February
25
Classroom Management Ideas
My diary gets filled up with bits of paper – notes from meetings, from development sessions, random scraps with names and telephone numbers on, and so on! In a bid to tidy up my diary a little, I’m going to type up some notes from an input session we had at work…one less piece of paper to carry around.
It was a session on dealing with large classes, but a lot of the ideas which came out would work with any class. Here are a few…
- Engage the whole class at the start of the lesson, with a drill or something similar. My colleague Ceri Jones has a great activity in which she divides the class into two teams, A and B. She says a question and then says either A or B. If she says A, team A repeat the question and B answer. It encourages everyone to listen as they need to know what the question was and which team is going to ask it.
- Think about how you can address the group rather than the individual – if you have a class of fifteen students and want to spend a minute with each one, what are your other students doing for the fourteen minutes when your attention isn’t focussed on them?
- Do you have an effective points sytem? Is it based on the individual, a team or the whole class?
- What role do fast-finishers have? We often use those quick students as helpers and correctors, but do they know how to do this effectively?
- Think about the level of noise in the classroom. Michael Linsin suggests a scale so everyone knows what’s expected of them at any one time.
- Finally, think about the things you do on a daily basis and whether they could be done more effectively. For example, writing the students’ names on the board takes time at the start of every lesson – could you have them pre-prepared on paper, or ask a student to do it?
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