Classroom management

Classroom management: classroom discipline

How do we get students to behave in class? Usually not by telling them to

behave, but using behaviour patterns that ensure they behave.

Let me explain. I teach 18 students aged from 11-15 in the one class, some
at varying levels of language ability to others. This means there is not only a
sociological divide but also a language level divide. So how do I get my
students to behave? I use these strategies and they are ones that all
teachers need to try at least once in their classroom to see which ones work
for them.

First ask yourself some questions:

 Have you set a code of behaviour in the classroom?
This should be set with the students where possible so they know the
consequences of their behaviour should it not be socially acceptable to
the rest of the group or to you. I always have this code of behaviour on
the board or on the wall on a big sheet of paper. Five or six key points
are sufficient, e.g. I will work hard to learn the language. I sometimes
just have to point to it to remind students of their decision, and this
brings the student back on line... Also the teacher needs to add his/her
code of behaviour too, what the teacher will do for the students, e.g. be
patient, never yell, I will work hard to help you learn the language...etc.

 Do the students really understand you or are they missing most of

what you are saying?
Very often bad behaviour patterns are because students do not
understand what is being taught to them, and they find no purpose for
the noise coming from the teacher. There is one way to de-motivate
students and that is for them to not understand what is really going on.
Here is a clue to bad behaviour - 75% of bad behaviour is accredited to
academic failure - in other words, they have missed vital clues in the
learning process. Make sure your students are having fun. This does
not mean games where students are over active. Fast moving games are
not necessarily the answer to discipline. In fact they often exacerbate
the problem.
 What type of troublemaker are they?
Attention Seekers - do they show off to get the rest of the class
laughing?

STRATEGY: Ignore minor behaviours but set a limit on what you call a
minor infringement. Be FIRM and CONSISTENT; when behaviour is
good, give attention to that behaviour - e.g. good, well done.

Power seekers - do they want to put one over you all the time?

STRATEGY: Don't argue or fight with the student; remain fair and firm
about the behaviour; as 'the One-Minute Manager' said, catch them out
doing something good.

Revenge seekers - act defiant, e.g. a student who won't move to

another section of the class when you think his or her behaviour is not
acceptable.

STRATEGY: Most of all, don't act hurt - students see that as a

weakness because they have had a reaction; convince the student that
he or she is liked - find the student doing something good and smile at
and commend that good behaviour.

Withdrawn or depressed - gives up easily and then sits in silence.

STRATEGY: Ignore failures, but counsel regularly. When counseling,

always, but always give good news first - e.g. I like what you did here,
then counsel with the bad behaviour. Lastly, finish with some good
news - how the behaviour can be addressed and then arrive at a
solution.

Most of all be FAIR and CONSISTENT.

Now some tips for the Teacher:

 Change students around

I have my badly behaved students sit in the front of the class. This way
I can move towards them more easily, maybe touch them lightly on the
shoulder if they are getting out of hand and pause near them. Make eye
contact as you leave.

 Use soft reprimands - Like the One-Minute Manager

Find time to praise the good work the student does. If the bad
behaviour is minor - ignore whenever possible. Don't yell. Remain silent
until the group settles down. If you have some students on your side,
those who do know what is going on, they will settle the rest of the group
down. Let them be the ones to say 'shush'. Sometimes I simply clap
hands a couple of times and the group comes back on line. Then I
speak softly, not with a loud voice. This has a calming effect on the
whole class.

 Encourage even your worst student

When they are behaving well, catch them doing that. 'Well done'.
'Good work'. It is amazing how soon you get them on-side if they think
you are finding them out doing good work. Try to counsel when you can
and don’t make it always a bad behavioural thing. I often speak to a
student after class and say how well I think they are doing, sometimes
in front of their friends, because it motivates the rest of the group too.

 Never ball out a student out in class

Just at a convenient time, as you are passing the student say you want
to see that student after class - quietly. It is amazing how the behaviour
changes from that moment on. At the meeting, find out the cause of the
behaviour. Explain that it is not helping the student to behave in this
way, and explain the consequences of the behaviour - there is a written
code which all the students agreed to at the beginning of the course - it
should be ever present. And there should be a code of behaviour which
the school has decided on - that persistent behaviour eventually means
expulsion.

