classroom management

Key Terms

• Classroom management
• Teacher as an effective classroom manager
• Authoritarian leadership style
• Democratic leadership style
• Laissez-faire leadership approach
• Mandated time
• Allocated time
• Instructional time
• Engaged time or time on-task
• Academic learning time
• Communication
• Rules and procedures
• Disciplinary problem
• Disciplinary plan

1. Classroom management : 

Actions and strategies used to maintain order in the classroom

2. Teacher as an effective manager: 

able to get students’ cooperation, maintain their involvement in instructional tasks, and carry out the business of classroom smoothly. Example, the teacher has to lay down rules and procedures for learning activities. Sometimes this role is viewed as nothing more than that of disciplinarian, the person who must see that the classroom group and its individual members stay within the limits set by the school, the limits set by the teacher, and the limits set by the tasks at hand. In fact, the teacher must also manage a classroom environment. He organizes the classroom space to fit his goals and to maximize learning. Seating must be arranged; posters hung; bulletin boards decorated; extra books, learning carrels, and bookshelves installed. Classroom management for the teacher also involves modeling a positive attitude toward the curriculum and toward school and learning in general. Finally, a teacher needs to manage and process great amounts of clerical work. There are papers to be graded and read, tests to be scored, marks to be entered, attendance records and files to be maintained, notes and letters to be written, and so forth.

3. Factors affecting classroom environment: 

There are factors which affect classroom atmosphere Leadership style:

Different leadership styles will affect the atmosphere of students’ learning.

•  Authoritarian leadership will discourage learning, the teacher tends to put down the students when they make mistakes. 
•  Democratic leadership, the sharing of responsibility, seeks compliance through encouragement rather than demands. The teacher is kind, caring, and warm, but also firm. Self-esteem is developed by sharing of responsibility. Research has shown that productivity and performance are high in well-run democratic classroom. 
•  In laissez-faire leadership approach, the teacher is completely permissive. Anything goes! Everyone does his or her own thing.This type of leadership often leads to chaos. It produces disorganization, causes student frustration, and results in little if any work.

Physical environment: 

An attractive room is conducive to learning. As a teacher, you will in most cases have full responsibility for the appearance and comfort of you room.

 Room arrangement: 

Your room arrangement should aid teaching and learning and help maintain discipline. The seating arragement should focus on the chalkboard since most class instruction occurs there. You should also provide access to pencil sharpeners, reference books, learning centres, trash containers, etc. Place these accessories behind or to the side of the students’ focal points, since travel to and from them can be distracting.

Motivation: 

The teacher should try to motivate the students by;

•  expecting the best from students 
•  modelling desired behaviour 
•  establishing a positive atmosphere 
•  actively involving students 
•  making learning seem worthwhile 
•  cultivating self-esteem 
• capitalizing on curiosity
•  use reinforcement n 
•  using competition 
•  reducing anxiety

Time in schools and classrooms: 

Schooltime is obviously limited. In fact school time can be divided into five different categories: mandated time, allocated time, instructional time, engaged time, and academic learning time.

•  Mandated time: the time set by the Ministry of Education. A typical school is in session from 7.45 in the morning until 2.05 in the afternoon for about 190 days. This set time must be used for both academic and nonacademic activities.
•  Allocated time: During the mandated time, a variety of subjects must be taught plus time must be used for lunch, recess, transitions between classes, announcements, etc. The time appropriated for each of these activities is called allocated time. The goal of classroom management is to expand the amount of time allocated for learning.
• Instructional time: Teachers attempts to translate allocated time into learning through instructional time. They try to translate the available, tangible blocks of class time into productive learning activities. The students may not make full use of the instructional time to learn. Instead, they may be daydreaming during seat work or some may be goofing off.
•  Engaged time or time on-task: It is the actual time individual students spend on assigned work. Students are actively (physically or mentally) participating in learning process during engaged time. So, one of the goals of classroom management is to improve the quality of time by keeping students on-task.
•  Academic learning time: Time on-task isn’t always productive. Indeed, students often engage in an activity at a superficial level, with the result that little understanding or retention takes place. If this is happening, the teacher must motivate the students to make time on-task more productive, they must maximize academic learning time. This means that the students’ performance must be at a high success rate (80 percent or more).

Communication:

When problems arise in the classroom, good communication between teacher and students is essential. This means that more than just the “teacher talks-students listen” pattern must be taking place. Real communication is an open, two-way street, in which you talk but you must listen.

4. Preventive classroom management: 

Many of the problems associated with student misbehaviour are dealt with by effective teachers through preventive approaches. Some of these approaches are briefly described below:

• Establishing rules and procedures to govern important activities in the classroom. Rules are statements that specify the things students are expected to do and not to do. Usually, rules are written down, made clear to the students, kept to a minimum. Procedures, on the other hand, are the ways of getting work and other activity accomplished. They are seldom written down, but effective classroom managers spend considerable time teaching procedures to students in the same way they teach academic matter. Student movement, student talk, and what to do with downtime (occurs when lessons are completed early or when students are waiting for upcoming events, like moving to another class or going home) are among the most important activities that require rules to govern behaviour and procedures to make work flow efficiently.

                 Categories of rules:

•  Relations with the adults and peers – be polite and friendly, be friendly and helpful; help your friends;  Academic work – work hard and quietly; do your best; try; (
•  classroom rutines – put your hand up; settle down quickly and quietly; 
•  relations to self – respect yourself; be smart; accept your own and others mistakes; keep trying; you can do it
•   safety – take care; be safe; take care of your friends’ safety.

 Example of classroom routines: going in and sitting down quietly when they arrive; collecting and returning books; getting equipment out or moving around the classroom.

