You don’t need to be a master in behavior management to understand how some good and established computer lab rules can help you in many everyday situations. Rules regulate behavior.

Think, for example, about the rules you follow when you eat dinner with friends (don’t throw food on people, use a fork and not your hands), when you board public transport (get a ticket, don’t shout) or when you buy things in a grocery shop (don’t knock down food on purpose, don’t steal). If rules are broken, social equilibrium is affected and everyone suffers.

Predicting the future with reasonable accuracy

Because they regulate behavior, rules allow us to predict the future with a reasonable degree of accuracy. This makes social situations easier to manage and allows us to co-exist peacefully and successfully in a stable and functioning computer lab.

Enforcing the computer lab rules

Without rules, life would be tiring, anxious, stressful and frustrating, so we should not be afraid of enforcing them to students. A well-ordered computer lab (or any classroom too) is always based on a set of clear rules. These rules are explicitly stated (at the beginning of the school year, on a poster, etc.) and reinforced by the modelled behavior and expectations of the teacher. So, for example, at the start of the school year, we might tell our rules to a new class, or state them again to a class that has already heard the rules last year, and also displaying these on the board or on the wall on a poster, so everybody can see them.

This habituates students into understanding what is ok, what is acceptable and what is unacceptable and forbidden in our computer lab or classroom. In short, the rules of your classroom cause norms to develop.

Ways to make the rules clear:

• display them on the wall or on a board, with a poster, just write the rules on a document, print it and display it (or you can use mine, just click this link to get a freebie – the computer lab rules I use in my classroom)

• talk to the students about the rules during the first lesson of the school year; in my school, we even hand a signing sheet where each student writes down their name and signature to state that they have heard the rules and will follow them for the upcoming school year

• remind the students of the rules as a ‘first and final warning’ before implementing them or sanctioning them

• use them if inappropriate or disruptive behavior develops

• speak individually to students whose behavior seems to be going in a negative direction and remind them what will have to happen if this continues

If you don’t have the time to sit and create your own computer lab rules poster, you can use mine, as I already mentioned, and download it for free from TpT. In the free product I have included a Computer Lab Rules poster (that I use in my computer lab classroom) and an editable version of the file in a *.docx type in case you want a template for your own rules. Click this link to go get the free Computer Lab Rules poster.

I hope I have convinced you in the great pros and possibilities of some well established computer lab rules. In my first year of teaching, I never created such rules, and often I found myself yelling or asking “don’t you know the computer lab rules”. No, they didn’t know because I never told them or showed them any rules. From my second year teaching and every year after that – I have always had a big A3 sized Computer Lab Rules poster on the door of the computer lab, so students could see it every time they enter and then leave the classroom. No need to tell you that this simple technique improved the behavior in my lessons a lot!