How to Improve Your Classroom Management: A Beginner's Guide
Classroom management is key to being a successful teacher and creating a safe environment for learning. Read on for tips to start implementing in your classroom!
Classroom management is the ability to maintain a functioning classroom and engage your students in a way that is conducive to learning. Whether you're teaching English abroad in Spain, Thailand, or online, having strong classroom management skills is integral to being a successful teacher.
Read on to learn how to improve your classroom management skills and foster the perfect learning atmosphere!
1. Establish authority and expectations early on
Even though your favorite teacher may have been friendly, patient, and encouraging, they likely weren’t a pushover. It’s difficult to foster an engaging classroom environment if the teacher is too lenient with students, rules, or deadlines. This is why it’s important for teachers to establish their classroom rules early on and consistently enforce them throughout the academic term.
As a first-time teacher, it’s helpful to start out a bit stricter than you might typically be. By establishing simple rules like “sit down, be quiet, and listen while the teacher speaks,” you set a precedent that helps students associate your presence with authority and respect. Over time you can gradually ease up, and create a more relaxed environment for learning.
It’s also important to remember that having a set of rules to encourage positive and constructive behavior doesn’t mean that your lessons need to be dull and devoid of games or personalization! At the end of the day, you want to create a respectful, structured, and supportive environment for your students to learn!
2. Get to know your students
While teachers need to maintain professional boundaries between their students, that doesn’t mean they can’t be friendly or get to know them. Strong personal relationships with your students can form the backbone of a well-run classroom.
Put yourself in the perspective of a student. It makes sense that they’re more motivated and driven to learn from a teacher who’s encouraging, supportive, and influential in their learning journey.
On the other hand, you’d be far less motivated with a teacher who doesn’t recognize your qualities, lacks interest in your academic development, and even struggles to remember your name.
When students feel valued and cared for, they’re more likely to respect you and be excited to learn!
While teaching abroad, it can be hard to remember student names, especially when they’re harder to pronounce or are unfamiliar to us. Simple things such as reading the attendance sheet at the start of class or organizing introduction activities can help boost your memory.
3. Personalize your lessons
Once you get to know your students, you can personalize your lessons. If you’re using games or videos to help facilitate learning, try your best to use something relatable or familiar that will engage the class. This can even make learning basic things like grammar, more fun!
Whether you’re using a Disney movie or a K-pop song to reinforce a grammar point, personalizing your lessons can make the most mundane of topics engaging. There’s a wealth of videos on YouTube using popular movies and TV clips to demonstrate target language points. Instead of having students complete a dialogue task with John and Jane, make it Spiderman and Batman, or Jon Snow and Daenerys, for example!
4. Prepare lessons in advance
As Taylor Swift sang in her song “Mastermind”, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.
To have a high-functioning classroom, preparing lessons in advance is essential, and you only get back what you put in. This is especially the case for beginner teachers who are still familiarizing themselves with their students’ varying levels and learning styles.
There are plenty of resources online that will help you with the basics of lesson planning. Veteran teachers at your school are also a great resource for inspiration, and you can run through your lesson plan with them to get a second opinion.
The more teaching experience you have, the more you’ll be able to wing it in the classroom. However, if you’re a first-time teacher or starting out at a new school, consider following these tips to help you get in the swing of crafting lesson plans:
- Come prepared and organized
- Arrive a few minutes early to prepare your lesson materials
- Ensure that your lesson caters to multiple learning styles
- Use a quick “warmer” activity to engage your students while introducing the topic
- Review the lesson at the end to summarize key concepts
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5. Appeal to different learning styles
You shouldn’t adopt a “one size fits all” method in the classroom. Not only will your students’ skill levels vary, but their learning styles too!
It’s important that we - as teachers - shake off the natural tendency to organize activities that only cater to our learning styles. and activities. In your classroom, you’ll have students who thrive off different activities, so aim to incorporate a range of tasks that cater to a variety of learning styles.
These learning styles of students include:
- Tactile & Kinaesthetic: These learners benefit from activities that include movement and their sense of touch. These students will particularly benefit from hands-on activities such as acting things out or doing crafts.
- Visual: Visual learners benefit from seeing visual aids in order to retain information. To support visual learners, try incorporating charts, infographics, posters, flashcards, graphs, videos, and more in your lessons.
- Auditory: Auditory learners process information best when they are listening to examples or instructions. You don’t want to turn the classroom into a lecture, so be sure to use dialogue, songs, group discussions, and more to facilitate learning.
- Reading & writing: Although this is typically the bread and butter of the classroom, this isn’t everyone’s most effective learning style. These students enjoy taking notes and are detail-oriented. In addition to traditional reading and writing activities, students can play games such as Bingo or Stop the Bus using key vocabulary words to foster learning.
