Classroom Management and General Tips
1. Arrange the seatings to help
The seating rearrangement could be helpful for teachers, especially in language classroom. No matter how you rearrange the seating, you have to bear this point in mind: the seating should suggest that the students are encouraged to talk to each other and at the same time the seating should allow for the removal of teacher from a central, dominant role.
2. Stand up when you’re directing activity
This one means we must know when we have to sit as well as when we have to stand up. We could sit when the students are doing something that does not involve us and when we have a conversation or a discussion with the class. For most activities in the classroom it is important that the students could see you, and this will be easier to be done when you are standing. Standing also means that you can see all the students cleary and can use your eyes and hands effectively.
3. Look at the students
Eye contact plays an important role in our teaching. With our eye contact we could know what happens with our students, especially when they are confused, long before they tell us that. We could also help the students to concentrate by looking all over the class. The point is with looking to your students, we have built and we have reinforced the contact with our students.
4. Use your hands to encourage and direct students
There are three main ways of showing student what you want – your voice, your eyes, and your hands. There are two reasons why you have to use your hands – to avoid unnecessary language which can distract students and to increase who is going to answer the question or which pair of students should read the dialogue. This gesture could indicate that something is wrong (by holding up one hand and shaking it from side to side) or to repeat something (by doing a circular “rolling” motion with one hand). You could also indicate what is required from individual students or even from the whole class.
5. Use the back of your hand to point
This gesture is less intimidating and conveys an invitation rather than a direction. If you point in conventional ways, it would be aggressive and inhibit the students.
6. Use pauses to punctuate what you say
If we read without punctuation, it will be very hard for our students to understand what we say, whereas the written text (the one that we read) have punctuation marks. One of the main ways to provide this “spoken punctuation” is to make very short pauses before each change in the use of language from, for example, instruction to example. These pauses are an important feature of the way the teacher uses language in the classroom.
7. Vary your voice
Vary your voice means you have to mark the changes in why you are speaking. Pauses, stress, and changes of pitch when you change from, for example, comment to instruction, is important because by doing that the students will be easier in following what we say.
8. Keep your language to a minimum when students are doing something
Unnecessary language could distract your students’ concentration, so you need to keep you language at a minimum level. There are several important implication for this point:
a. Do not interrupt students unnecesarrily while they are preparing something.
b. Do not dominate discussion yourself.
c. Do not tell students what they want to say.
d. Do not use more language than is necessary to direct and control classroom activity.
We can use our eyes as well as our hands to reduce the amounts of unnecessary language. Sometimes we need verbal lamguage and there is a simple secret about this verbal language – the verbal instruction are given using the imperative. This automatically avoid unnecessary language. The combination of gesture and the imperative ensures both clarity and a brisk lively pace.
9. Don’t commentate
It is essential to involve students in the learning process and discussion of classroom activities. Unfortunately, students never know whether what you are saying is important or not. Any commentary you give should be of help the students and not used either to reassure yourself or simply to fill up silence.
10. Don’t be afraid of silence
Silence is also important in a language classroom. With silence, we allow our students to think, collect their thoughts, take notes etc. Silence is particularly desirable:
a. When students are doing something individually.
b. An individual is hesitating when during an exercise or looking for a word.
c. In discussion the student sometimes needs time to formulate a thought and, most important of all, if the teacher is constantly injecting ideas, students will soon sit back and expect the teacher to do the work.
d. If something hectic has been happening: there is to be change of activity, or students need, for example, to get a new book.
11. Don’t be afraid of noises
A quiet class is not always a good class, especially for language one. In language class, the aim is to increase the students talk time. It means that anyone who is making a serious effort to teach oral English must be regularly usring choral work, pair work, and group work. So if 30 students speak altogether in the same time, there will be a lot of noise. That is fine, because there is more constructive activity going on. Additionally, thenoise does not mean disorder or that time is being wasted.
12. Using pairwork to increase student talking time – even if it seems chaos
Like I have stated above, the aim of language classroom is to increase the students talk time. Well-organised pair work is one of the most important ways to achieve this. In order to be well-organised, the teacher should give clear and explicit instruction. The teachers should also move around the class monitoring and also guiding and correcting what individual pairs are doing.
In order to make your pair work more effectively, you could do several things below:
a. Divide the group into pairs yourself and make sure that all students know who are they working with and which role they are to take.
b. Make sure everyone is clear about what they are meant to be doing.
c. Go round, listen, and check that they are doing it.
d. Stop the activity when it is clear that everyone is finished. Pair work is not an excuse for the teacher to sit back.
e. Follow up the pair work with a demonstration or summary from one or more pairs. If it is not well done, correct and provide help and then ask students to do the same practice again.
f. Make a habit of it.
13. Use group work to increase student talking time
Group work would increase the student talking time. The more the students talk, the less the teacher talks and therefore they will help each other and the atmosphere is more relaxed and conducive to good language learning. To make the group work well organized, the teacher should make the task clear as well as who is working with whom and for how long. Appoint a secretary – the one who takes note or writes answer to report back to the group – could be a good idea. But remember, it should be followed by a general class activity when the results are reported and the teacher gives comment to it.
14. Be explicit
This deals with the classroom instructions and explanation. The instructions should be simple, precise, and explicit; regarding to the fact that this is the teacher duty to structure the classroom activities. In doing these, the teachers should give explanation in order to make clear the instructions. The more explicit the instruction, the easier it is for students to concentrate on the content rather than the organization of the activities.
