Never get caught in escalating punishments to force compliance. Successful teachers defuse, sidestep, and redirect challenges to authority. Identify with student pain, sickness, and abuse. Refer students to people who can help. Focus on effort and not on innate gifts or abilities.
Successful teachers encourage student effort by finding good parts in their work.
Use cooperative learning whenever appropriate. Do NOT try to control children by calling on them when they are not paying attention. Model learning from mistakes and differentiate this from expecting students to learn through repeated failures. Repeated failures lead to frustration, but learning from mistakes leads to success. Show respect for parents in the presence of their children.