 Don't allow yelling at the teacher in class when the student knows
something
Miss, Miss, Miss or Sir, Sir, Sir...and standing up and coming to the
teacher all the time is another disruptive behaviour. It can be VERY
noisy if all the students know the answer and they are yelling at you
and you don't want a rush of students coming to you to show you their
work.

They soon learn the discipline of putting their hand up when a

response is needed or that you will look at their work at an appropriate
time. This makes for a more productive classroom, and students feel
great when they are chosen to answer and you feel better because you
don't have a headache from the noise.

 Move around in the proximity of the student when the behaviour is

persistent
Not in a disciplinary way, rather in the guise of helping them with the
problem they have. Maybe they don't understand. Move towards them,
see if you can help them and then when you have calmed the student,
walk away with a smile and a well done.
 A final message:

 Be INSISTENT
 Be CONSISTENT
 Be PERSISTENT
 But most of all be FAIR
Soon you will get to like your students and enjoy the class with them.

Classroom management: pair and group work in EFL/ ESL

The modern English language teacher is spoilt for choice when it comes to
selecting material for use in class. There are hundreds of excellent course-
books on the market and a wealth of supplementary material. Many of these
books will include interesting and motivating exercises and activities based
on communicative principles. There is little doubt that activities such as
information-gap, questionnaires, interviewing, mingling and so on will work
well in the multilingual classroom where learners from diverse backgrounds
are required to use English as the only means of communication. Such
activities have become commonplace in classrooms in the English-
speaking environment and they are widely used to good effect to promote
fluency and to give contextualized practice of grammatical structures,
functional exponents and items of vocabulary.

However, ESL classes in English-speaking countries represent just a small

percentage of the total amount of English language teaching going on in the
world at a given moment. Most L classes are monolingual and mono-
cultural, i.e., EFL, and this has a considerable effect on the use of pair and
group activities.

Firstly, and most obviously, the lack of a need to communicate in English

means that any communication between learners in that language will seem
artificial and arguably even unnecessary. Secondly, the fact that all the
learners in the class share a common culture (and are often all from the
same age group) will mean that there will often be a total lack of curiosity
about what other class members do or think, thus making questionnaire-
based activities superfluous. Thirdly, there is the paradox that the more
interesting and motivating the activity is (and particularly if it involves a
competitive element of some sort), the more likely the learners are to use the
mother tongue in order to complete the task successfully or to finish first.
Finally, the very fact that more effort is involved to communicate in a foreign
language when the same task may be performed with much less effort in the
mother tongue will also tend to ensure that very little English is used.
Taken as a whole these factors will probably convince many teachers that it
is simply not worth bothering with pair and group work in monolingual
classes at all. This, however, would be to exclude from one’s teaching a
whole range of potentially motivating and useful activities and to deny
learners the opportunity to communicate in English in class time with
anyone but the teacher.

Simple mathematics will tell use that in a one-hour lesson with 20 learners,
each learner will speak for just 90 seconds if the teacher speaks for half the
lesson. In order to encourage learners in a monolingual class to participate
in pair and group work, it might be worth asking them whether they regard
speaking for just 3% of the lesson to be good value and point out that they
can increase that percentage substantially if they try to use English in group
activities. At first learners may find it strange to use English when
communicating with their peers but this is, first and foremost, a question of
habit and it is a gradual process. For the teacher to insist that English is
used may well be counter-productive and may provoke active resistance. If
the task is in English, on the other hand, and learners have to communicate
with each other about the task, some English will inevitably be used. It may
be very little at first but, as with any habit, it should increase noticeably as
time goes by. Indeed, it is not unusual to hear more motivated learners in a
monolingual situation communicating with each other in English outside
the classroom.