15. Don’t ask, “Do you understand?”
This question is a sign of laziness in the part of the teacher or something teachers say while thinking of what they really want to say. Students are very rare in admitting this for some reasons, like to avoid being appeared in a slow pace. We could avoid this by doing the regular eye contact, since their eyes could not tell a lie to us. If anybody has not understood yet, it will be immediately apparent. It is then the teacher’s job to anticipate difficulties and misunderstandings, and to make it as easy as possible for the students to show their difficulties without embarrassment.
16. Don’t go ‘round the class’ if individuals can prepare particular examples
Sometimes in doing the class practice, such from those of the grammar textbook practice, we tend to follow the class pattern. In such pattern, the students could prepare their examples in advance, but they tend to not listen to others’ examples. To avoid this, we could pick individuals randomly in order to make them listen to their friends’ examples. In addition, this guiding principle could be of help:
If the student is more likely to be able to ‘switch off’ if you follow a pattern, then you choose individuals to answer. If the emphasis is on speed and students will remain involved because of the pace, it is often more efficient to do those things in an “obvious” way.
17. Admit your ignorance
English is a huge subject. No matter how hard and how long you have studied it; still there are any possibilities for unsolved questions or problems. Sometimes, those questions or problems bother us so much that we could not fall asleep. Well, the solution for this is straightforward – admit that you do not know, consult a colleague or look the answer up, and make sure that if you say you will tell the students in the next lesson, you do actually say something about the problem – even if you can’t find the answer.
The worst thing to do is to give an ad hoc explanation that later turn out to be untrue. The best thing to do, in this as so many in other things, is to take the students into your confidence – do your best to help them, but if there are occasions when you cannot, make that, and the reasons for it, clear to them.
18. Consult colleagues
One of the quickest and easiest ways of finding the answer to a question you cannot answer is to ask someone else, especially those who have a lot of experiences more than us. We could also refer to self-help groups instead of our friends or colleagues. Because of the varied background of their participants, a combination of the insights of the several group members can often produce a solution which no individual member would produce alone. There is a saying: A trouble shared, is a trouble halved; it is as true for the language teachers as for nobody else.
19. Consult students
Consult students are done in order to know whether we have conducted the teaching in the proper manner or not. By consulting the students, we could also learn whether they have understood the materials or not. We could consult them by asking some questions, for example:
Did you particularly enjoy today’s lesson? Why / Why not? What activities in your English lessons do you particularly like/dislike? What activities do you think when we spend too much/too little time on in English classes?
But remember, there is a danger in consulting the students too frequently, so that they feel the process of language learning is more important the learning itself. Providing, however, that you take the students’ comments seriously and do not do it too frequently, consulting students can have a very beneficial effect on the general atmosphere of your class, and sometime reveal concrete ways in which your classes can be made more enjoyable or more effective for that particular group of students.
20. Demonstrate, rather than explain, new activities
In conducting the new activities, it is right to give explanation so that the students could understand what do you want. But sometimes the explanation itself could cause the confusion among students. That’s why you have to demonstrate the new activities so that the students will understand what do you want and the teaching will run effectively.
21. Exploit real events
Most of the teachers set up situations where the language is being used so they forget the real events; whereas the language should be used in the real events. This is the essential things that the teacher mostly forget. Use the natural language (natural language is the one that always being used in the real events) in your classroom while teaching, for example when you sneeze say “Excuse me”, when you are late say “Sorry, I’m late . . .”, and so on. Some of the most lively and natural language use can be stimulated by asking students about what they already know, and are interested in.
22. Divide the blackboard
The aim of dividing the blackboard is to help the students read the materials being presented. The ideal division, especially for the larger boards, should divide the blackboard into three parts – two smaller side panels and a larger central area. Below is the explanation of the divisions:
a. One side panel is used for listing new words and phrases; not cleaned during the lesson.
b. The other panel is used for doodles, drawings, unexpected odds, and ends etc; may be cleaned constantly.
c. A larger central section is used to present the main material of the lesson – grammatical examples, examples for exercises, etc; this may also be cleaned as required.
23. Use the overhead projector to control what students see
The advantages of using the overhead projector is:
a. It is easier to write on transparency than on the blackboard; the transparencies can be prepared in advance.
b. Important transparencies can be re-used, with different classes, or from day-to-day with the same class; the teacher can build up a file of transparencies giving frequently needed exercises and clear, well-prepared examples for the most common grammar points.
But remember, it is extremely annoying to be asked to look at a projected transparency where the text is too small for you to read. So, check what size of handwriting you need to use to make sure it is visible to every student in the room.
24. Machinery will not solve all of your problems
Nowadays there are so many teaching aids that could help us improving our teaching. But we should remember that those aids are designed to help us, not to solve our problems. You have to solve the problems by yourself, since teaching is a personal activity and anything that obscures that needs to be treated with the greatest caution.
25. Expand, don’t clutter
Finally, the last point of all. In teaching, we must not to be too rigid. We are teaching, not reading the materials from the book to the students. We should give a space for improvisation; we should expand the materials we teach. Remember, students learn best when they are relaxed: similarly teacher teach best when they are prepared and alert but equally are also relaxed.
