Effective Classroom Management

If you are a teacher and have ever taught to groups of students, no matter what age group they were, you have probably asked yourself a question of — how to manage my classroom better? It doesn’t matter what our subject is, what target group we are dealing with, what background our students have. The thing is, we have limited time and need to make sure the learners take something with them from the class.

Here we will talk about how to manage our classroom better, how to arrange the students to make them more effective, what tricks we can use to save time and how to spend less energy but get a better result.

Common Truths

Creating a learning environment is one of the most challenging things the teachers face. It includes trust, professional readiness, soft skills and ability to adapt. Generations change, so do the means and measures of how to create an environment where learners will feel confident, eager to study and motivated. Things that have worked a long time ago maybe just ineffective today, so it is fair to note, that teachers always have to learn and keep up with the changes and development of both people and technologies.

By classroom management, we don’t mean the way students behave during the class. We actually mean how and what we do in class that benefits them considering their learning needs and goals. This means something wider than just physical presence. It has to do with:

1. How we arrange the learning environment/the classroom
2. How we present ourselves in the classroom, meaning how the students see us, how they can trust us to learn something from us
3. How we measure the students progress and show it to them to boost confidence and willingness to push forward.

Rules and Routines

We all know that the first impression is a powerful thing. It doesn’t have to be always right, but it surely impacts us.

Establishing rules and routines from the very first class can be very decisive in how our classes will proceed afterwards. Students have and will always try to challenge the teachers, workaround the rules and relax if not driven otherwise. Showing that we know what we are doing and letting the students know the classroom rules can have a crucial influence in creating a healthy learning environment. Some of the rules can be as follows:

1. Being on time
2. Being ready for home tasks (if any)
3. Meeting deadlines
4. Using only the target language (if we are teaching a foreign language and if the level of the students allows us to make such a demand)

By saying ‘rules’, we don’t mean to act like the police and scare the learners off, actually what we can do first is to ask the students to work in groups/pairs and come up with classroom rules they would like to enact and the types of “punishments” to be exercised if they fail to comply with the rules. This can be a very nice warmer and will create a liberal atmosphere.

Here you can download posters with classroom rules.

Routines are another important thing in “training” learners to good study habits. In my case, students know that the first 5 minutes of each class is a vocabulary revision slot from the previous session which can be done using different games and activities (link for the Vocabulary Recycling Activities).

In the same way, the last 2-3 minutes of the class is a summary — what the students have learnt and what questions they have. I normally ask them to write it on post-it notes and leave on my desk for further consideration. This also allows the students to summarize what they have learnt and have a picture in mind of what had been studied during the class.

Read more about establishing routines with YL in this article

Creating a Positive Environment

Needless to say that people feel more comfortable and relaxed when there is no stress. Providing an environment like this is our job in the learning process. I still cannot understand the idea that a teacher must be strict to be respected and listened to. I do agree that there should be some subordination, but fear is not what I have in mind. Actually, having quite friendly and positive relations with students have always worked for me, no matter if they were teenagers or adults. Mutual trust, respect and understanding serve greatly in all human relations — teaching is not an exception.

Inside jokes, highlighting fun moments, using appropriate humour in class will do the job. Hence, if the environment is positive and there is respect, misconduct and bad classroom management are 80% eliminated.

Show the Progress

Helping the students see the results of their progress is the way to make them motivated and wanting to do more. The most practiced way of doing it are tests and grades. This, however, does not have to be the only way out. Constructive feedback on students’ progress, praising the good results, stressing the things to consider working on and ways how to do it have proven to be more effective.

Mark is a number, it denotes a level of knowledge, it does not explain what to do to make it better. Feedback, however, does exactly the opposite. It’s more unbiased, informative, future-oriented.

This much for the theory, let’s look at some practical ways of how to make our classroom management more effective.