If the benefits of using English to perform purposeful communicative tasks

are clearly explained to the class and if the teacher is not excessively
authoritarian in insisting that English be used, a modest and increasing
success rate can be achieved. It is far too much to expect that all learners
will immediately begin using English to communicate with their peers all the
time. But, if at least some of the class use English some of the time that
should be regarded as a significant step on the road to promoting greater
use of English in pair and group work in the monolingual classroom.

Classroom management: speaking correction techniques

Introduction

Everyone makes mistakes, even speakers using their own language when
they are hurried, ‘lost for words’, or forced into inappropriate language by a
difficult or unusual situation. It is hardly surprising, then, that language
learners make mistakes, given the difficulty of the task of comprehending,
processing the content of the message and knowledge of the target language,
and coming out with a response that is both grammatically correct and
appropriate to the situation.
It is generally agreed that correction is part of the teaching/learning
process, but that over-correction and poor correction techniques can be de-
motivating for the learner and may lead to a reluctance to try new language
or even to speak at all. Teachers need to make informed decisions about
what, when and how to correct in order to help learners improve their
speaking skills without damaging their confidence. The following are
important points to consider:

 Mistakes and errors

Errors are produced as a result of the lack or misinterpretation of
knowledge, which, in turn, may be a product of the learner’s stage of
language development, or inadequate teaching or learning. Errors
cannot be corrected and need to be dealt with by teaching or re-
teaching. Errors are often noticed in less-guided practice activities
when the same error is made by a number of learners, leading the
teacher to realize that something has gone wrong in earlier stages of the
teaching/learning process. Mistakes, on the other hand, are products
of the learner’s efforts to produce language despite prior knowledge.
They may be due a variety of factors including over-enthusiasm, over-
generalization of rules, interference from the mother tongue, and once
the cause has been established, can be dealt with by a number of
correction techniques.
 Accuracy and fluency
Mistakes are usually corrected immediately when the aim of the stage
of the lesson is to promote accuracy, particularly during the drilling of
the target language and during guided practice. Attention to mistakes
in these stages improves the chances of correct use of language later,
while mistakes made during less-guided practice often indicate that the
teacher has not dealt effectively with mistakes at the accuracy stage.
When the aim is fluency, however, less intrusive, ‘gentle’ or delayed
correction techniques are required in order not to damage either the
flow of the activity or the confidence of the learners.
 Inter-language
In the process of acquiring the language, a learner may acquire forms
of language that are in between their first language and their target
language. This is their ‘inter-language’, and is a product of incorrect
application of rules, incomplete knowledge, and comparison between
two (or more) languages. Inter-language may seem completely logical
and correct in the mind of the learner and may also be a part of a
natural learning process where rules get more refined as more input is
received. This leads to the belief that mistakes are a healthy part of
language learning and should not be dealt with too severely. However, if
learners are not corrected, mistakes in their inter-language may
‘fossilize’ and become permanent.
 Good learners
Oddly, ‘good’ learners often make more mistakes than others. This
tends to be because they have more confidence, produce more language
and are highly motivated to speak. Good learners are also ‘hypothesis
testers’ in that that they can formulate and try out rules of their own,
and ‘risk takers’ in that they are prepared to ‘have a go’. These learners
need to be encouraged, and are often capable of self-correction.

Teachers need to consider the above, get to know their learners and
their learning background, develop an attitude to correction and be
equipped with a variety of correction techniques which are appropriate
to a variety of learner types and learning situations. Bearing this in
mind, we suggest some activities that teachers might like to try in their
classrooms.

Correction drill

Choose a confident student who will not mind having mistakes

corrected. Explain that you are going to correct him as he speaks, and
that the purpose behind this is not to humiliate, but to help. The
student should speak, e.g. tell a story about himself. You repeat each
sentence. If there are mistakes, you repeat the sentence correctly and
the rest of the class does the same after you. The rationale is 1)
students get to hear how they should sound, 2) the rest of the class is
involved, and they listen to the original and the teacher’s improvement.
3) By using intonation to show interest, approval, disapproval, and
surprise in a light-hearted way, which can be echoed by the class, you
focus on meaning as well as form. Example:

 S1: I stood up late.

