Last month I travelled to Turkey, visiting five different cities for the start of the new school year. One of my workshops was on Classroom Management, and I thought I’d share with you some of the tips and ideas we discussed.
1. Interaction patterns
It’s important to keep your lessons varied, to keep students engaged and on their toes. I’m sure you already break up the whole-class plenary part of your lesson with individual, pair, and group work, but why not try something as simple as sitting down for part of the plenary, and standing for another? You could also add ‘mingles/mixers’ when all the students get up and go around to ‘Find Someone Who…’ or conduct a ‘Class Survey’.
2. Teacher language
Of course, you’ll need to adjust your language level according to the level of your group. However, make sure that this doesn’t result in you losing the humour and small talk that are as important in classroom life as they are in real life. Just make sure that it’s appropriate ‘caretaker’ talk and ‘comprehensible input’, as Krashen terms it.
3. Organising pair work
For pair work, of course there’s so much more that you can do than just always say ‘turn to the person next to you’ or ‘behind you’. You can have the students get up and find the person in the class whose birthday is closest to theirs, or who got up or went to bed at the same time as they did, or who is wearing a similar colour shirt or blouse, and then have them sit down and work with that person. That should get students communicating with each other before the formal activity has even begun, and will mix things up a bit too.
If you have an odd number of students, you could participate with the extra student—but it’s probably better to have one ‘threesome’ and perhaps put one of your best students with a weaker pair to help them.
4. Organising group work
Group work can be organized in a similar manner as above (the three or four students with the nearest birthdays etc.) or randomly by counting off ‘1,2,3’ or ‘A, B, C, D’. If it’s appropriate for your teaching situation, you can use playing cards: take the number of cards from the deck that you need for the size of your class and have each student ‘pick a card, any card’ and then have all the kings, queens, aces etc. work together. You can then reform groups in a pyramid activity by having the students get together in different groups according to the suit of their cards, i.e. hearts, diamonds etc.
5. Giving instructions – the rule of three
You do have to be careful, of course, when giving instructions. I like the ‘rule of three’: First, the teacher gives the instructions, then a student paraphrases those instructions in his/her own words (if you have a monolingual class, it could be in the students’ ‘own’ language—if that’s acceptable in your teaching situation); finally, the teacher gives the instructions again. That’s ‘Third time lucky’ if you’re speaking British English; in the US, we say ‘Third time’s the charm’.
6. Monitoring
And of course, while the class is involved with pair or group work you won’t be taking a break – not for very long, anyway! – but rather monitoring in order to notice and note not only their learning but also their motivation, interest and interaction. You might either be moving around the room to support pairs or groups as needed or perhaps sometimes sitting down with one of the pairs or groups and participating with them for a while.
For more tips on successful evaluation techniques, and how to incorporate informal evaluation into learning oriented assessment, why not watch the recording of Craig Thaine’s recent webinar?