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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Posted February 25, 2013 by Teresa Bestwick in category Miscellaneous

1 thoughts on “Classroom Management Ideas

  1. Pingback: Classroom Management Ideas Views from the Whiteboard | Building a classroom community | Scoop.it

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