 T: Oh you got up late! (disapproving)
 SS: You got up late! (disapproving)
 S1: I got up late, then I eat big breakfast.
 T: You had a big breakfast. (amused)
 SS: You had a big breakfast. (amused) etc.
 S1: Yes, I had a big breakfast then I went at the park.
Teacher’s shadow
Put students in groups for conversation. Choose one student to shadow you
while you walk around, monitoring. When you hear a mistake, correct it and
replace the student who made it with your shadow, so that you have new
shadow. Continue until you have had a number of different shadows.
Shadows can help you listen for mistakes, too. The aims are: to give the
students a teacher’s view of the class, to make students aware of mistakes.
Also it should show it's not only weak students who make mistakes. As we
noted in the introduction, ‘good’ students who speak more and try to use
more complex language make mistakes, so stress that being a shadow is not
a punishment.

Two speaking, one secretary

Getting students to focus on each other’s mistakes can be useful, if done

tactfully and the reasons explained (it is sometimes easier to see other
people’s mistakes other than your own.) While two students speak, a third
makes notes of anything that he or she thinks may be wrong. Afterwards the
three students can discuss it.

Manual chat

Instead of speaking to each other, students quickly pass pieces of paper

back and forward with a written conversation in groups, a bit like chatting
on the Internet. This has the advantage of being similar to spoken
conversation, but leaving a written record that can be analyzed by students
themselves.

Booing and cheering correction

Write six or so sentences on the board, some of which should contain

mistakes. Students locate the mistakes as follows: As you point to each
sentence, get the class to cheer or boo, according to whether they think it is
correct or not. Put a cross next to the sentences the class thinks are
incorrect. Point at these word by word until the mistake is located, again by
booing and cheering.

Conclusion: Turning a blind eye

In the introduction we noted that while correction was necessary to prevent

fossilization, over-correction could be de-motivating. This means that
teachers need to be selective in correction. Some students may notice that
some mistakes are not being corrected. Here’s an activity you can use to
explain this.
Record students’ mistakes and write them on the board, which you divide
into two. Write on the right side if they are serious, i.e. interfere with
communication, and on the left side if they are not. Ask students to help
you decide. When finished, tell students that ‘to turn a blind eye’ means to
ignore something wrong, and this is usually done where to do something
would be worse than to do nothing. The original expression is reputed to
come from Admiral Nelson, who ignored a signal to retreat, by ‘looking’ at it
with his blind eye, and then won the battle. Like battles, speaking a foreign
language is a risky business, and in the interests of encouragement,
mistakes are sometimes overlooked. Ask your students to cover their left
eyes and concentrate on the mistakes on the right.

Classroom management: teaching mixed-ability classes

This is a very common problem. Most, if not all, language classes contain
students of mixed abilities. This happens for a number of reasons, but
mainly because of different learning styles, different learning speeds,
variations in motivation and, very frequently, as a result of logistic
decisions. Very often the teacher is faced with a class with two or more
distinct levels of ability and has to tackle the problem of how to meet the
needs of everyone in the class. Naturally, this is not an easy problem to
solve and it would be wrong to suggest that there are any simple solutions.
A fundamental step, however, is to talk to the class about the situation and
to present it to them as a normal situation and one that the class as a whole
has to deal with. This is probably best done in the mother tongue of the
students. As most of the solutions to the problem depend on cooperation
between the members of the class, it is essential to stress the need for
teamwork and for the class to use English whenever possible in classroom
communication.

The use of pair and group work is essential if you are to involve all the
members of the class. A fundamental technique here is the use of
questionnaires and interviews. By pairing off weaker and stronger students
and involving both in the preparation and implementation of the
questionnaire you should ensure maximum participation of all the students.
You can then get the weaker students to interview the stronger ones and
vice-versa. Of course, this may be frustrating for the stronger ones, but if
they are able to see their role as that of “helper” or even mentor, it may also
have a positive effect.

