The Components
Being a well trained teacher delivering effective lessons is only half the battle. In order for effective learning to take place, there are all sorts of other factors that can be grouped under the heading – components of classroom management.
The areas are:
o The teacher
o The student
o Teaching techniques
o Discipline
o The Environment
o Natural disasters
o Mixed group management
o Time and Material management
The Teacher
When asked what they like in a teacher this is what some 10 year old students had to say:
“My ideal teacher is Mr. Jolly because I like his music.”
“My ideal teacher is funny and makes you work hard and let me draw things from my imagination.”
“A patient teacher who doesn’t mind children getting things wrong, sometimes. A teacher who enjoys fun and games.”
“Someone who is strict to the naughty ones and nice to the good ones and has always got chalk handy”. (from Teaching English to Children by W.A Scott and L.H Ytreberg)
A teacher manages her class, taking care of her students, taking account the age, ethnicity, and personality of the class as a group, and of oneself as a teacher. It is not an easy job. The attitude of the students over the past few decades have changed dramatically with greater self-confidence in themselves. Increasing incidence of violence to achieve ends; abusive attitudes and an increasing lack of respect for authority have made managing classrooms more difficult, and more demanding. Successful teachers need to be good learners. He / She needs to work on the abilities in order to enhance his/her qualities. There are some basic things that a teacher needs to follow, which make tremendous difference in managing a class.
It is nerve wracking to enter a classroom for the first time and not knowing what to do. Without realizing new teachers often –
Have not figured out what exactly they want and don’t want – a root cause of much of what follows.
Over praise students for doing what is expected.
Don’t know the difference between praise and acknowledgement (يقر)and when each is appropriate.
Fail to do effective long-range and daily planning.
Spend too much time with one student or one group and not monitoring the entire class.
Begin a new activity before gaining the students’ attention.
Talk too fast, and are sometimes shrill.
Use a voice level that is always either too loud or too soft.
Stand too long in one place (the feet of clay syndrome).
Sit too long while teaching.
Overemphasize the negative.
Are way too serious and not much fun.
Are way too much fun and not serious.
Ineffectively use silence (wait time) after asking a content question.
Are ineffective when they use facial expressions and body language.
Tend to talk to and interact with only half the class (usually their favorites, and usually on the right).
Collect and return student papers before assigning students something to do.
Interrupt students while they are on task.
Use “SHHHH” as a means of quieting students (one of the most annoying and ineffective behaviors).
Use threats to control the class (short term, produces results; long term, backfires).
Use global praise inappropriately.
Verbally reprimand students across the classroom (get close and personal if possible).
Interact with only a “chosen few” students rather than spreading interactions around to all students.
Do not intervene quickly enough during inappropriate student behavior.
Do not learn and use student names in an effective way.
Ask global questions that nobody likely will answer.
Fail to do appropriate comprehension checks to see if students understand the content as it is taught.
Use poorly worded, ambiguous questions.
Try to talk over student noise.
Are consistently inconsistent.
Will do anything to be liked by students.
Permit students to be inattentive to an educationally useful media presentation (this happens a lot).
Introduce too many topics simultaneously (usually the result of poor planning).
Take too much time to give verbal directions for an activity (an inability to focus and explain effectively).
Take too much time for an activity (usually the result of poor planning).
Are nervous, uptight, and anxious (if this is persistent, you need help).
Overuse punishment for classroom misbehavior – going to an extreme when other consequences work better.
This is a long but interesting list and the best solution would be to try and avoid doing these but while facing a classroom most often that not even experienced teachers sometime fall prey to some of these mistakes.
Let’s look at some important points that need to be kept in mind by the teacher.
1. Knowing student’s names
Remember how good it felt when your teachers knew your name and even a little about you. Knowing and using student’s names helps keep the class motivated and interested. The students will appreciate being acknowledged for individuals. Though it may be a daunting task to try and remember over a hundred similar sounding names but there are ways. The teacher can learn a few names and then calling on them to call on others, the more this is done the faster the teacher will learn names. Other aids would include name tags, attendance charts with photographs or play the name-game.
2. Rapport
Teaching is people skill. Building rapport goes a long way in making the journey smooth for the teacher. Rapport is the relationship or connection that the teacher establishes with students. A relationship based on trust and respect that leads to students feeling capable, competent and creative. Connecting with the student, being approachable, just letting them know that “I understand” will help teachers build rapport. Whether one is a serious, no nonsense by the book teacher or otherwise will depend on the personality of the teacher. Teaching is subjective and whether one likes it or not the teacher is bound to take his or her personality into the classroom.
