What is Classroom Management?
Classroom management refers to the policies, procedures, and practices that teachers use to ensure that their classrooms are safe, orderly, and conducive to learning. A well-managed classroom is one in which students feel safe and secure, where they can engage with their teachers and peers without fear of physical harm or psychological distress.
In order for a teacher to improve classroom management, she needs to first assess what factors are contributing to misbehavior. Does the student have trouble seeing things from another person's perspective? Is he easily distracted by outside stimuli? Does he lack self-regulation skills? Once you've identified these issues, you can start looking at ways that you can help your student develop those skills and make them more effective learners in your classroom environment.
There are many classroom management skills a teacher can use to maintain a productive, safe learning environment for students.
Some of the most important ones include:
- Establishing clear rules and expectations for students about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior.
- Communicating with students about how to follow these rules and expectations.
- Giving frequent praise when students follow these rules and expectations.
- Implementing consequences for when students don’t follow them (e.g., detention).
What are other techniques for classroom management?
Role Playing
A good way to do this is through role playing—you can pretend that you're the student who's having trouble staying focused, or walking around during class time (if they tend toward physical activity), or keeping up with their work without being prompted by an adult all the time (if they tend toward mental underachievement). Acting out these scenarios will help
Humor
A sense of humor is sometimes helpful with difficult students. The ability to laugh off certain situations and still maintain control of your class can be powerful for maintaining order. It is important that a teacher never make fun of a student while attempting to diffuse a situation with humor.
Group Responsibility
Creating groups of shared responsibility can help students to see how their actions affect others. The resulting social pressures can help a student reform their actions before escalating to serious disruption. For this to work, it is important that the group responsibility not be too large or the punishment too harsh as to create excess negative consequences for the poor acting student.
