We recently flagged an excellent overview of attention regulation skills, which was great on the principles but whose scope wasn’t to cover practical classroom strategies. So, conveniently those clever people at Edutopia have just released “30 ways to bring calm to noisy classrooms”. There are a couple of the usual favourites (teachers hand goes up to signal silence and focus, everyone else mimics), to some we hadn’t heard of but have to be worth a go: ‘The Silent Spot’, ‘The Magic Wand’ and ‘The Remote Control’. Or how about ‘The Silent Typist’? In a document linked to the big screen, begin typing the description of an essay that will be assigned if the room doesn’t quieten down. If you reach typing out the due date …. then everyone has to do the assignment. So far, apparently, the due date has never yet had to be typed….