3. Voice and Body language
One of the first requirements of good teaching is good voice projection. The teacher does not have to have a loud, booming voice but needs to be heard by all in the room, even the one sitting farthest from the teacher. Teacher’s speech should be well articulated and have a natural flow of the language. Clear articulation is a key to comprehension than slowed speech.
Non verbal communication is very powerful and students attention is drawn to it.
Here are some pointers:
Let the body posture exhibit confidence.
The face should reflect optimism and brightness.
Facial and hand gestures help to interpret meanings of words and sentences.
Frequent eye contact is important but overdoing it can be deemed as aggression.
Slouching, leaning or persistent sitting indicates a lazy uninterested teacher.
It is important to move around in the class and not be fixed to a spot but too much movement is a distraction.
The conventional rules of proxemics (distance) and kinesthetics (touching) pertaining to the culture need to be followed.
4. Position
When giving instructions or teaching it is more effective to stand however when monitoring students who are doing group or pair work sitting with them briefly is useful. A teacher who moves around commands more attention. Remember “a teacher on her feet are worth a hundred on their seats”.
5. Teacher talk
Research shows 50% to 70% of talk time in the classroom is taken up by the teacher. Teachers always have the tendency to overdo the amount of talking and a common student complaint is “my teacher does not give me enough opportunities to speak”. Use of gestures, writing on the board to reinforce will help cut down on teacher talk time. The teacher needs to initiate a topic of discussion and take a back seat to allow maximum student participation.
6. Preparation
Students can spot an unprepared teacher a mile away. It takes a very experienced teacher to walk into a class and teach unprepared and even so it may not be good. Experience shows that a sketchy preparation leads to problems in the class. The teacher needs to spend some time preparing a lesson, planning it, organizing material and mentally going over what needs to be done. If your lesson requires the use of equipment make sure that they are supported by the room and are in optimum working condition.
Sometimes, familiarity with a class can lead to lack of preparation since the teacher falsely believes that he can work something out as the class goes along. Another common diversion from planning, is re-teaching a lesson that has been done with other classes. Whatever the case, there is no doubt that the best classes are preceded by the best lesson plans. This means that the teacher has carefully considered,
1. The context of the lesson in the learner’s terms
2. The objectives of the lesson in student terms
3. What the students will do at each stage
4. How the teacher will facilitate what the students ‘do’
5. The potential problems that might arise at each stage
6. Approximate timing for the lesson activities
7. The sequence of activities in terms of learning and student engagement
8. The amount of material needed to fill the allotted time and offer alternatives
Lesson planning is the first consideration in classroom management since engaged students seldom require “problem management.”
7. Energy level and Moods
Students respond with enthusiasm when they are led by an enthusiastic teacher. You are the ‘energizer rabbit’ in your classroom. The students will be as animated and committed as you appear to them. Do temper your enthusiasm with a level of decorum appropriate to your role as a teacher. Don’t behave in a manner that will offend or discomfort students in the that culture – for example, overly loud voice or sudden actions.
The temperament and energy level of a teacher is easily recognized and reflected by the students. Keep your bad moods and emotions outside the class. Teaching is both mentally and physically demanding. So the teacher needs to be fit and alert. Take adequate rest the night before and have a good breakfast!
8. Attire
Teachers must always look smart and clean and professionally dressed. It shows that the teacher takes her work seriously. A student’s perception of the teacher is affected by the teachers dress and indirectly affects learning. A professional teacher is one who starts by looking professional. While this varies from place to place, in general, teachers are expected to represent conventional and relatively conservative models of behavior and dress. Students have expectations about how their teachers should act and dress. ‘Making a statement’ as a teacher may cost more than it’s worth in terms of credibility and respect, most particularly overseas where the native-speaker may not really understand the student’s expectations.
9. Eye Contact and position
Use eye contact to recognize the presence of everyone in the class, both at the beginning of the class, and during the class so that all the students know that you are interested in what they are doing.
• Obviously, your eye contact must be friendly and brief enough not to embarrass. This is particularly important in some countries.
• Eye contact is a way to keep in touch with other students in the class when you are addressing an individual, or a group.
• You should combine eye contact with position in the classroom by standing close to some students while using eye contact to maintain contact with others.
• Changing your position helps you to check on everybody in the class, and makes sure you don’t ignore someone.
• Remember, getting close to someone:
1. Doesn’t mean you must ‘confront’ them (demo), and
2. Can be an effective way to “reign in” students whose attention has wandered.
10. Gestures
Most effective teachers have developed a set of classroom gestures to indicate what they want students to do. These gestures are often more effective than voice directions, and at least reinforce voice directions. Unnecessary teacher talk and directions actually tends to raise classroom ‘hubbub’ and ‘clutters’ the atmosphere with unneeded noise.
