vague sense that kids are struggling more. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the percentage of high school students who felt persistently sad or hopeless reached 42 percent in 2021, and the share who seriously considered attempting suicide increased by more than a third since 2011, with the most significant jumps occurring during the pandemic years.
Because of this alone, social workers are stretched thin. School leaders are making decisions they never anticipated. Classroom teachers are on the front lines, whether we signed up for it or not. I’ve had students tell my teachers, in the middle of a history lesson, that they haven’t slept in three days. They’ve had students who seemed checked out, but later found out they were the primary caregiver for a family member who was ill.
The idea that classroom management exists separately from students’ mental health is a fiction. In the post-pandemic classroom, emotional health and behavioral expectations are intertwined in ways that require us to hold high standards and genuine compassion at the same time.
That doesn’t mean lowering expectations. It means being more intentional about how we communicate them.
When a student is consistently disruptive, the question I encourage you to ask isn’t “What consequence do I give?” but “What is this student unable to do right now that they need support with?” Sometimes the answer is academic…they’re acting out because they’re embarrassed they can’t read the assignment. Sometimes it’s social…they never learned how to enter a collaborative activity without escalating. Sometimes it’s structural…they’re dealing with a lot of stress at home, and school feels like another place where they have no control.
None of those root causes are solved by a detention slip. The approach I’ve seen work most consistently is “high structure, low drama”, clear, predictable classroom procedures paired with individual conversations that treat the student as someone whose needs matter, not just someone whose behavior needs correcting.
Rebuilding Social Skills in a Screen-First Generation
We spent a significant amount of time telling students their learning happened through a screen, and now we’re asking them to put the screens away and engage with real life…something some of them have no real concept of how to do. That transition is harder than we sometimes acknowledge. I’ve had teachers tell me their students literally don’t know how to have a conversation without a device in their hand. The shift back to collaborative learning, meaning actual, face-to-face discussion where students have to listen, respond, and build on each other’s ideas, requires intentional scaffolding.
I’ve found success using structured protocols like think-pair-share and Socratic seminars with explicit norms. You can’t expect students who spent years in online classes to sit down and have a forty-minute discussion without support. You have to teach them how.
The data around academic achievement tells a similar story. We’re seeing declines in math scores and reading proficiency that correlate directly with the disruption of in-person instruction. But the schools recovering academic ground fastest are the ones that prioritized classroom culture first. They didn’t wait until behavior was “fixed” to focus on instruction. They built instruction and behavior support as parallel tracks. When students feel like they belong in a classroom…when they know the routines, when they have strong relationships with adults, when their emotional health is acknowledged…they’re more available for academic learning.
What School Leaders Need to Understand Right Now
One of the most hopeful things I’ve seen is the way some school districts are rethinking professional development. Instead of generic workshops on “engagement strategies,” I’m seeing more districts invest in ongoing coaching that helps teachers analyze their own classroom data, refine their classroom structure, and build systems for responding to behavioral issues without burning out. I’ve moved from one-off trainings to sustained partnerships with school sites where we look at everything from graduation rates to discipline referrals to student surveys. The teachers who come out of that work aren’t just managing behavior better. They’re actually enjoying teaching again.
I’ll be honest: this is hard. There’s no magic strategy that makes classroom management after a global pandemic simple. The lasting effects of the COVID shutdowns on young people will be with us for a long time.
But I’ve also seen what’s possible when teachers are given the time, support, and permission to rebuild their classrooms with intention. I’ve watched a high school teacher, ready to quit completely, turn her classroom culture around by simplifying her classroom procedures, focusing relentlessly on relationships, and asking for help from her school site administrators instead of carrying everything alone. I’ve watched an elementary classroom teacher use daily morning meetings to build the social skills her students missed during remote learning, and by the end of the year, her students weren’t just meeting behavioral expectations but holding each other accountable in ways that were kind and constructive.
A Final Word for Teachers Who Are Still Standing
If you’re reading this and you’re exhausted, that’s a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. The expectation that we would return to normal without acknowledging what students and teachers actually went through was never realistic. What I’ve learned, from my own classroom and from watching hundreds of others, is that the most effective classroom management after COVID isn’t about being stricter or more lenient. It’s about being more intentional. It’s about teaching the skills we used to assume students had. It’s about building systems that don’t depend on you being perfect every day. And it’s about recognizing that our students’ needs…academic, social, and emotional…are all connected, and our response needs to honor that connection.
The teachers I know who are still standing at the end of the day are the ones who’ve given themselves permission to do this work differently. They’re using educational technology in ways that actually save time. They’re leaning on their colleagues, especially veteran teachers who’ve seen other hard seasons and come through them. They’re advocating for the mental health services their students need.
And they’re holding onto the truth that classroom management, at its core, is about creating conditions where young people can learn. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the path to getting there.
So if you’re a teacher reading this, whether you’re in your first year or your 25th, here’s what I want you to take with you: you don’t have to have this figured out by tomorrow. You don’t have to be the teacher with perfect classroom management. What matters is that you’re paying attention to what your students actually need, that you’re willing to adjust your classroom structure when something isn’t working, and that you’re protecting your own capacity to keep showing up.
The pandemic took a lot from our education system, but it also gave us something valuable: permission to stop pretending everything was fine. We’re building something new now. It takes time, honesty, and teachers willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding. From where I stand, that’s exactly what so many of you are already doing.
This article was originally written on October 29, 2021.
Thank you so much for this article! I’m an elementary music teacher who taught from 2014 to 2022, took a break after burnout, and attempted to start again in 2025. My own mental health struggles combined with lack of (appropriate) support from admin led me to choose resignation even after I came back from FMLA leave and IOP therapy. 😔 I love teaching, but being a music teacher post-pandemic seems to require less music instruction and more of what you talk about in this article: how to come in to the classroom, have appropriate discussions, work together, and resolve conflicts. These are things that I always try to model at the beginning of the year and after extended breaks, but I since I only see kids once a week for 40 minutes I usually count of students learning some of these things with their classroom teachers. Unfortunately the teachers were under high pressure to improve test scores, and it seems that social skills and appropriate behaviors for face-to-face interactions didn’t get enough air time. 😞 Even the kindergartners were usually on the chromebooks when I visited classrooms for push-in support.
I hear you…and honestly, my heart breaks a little reading this. You’re still in the thick of it, and what you’re describing is so real. You’re not failing; you’re trying to teach music in a system that doesn’t give you or the classroom teachers nearly enough time or support to rebuild basic social skills. Seeing kindergartners on Chromebooks instead of learning how to be with each other? That’s not on you. You’re showing up with love for music and for kids, and that shouldn’t have to mean burning yourself out just to survive the 40 minutes you get. I’m really glad you’re still here, even after all of that. Let’s hope the pendulum starts swinging back soon!