6. Incentivize learning & positive reinforcement
One of the most powerful rewards a student can receive is praise from their teacher. After all, as a teacher and role model, you’re the gatekeeper to knowledge! However, this comes with a caveat; praise needs to be earned, it needs to be honest, and it needs to be specific.
When delivering praise, name your students and highlight specific examples of positive behavior. Instead of saying “great job,” explain exactly what they did right. This will encourage other students to receive similar praise.
You can also consider using a positive reward system, such as stickers or fun-shaped erasers, that students can work towards by earning points for good behavior. In Vietnam, for example, schools are known for dividing classrooms into four teams and using a star system. Stars are rewarded for answering questions and winning games - but deducted for poor behavior. The team with the most stars at the end of the lesson wins a prize such as stickers, stamps, or other things.
A recent study showed that the praise of effort - rather than results - is more effective in sustaining long-term positive behavior and work ethic.
The study compared a group of students who were rewarded for effort, and the other for results. It showed that being rewarded for effort only increases and sustains motivation levels, whereas being rewarded for results can make students complacent, and in fact, lead to a reduction of effort and inevitably - results. Not all students are the same, so make sure that you praise effort as much as - if not, more - than results!
7. Emphasize body language
There’s no better way to learn a new language than by combining spoken and physical communication. Enter total physical response (TPR)!
Communication is significantly made up of body language. Total physical response - or TPR - goes hand in hand with learning English as a second language because it can help students associate the words they’re learning with actions and body movements they are familiar with.
ESL teachers won’t always have the support of a native co-teacher to translate things in the classroom, as some schools want students to be fully immersed in English and not rely on translation. Body language is universal and can help students not only learn English but also engage with your lessons. It can help them understand if they should ask or answer a question, and how to respond to dialogue cues.
Instead of just having students repeat “I like basketball”, consider pointing at yourself (“I”), using thumbs up (“like”), and mimicking throwing (“basketball”). When asking a question, point at the student, put your hands outwards, pull a confused face, and use intonation!
Video courtesy of ESC Region 13
8. Seek support and advice from colleagues
Although you’re a teacher, always remain a student! Teachers can learn a lot from their colleagues, which can lead to better classroom management and student performance.
As a new teacher abroad, following the lead of seasoned, well-respected teachers at your school can go a long way. Many programs abroad will pair you up with a seasoned teacher at your school. If this isn’t the case, seek out the seasoned veterans and be sure to ask them for advice.
If a fellow teacher has already set certain routines in place in your classroom, continuing these routines can maintain momentum and avoid disrupting learning methods.
Keep in mind that cultures vary in different regions of the world, so your perception of the “right” way to do things may not always be right. For example, being late to class isn’t as frowned upon in Thailand as in the US or the UK, and applying similar levels of punishment could be viewed as extreme. Again, learning from co-teachers at school will help you navigate cultural differences as they arise or become apparent.
9. Plan hands-on activities to keep students engaged
Learning isn’t just about listening, reading, and writing. The more engaging you can make your lessons, the more likely your students will be to listen to your instruction and exhibit behaviors that lead to focused learning.
You should use a range of interactive activities to grasp the student’s attention. By essentially disguising lesson objectives and target language points through interactive ESL games, your students are learning without even realizing it.
Another way to make lessons more engaging is to make them hands-on. This will be an especially helpful tool with younger students as they have shorter attention spans.
Students are more apt to learn when they feel they can interact with the material you are trying to teach them. Seek out ways to incorporate hands-on activities into your lessons. When students are asked to engage physically, they will be more focused on participating in the activity, minimizing their opportunities to goof off or distract other students.
However, each classroom is different, and one activity which is a home run in one class may fall flat in another. Prepare some back-up activities or variations to anticipate an underwhelming reception from students.
10. Be patient with students & minimize reprimanding
It may seem that to have a well-run classroom you will need to be a strong disciplinarian. However, in the most well-run classrooms reprimanding is kept to a minimum. Specific, timely praise is a more effective tool in the long run.
It’s a given that you’ll face disruptive students as a teacher. Even the best of students can be disruptive from time to time depending on many factors.
However, disruptive, distracted, or underperforming students will respond negatively to reprimanding. Instead, be patient and consider external factors affecting their behavior. They may face personal problems at home, the lesson may not cater to their learning style, and more often than not, students simply crave attention and become disruptive as a result.
Instead of punishing disruptive students, consider giving them a role within the classroom that can facilitate the lesson. Whether you involve them through demonstrating examples, writing on the board, completing activities, or else, giving them responsibility within the classroom can positively influence their behavior.
Manage your classroom with ease
Being a teacher can be tiring and difficult, but it can also be highly rewarding, especially if you put in the effort. Developing classroom management skills to create a healthy and proactive learning atmosphere will benefit your teaching career and also the development of your students. Whether you teach abroad, or online, practicing classroom management will help you create the best learning experience for your students.
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