Marmara Elt Resources

5 Classroom Management Tips To Silence A Noisy Class
(By Rob Johnson)

1. The first thing to remember is that you are the boss.

Self belief is incredibly important in this job. You can’t expect pupils to respond positively to you unless you believe, really believe, that you fully deserve their respect and compliance. The thought that you are the leader in the classroom must be at the forefront of your mind.

If you give any sign at all that you are NOT in FULL CONTROL, children will sense this and exploit your weaknesses. You MUST project strength and the impression that you will not tolerate any disobedience.

All too often a teacher will enter a lesson filled with dread and give out the signal that they are beaten before the lesson even starts. Pupils sense this. If you’ve been having a hard time with a particular group they will come to expect that you will be a walk-over and get into the habit of talking freely with total disregard for your threats.
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Some Tips For Classroom Management
● Take control of where the kids sit. Even if you don’t allocate the exact seats, get each student simply to sit in a different seat from the one they had in the last class.
● Keep desktop clutter to a minimum – provide pencils/paper, etc yourself.
● If you want the kids to move around, give clear instructions, including a quick diagram on the board even, before they start moving.
● Divide the lesson into ‘circle time’ for presentations, games, recycling, etc, and ‘table time’ for book-based work.
● A non-verbal signal to be quiet is better than a loud noise or raising your voice – don’t get into a competition with them!
● The fewer and simpler the rules, the better.
● Positive reinforcement is better than negative commands: try asking noisy students to do something specific or answer a question rather than saying Stop …!
● Remove misbehaving students from their audience (the rest of the class). Put them just outside the door, in the back of a colleague’s classroom, in the corner out of the sight line of the other students, etc.

Team Teaching Tips for Foreign Language Teachers (by Rebecca Benoit and Bridget Haugh )

Introduction
This article seeks to provide team teachers with specific tips on how to function effectively as equal partners working together in the same classroom. These step-by-step tips are a basic guide to help you establish a dynamic team so you can experiment and find the approach that works best for you. For teachers who have never had a chance to team teach, or have perhaps avoided doing it for a variety of reasons, perhaps this article will help allay fears and give teachers a sense of what exactly team teaching ‘looks like’ within the class.

From our work team teaching with one another and others in a variety of contexts (elementary, high school, junior high school, and international schools) in Canada, Mexico and Japan, we’ve had the chance to experience everything from wonderful to disastrous team teaching relationships. Based on these experiences, we have assembled a brief series of tips to help you and your classroom partner.
Background Literature
Team teaching, in the most general sense, encompasses a wide variety of arrangements. One specific form, which has become quite prevalent in recent years, is having two teachers in the classroom teaching simultaneously. This is becoming more and more common throughout Japan and in other Asian countries. Each year on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme alone, nearly 6,000 Assistant Language Teachers (ALT) come to Japan to assist Japanese Language Teachers (JLT) in foreign language classrooms (Horwich par. 22). Recently, Hong Kong launched a programme similar to JET called the Native-speaking English Teachers Programme (NET) Programme that also employs team teaching.
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Natural Consequences to Control Behavior Are More Effective
Punishment encourages minimum behaviors-just enough to avoid punishments. Extrinsic forces work only if the outside force is present.
Punitive Schools
Visitors sense the atmosphere in a school within minutes. The students are friendly and smiling or snarling and angry. Bullying may be rampant or rare. Graffiti is absent or quite visible. There are many signs that reveal the tone in a building.

When punishment is the dominant strategy, tension is everywhere. Both teachers and students are tense. Students are tense looking over their shoulder and teachers are tense trying to be everywhere to enforce rules.
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