ICQs (Instruction checking questions)

We have all been faced with the situation when an instruction has been given and one (if we are lucky) or more students were still confused about what on earth the teacher wants them to do 🙂 A nice way to avoid this is using ICQs. After an instruction has been given, we can ask one of the students to repeat what they are supposed to do. Interestingly, students learn from each other and listen to each other better than they do to the teacher.

Equipment

Nowadays a lot of teaching is based on the equipment we are using during the classes. They can be projectors, laptops, CD players, online resources, tracks, the Internet. In my experience of both teaching and observing classes, the most time-wasters were the things mentioned above when they were not checked or set up minutely before the class.

It is understandable that a lot of teachers rush from one class to another and have very short breaks to manage to set all the things up, but if we don’t want to have ‘bloopers’ during the classes, we need to make sure all is appropriately set and is working as it is supposed to be.

In failing to do so, we face several issues:

1. The students are prepared to do the task but because of something went wrong, they lose attention
2. Technical issues kill a lot of time
3. They create confusion and the class looks very disorganized

I don’t want to sound very critical here, but this is an issue that can fail an observed class if ignored.

Boardwork

Organizing the board in an easy to see way, when students can find the required information promptly without getting confused assists effective classroom management very much.

In my classroom, I divide the board into two sections. One is for the vocabulary notes — new words and phrases, mispronounced words, the other one for language — grammar elicitation, error correction, etc. This helps the students to focus more and they always know where to look when they want to find something.

Read more about boardwork in this article.

Interaction patterns — Groups and Pairs

Maybe not so in the past, but today group and pair work are very much practiced in every classroom. We have come to learn that they help the students to be more responsible for their learning, to be more independent in doing tasks, less dependent on the teacher, boost communication skills and learn from each other.

There are different ideas on how to arrange students to be more effective. Some say, that strong students should work together and the weak ones together. They explain it this way — if a strong and a weak student work together, the strong one always leads the discussion/the task, whereas the weak one is left out.

From what I have tried, anyone should/can work with anyone unless there is a good reason why not to (personal issues, special needs, etc.). Pairing up students depends why it is done the way it’s done. If the idea is for the strong student to teach/explain something to the weak one, that’s justified. To compensate for the weak students’ passive involvement during group activities, we can ask them to report the summary of the task/project of their group, thus giving them a chance to have a speaking time.

Another way to group the students is through matching cards or randomly. This works best when the task doesn’t require a specific grouping.

One more way is to distribute roles to group members based on their learning styles. An active student who never gives the others a chance to speak can be appointed as the ‘observer’ who will have to make sure that all the group members have their contribution in the task. The silent one can be appointed as the ‘presenter’ who will need to lead the discussion, the inattentive one can get the role of the ‘reporter’ to summarize the results of the task for the whole class.

Another interesting activity is the ‘shift left’ technique. In speaking slots, where the students need to talk about several topics and discuss with different people it can get quite noisy and confusing for them to change partners. Not to get lost, we can ask the students to stand in 2 separate lines facing each other and start discussing the first question. Next we can ask the student line on the left from us to shift left. It means, the first person will go to the end of the line. This can go as long as we want to depending on our lesson plan.

Pairing/grouping the students can get as creative as possible. The one thing that we have to keep in mind is the aim of the task and the students who will work better on it when assigned together.

Timers and Talk Cards

This is another way of not letting the activity go much longer than planned. It develops discipline, improves time management skills and saves the teacher from shouting “your time is up” again and again.

The only thing to be careful about here is to make sure the timing is done appropriately on our part. Sometimes we get the estimations too long or too short. In both cases it has drawbacks. In both cases, our lesson outcomes may suffer by not managing to cover what we had planned or being left with nothing else to cover. It’s best though, to plan more having in mind that we might have a need for a ‘time filler>’.

As for the ‘talk cards’, I have found them extremely useful in avoiding classroom noise and a group of people talking at the same time.

>I have been using green, red and yellow flashcards. The green cards are used when the student wants to say something. They will need to hold it up and get the right to talk. The yellow one is used when they have a question, the red one — when they don’t understand something.