A second area of activity that can be productive in mixed ability classes is

project work. Again, this can work successfully using mixed groups where
the stronger help the weaker, but another approach is to form groups that
are at approximately the same level and assign different tasks that are
appropriate to the level of each group. By adjusting the complexity of the
task, you can ensure that each group has a task that it can carry out
successfully, thereby providing the correct level of challenge for the higher
level students and not de-motivating the weaker ones.
A third area is that of homework. If you set the whole class the same
homework task irrespective of level, then you will have to expect very mixed
results. As with progress tests, the purpose of homework should be to
consolidate class work. To this end, giving weaker students less demanding
tasks can help both to motivate them and to give them further practice in
areas of the language which they have not yet mastered. Assigning more
challenging tasks to the stronger students in the group should ensure that
they remain motivated and continue to make progress. It is more work for
the teacher but, ultimately, it should produce results.

Choral drilling can be an effective way of involving weaker or shy students. If

applied judiciously (in other words not all the time), it can give excellent
practice in rhythm and intonation, as well as reinforcing word order and
grammatical structure.

Finally, be diplomatic in your questioning techniques. Try to avoid putting

weaker students “on the spot” by nominating them to be the first to answer
a question in open class. Instead, try to encourage a culture of attentive
listening in the classroom so that you ask a stronger student first and then
ask a weaker student to repeat the answer. It may take time but, once this
style of interaction becomes habitual, it can be very productive in terms of
class dynamics.

Classroom management: the role of correction in English teaching

Correction slots: in principle and practice

Introduction A lot of time and effort is spent on training courses and

beyond in encouraging teachers to consider whether immediate or later
correction of student errors during oral work is appropriate. There are a
variety of good methods and techniques suggested for correcting students'
errors on the spot (see references below).

Our aim here is to consider what benefits correction of any kind might have
for learners, as well as to present some ideas for conducting later correction
(correction slots). We have included a sample lesson plan with two of these
ideas incorporated into it.

Why correct learners?

Look at these statements about correction of students' oral work. What do

you think?
 Advanced students need loads of correction, beginners hardly any.
When you start to learn a language you need to be able to communicate
imperfectly in lots of situations, not perfectly in a few. The teacher's job
is to support learners as they blunder through a range of
communicative scenarios, not badger them because they forget the
third person -s. With advanced learners the opposite is usually the
case.
  The jury is out on the question of whether correcting students, however
you do it, has any positive effect on their learning. There is some
evidence, though, that time spent on correcting learners may be
wasted.
Research into Second Language Acquisition has suggested that it may
be that some language forms can be acquired more quickly through
being given special attention while others may be acquired in the
learners' own time, regardless of teacher attention. This helps explain,
for example, why intermediate learners usually omit third person -
s just like beginners, but often form questions with do correctly, unlike
beginners.

 There is little point correcting learners if they don’t have a fairly

immediate opportunity to redo whatever they were doing and get it
right.
Learners need the opportunity for a proper rerun of the communication
scenario in which they made the error, if they are to have any chance of
integrating the correct form into their English. Whether the error was
teacher-corrected, peer-corrected or self-corrected in the first place is of
relatively minor importance.

 Lots of learners and teachers think correction is important.

Is this because it helps them to learn and teach or helps them to feel
like learners and teachers?

 The problem with some learners is they don’t make enough mistakes.
Accurate but minimal contributions in speaking activities are unlikely
to benefit learning as much as inaccurate but extended participation.
Learners can be hampered by their own inhibitions and attitudes to
accuracy and errors, the teacher’s attitude and behaviour (conscious or
unconscious) to accuracy and errors or the restricted nature of the
activities proposed by the teacher.

 Teachers spend too much time focusing on what students do wrong at

the expense of helping them to get things right.
When giving feedback to learners on their performance in speaking
English, the emphasis for the teacher should be to discover what
learners didn’t say and help them say that, rather than pick the bones
out of what they did say. This requires the use of activities which
stretch learners appropriately and the teacher listening to what
learners aren’t saying. That’s difficult.