Some typical gestures are:
• Listen – hand cupped behind the ear
• Repeat in chorus – sweep of the hands like an orchestra director
• Stand up – raising the hands palms upward
• Sit down – motioning downwards with the palms down
• Get into pairs – hand or finger movements to show getting together
• Stop – clap or time out sign
• Good – thumbs up or smile and nod (Watch out for…!)
• Not right – facial expression, plus shake of head or finger
• Nearly right – outstretched hand rocked side to side or thumb and fore finger lightly apart
• Interesting idea – raised eyebrows and nod
• Eliciting – beckoning with the cupped hand
• Say again – circling motion with hand to one student
• Missing word – “fingers” – one finger for each word indicating that one word is missing
Remember, when you meet a class for the first few times they will be unaccustomed to you and your gestures. You will have to reinforce your gestures with spoken directions, and there may be some initial hesitancy or confusion.
Multi Tasker
Rebecca Oxford et al. (1998) pointed out that the role of a teacher is often best described in the form of a metaphor: teacher as manufacturer, as doctor, as judge, as gardener and others.
The teacher is first and foremost a controller. There has to be some amount of control over important elements in successfully carrying out a lesson. As a controller the teacher will carefully project how a technique will proceed, map out the input to students, specify directions and gauge the timing etc.
The teacher is also like a conductor of an orchestra or the director of a drama. It is her job to keep the process flowing smoothly and efficiently.
The teacher as a manager, plans lessons and modules and structures larger and longer segments of classroom time.
The teacher as a facilitator is responsible for facilitating the process of learning and helping in making learning easier and enjoyable.
Apart from these roles the teacher is also a friend, a confidante, a parent and time s a counselor. Depending on the location of the school some of these roles will be more prominent than others especially in the eyes of the students. For growing comfortable and confident in playing multiple roles, two rules are very important. 1. A willingness to accept that students will perceive you in many ways and 2. Ability to maintain a consistent fairness to all students equally.
Assignment
Rate yourself on the continua of teacher styles below:
Teaching Styles: (Courtesy Teaching by Principles by H. Douglas Brown)
Shy A B C D E Gregarious
Formal A B C D E Informal
Reserved A B C D E Transparent
Understated A B C D E Dramatic
Rational A B C D E Emotional
Steady A B C D E Moody
Serious A B C D E Humorous
Restrictive A B C D E Permissive
Check one box for each pair of adjective. Boxes A and E indicate that the adjective is very like you. Boxes B and D indicate that the adjective somewhat describes you, while Box C indicates that you have no inclination one way or another.
Now, answer the following questions:
Do you feel that you need to change some of those natural styles when you enter the classroom? If not, why do you feel your present styles are adequate? Are there any tendencies that might work against you? What should you do to prevent such a problem?
The Student
Most of a teacher’s classroom management skills involve managing the students. Their needs, expectations and welfare are primary concerns of the teacher. With reference to Joan Rubin and Irene Thompson, we get a sense of what good students show signs of.
They take charge of their own learning, organize information, are creative, make their own opportunities, learn to live with uncertainties, make errors work for them and not against them, learn to make intelligent guesses.
However these traits are not based on empirical findings and do not assume that all good students will exhibit all these characteristics. We, teachers need to be relieved that the onus of learning is on the learner otherwise it would be a great burden to carry. Teachers only help or facilitate the process of learning, while the student will learn when he is ready to do so.
Knowing Teacher
The amount of personal information you are willing to give your students depends on you. However it is reassuring to students to know that the teacher is willing to listen to their side of the story too.
Rapport with each other
Apart from building rapport with the students the teacher must ensure a healthy team spirit amongst themselves. By helping creating the environment through group work, pair work and whole class activity will help in the process. The teacher should never show favoritism as this will lead to contempt. The teacher needs to encourage more collaborative work rather than competitive work.
Student’s Body Language
The students are a clear indication of how the teacher is teaching. Their facial expressions and body language determine their attention level, motivation and interest. Experienced teachers are good face readers. They can gauge with students are listening or comprehending and which students have mentally switched off but still looking at the teacher. However do not let their energy or mood affect you, keep an upbeat and cheerful manner always.
Assignment
In your own words describe ‘energy’ in the classroom. Observe or think of a class and see if you can identify things that the teacher or the students do that make you feel that the class is energized. Share your observations.
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