Large Classes
In today’s world of shrinking budgets for education, and public schools in
particular, larger and larger class sizes seems to be the norm. Therefore,
much of the determination of class size is dependent upon the economic
backing of the institution one find’s themselves teaching for and where they
are geographically employed. Remember, it is not unusual in parts of Africa,
South America, SE Asia and the Middle East it is not unusual for the
normal size of a public school to house 40 to 50 students per class. The
more affluent the school, the smaller the numbers per class typically.

Another key factor for the EFL instructors is the number of preparations
/subjects required as a part of their everyday teaching routine. The more
“preps” the less time you may have to make adaptations to meet the needs
of a large class enrollment. This can be true at a private or public university
setting as well. (Finding out the numbers of the average sizes of the courses
in advance might be something to perhaps consider when negotiating a
teaching contract.)

Large classes present some very distinct problems to the teacher. For the
overwhelmed facilitator, solutions and mitigating these problems is always
the goal along with student involvement and participation.

Some Common Problems with Large Classes

 Student talking and contact time. (Difficult to ensure that each student
gets enough speaking time/STT).
 Classroom management and discipline. (Keeping everyone on task,
limiting disruptive behaviour)
 Mixed ability. It is common to struggle with a huge range of student
abilities
 Resources, materials. Students may need to share resources. Budgets
for material may be limited
 Physical space is limited. Not as many desk/ classroom configurations
possible
 Line of sight. May not be able to easily make eye contact with all
students
 Issues with audio. Not all students may be able to hear in a large noisy
environment
 Checking homework and assessments, tracking and record keeping
duties can be overbearing
 Knowing the students personally and using multiple styles to facilitate
optimal learning.
 Students are unable to follow long winded or detailed instructions,
descriptions and examples

Possible Solutions
 Break the class into groups. This helps with quite a few of the problems
listed above
o Student time is increased by grouping
o Classes are easier to manage because group dynamic
o Students can be grouped by ability to achieve specific goals
o Materials can be shared by group
o It is no longer necessary to communicate with the whole class
simultaneously as the teacher communicates with students on a
per-group basis. Problems with line-of-sight an audio problems are
reduced
o It is easier to remember students personally if they are in groups
settings
 Present instruction in as short and efficient manner as possible with
lots of visual examples and written instructions handed out to the
students individually (Limit Teacher Talk Time/TTT as much as can be
managed)
 Audio problems can be reduced in situations where the whole class
needs to listen to a video/audio piece by using good loudspeakers
 Use attention grabbers. For example, get students to perform in front of
the class in groups. Always seek to have your lesson plans and
materials ready in advance.
 Consider giving the students group topics to choose from; utilize project
based learning, peer mentoring and monitoring as well as leveled and
mixed ability groups accordingly.
 Consider giving each student in the group the same mark. This
encourages focus and teamwork. Alternatively, the teacher can average
the group mark with the personal mark or differentiated assignments.
 Check for completion of homework rather than detailed examination of
each and every exercise when time does not permit. Periodic collection
of notebooks on a scheduled rotating basis may be helpful. Limit
homework for manageability.
 Consider developing a simplified marking system which can be
implemented while the students are working independently (such as
silent sustained reading) or engaged in group work. (A “plus,” “check,”
“minus” or “zero/unexcused incompletion” might make a quicker
notation in a gradebook than a percentage or numeric score for
example.)
 Research what kinds of resources are available for you at your school.
Decide in advance how much of your own personal budget you are
willing to devote toward resources and curriculum necessary to
improving the learning environment in your own classroom or teaching
environment if any.
 Sometimes the struggle to get the materials you really need to be an
effective facilitator from a requisitioning administrator may not be
worth the wait. Conversely, having those items and being able to
control them may enable you to do a much better job and could make
your job so much easier. For some teachers and expensive purchase
such as an LCD projector, laptop, speakers or other AV devices, over
time may pay for themselves in terms of the relative ease and reliability
of presenting information. Audio books, dictionaries, computer
programs, phonics systems etc. Consider the “bang for the buck” and
proceed from there.

Assignment for module 15 – classroom management

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT - narrative explaining the following
concepts of classroom management:
a. Error Correction
b. Mixed-ability Classes
c. Large Classes
d. Discipline