• Maintain consistency: Effective classroom managers are consistent in their enforcement of rules and their application of procedures. If they are not, any set of rules and procedures soon dissolves.

• Preventing deviant behaviour with smoothness and momentum: 

Another dimension of preventive classroom management involves pacing instructional events and maintaining appropriate momentum. 

 Common problems in maintaining smoothness and momentum are: 

•  Dangle: leaving a topic dangling to do something else 
•  Flip-flop: starting and stopping an activity and then going back to it
•  Fragmentation: breaking instruction or activity into overly small segments 
• overdwelling: going over and over something even after students understand the facts.

• Orchestrating classroom activities during unstable periods (example, opening of the class, during transitions, closing of the class): This involves planning and orchestrating student behaviour during unstable time. Students are coming from other settings (their homes, the playground, another class) where different set of behavioural norms apply. The new setting has different rules and procedures as well as friends who have not been seen since the previous day.

• The beginning of the class is also a time in most schools in which several administrative tasks are required of teachers, such as taking roll and making annoucements. Effective classroom managers plan and execute procedures that help get things started quickly and surely.
• Transitions are the times during a lesson when the teacher is moving from one type of learning activity to another. Planning is crucial when it comes to managing transitions. Cueing and signaling systems are used by effective teachers to manage difficult transition periods.
• The closing of the class is also an unstable time in most classroom. Sometimes the teacher is rushed to complete a lesson that has run over its allocated time; sometimes materials such as test or papers must be collected; almost always students need to get their own personal belongings ready to move to another class, the canteen or the bus. Effective classroom managers anticipate the potential management problems associated with closing class by incorporating the appropriate procedures into their classroom.

• Developing student accountability: 

Effective classroom managers always hold students accountable for their work, such as completing and handing in their assignments on time or little learning will be accomplished.

5. Discipline: 

Teachers who attend to many of the aspects of classroom management identified as crucial to positive learning events will avoid a great many conflicts and have significantly fewer classroom disruptions. Even so, there will be times when students bring problems to the classroom, and even teachers who are very effective classroom organizers will be confronted with unproductive student behaviour that requires intervention (Brophy, 1996). Disciplining students for disruptive behaviour should be part of a continous plan that is explicit to the teacher and students. Skills necessary for teachers during disciplining procedures are the ability to work with teams of professionals who can focus on the disruptive behaviour or a particular student, and the knowledge to develop and carry out management and discipline plans.

The most important aspect of attending to disruptive behaviour is to return the classroom to a constructive atmosphere. Regaining control of the classroom quickly and avoiding involvement of more students that necessary is a goal following any type of disruptive behaviour or confrontation. Several strategies are important for the teacher when responding to disruptive student behaviour:

•  Try not to make unreasonable requirement or overreact to disruptive incidents.
•  Be honest about your feelings. If you are upset, disappointed, or angry, explain to the students.
•  Be consistent and follow through with what you said you will do
•  Be fair with your students. If you have made a mistake, applied rules indiscriminately, or have implemented actions that are not working or were not fair in the first place, apologize to your students. They will respect you for your honesty and openness.

When students’ misbehaviour is serious and teachers’ effort fail to result in appropriate behaviour, more severe strategies are needed. Consequences may involve corporal punishment and suspension from school.

6. Disciplinary problem: 

is a behavior that 

•  interferes with the teaching act; 
•  interferes with the rights of others to learn 
•  is psychologically or physically unsafe; 
•  destroys property. 

A disciplinary problem could not only be caused by a student but it could also be caused by a teacher. When a teacher inappropriately or ineffectively employs management strategies that result in interference with the learning of others, he in fact becomes the discipline problem. This is also true for inappropriate or ill-timed classroom procedures, public address announcements, and school policies that tend to disrupt the teaching and/or learning process.

7. Causes of misbehavior : 

The most common causes of misbehavior in the classroom are: 

•  boredom – failing to offer classroom activities that are interesting, appropriately timed, challenging and relevant; 
•  an inability to do the work a teacher has set – because it is too difficult, expressed in inappropiate language or it is unclear what pupils need to do; and 
•  effort demanded for too long a period with a break – which is difficult to sustain over a long period;
•  poor teacher organization – visual aids do not work or there are too many interruptions to the flow of the lesson; 
•  confusion about teacher expectation – the teacher fails to be clear and explicit about the kind of conduct that is expected; 
•  social or peer interaction – conversation or behaviour can spill over into the classroom from the corridor, playground or outside school; 
•  low academic self-esteem – students lack confidence in themselves because they experienced failure before.

8. Practical strategies for managing misbehavior (Kyriacou, 1991):

 Ways of preventing misbehavior

• scan the classroom (see if any pupils are having difficulties and support
• them in resuming working quickly. Individual contact is more effective than calling across the room.
• Circulate (Go around the room asking pupils about their progress. This uncovers problems which otherwise would not be obvious.)
• Make eye contact ( Do this with individuals when talking to the class)
• Target your questions (Directing questions around the class keeps students involved. Use proximity (moving towards students who are talking indicates awareness of their conduct. Standing by pupils keeps them on task.
• Give academic help (This encourages students to make progress with the task set and is one of the best ways of pre-empting misbehavior.)

• Change activities or pace (Sometimes lessons proceed too slowly or too fast, so altering the activity or pace can be crucial for maintaining students’ involvement.)
• Notice misbehavior (Use eye contact, facial expressions and pauses to signal disapproval, so there’s only a momentary interruption of the lesson. Ignoring trivial incidents allows more serious misbehaviour to occur.)
• Notice disrespect (Discourtesy to you, as teacher, must be picked up or it will undermine the standard of behaviour expected from students.)
• Move students (If necessary, separate students whose behaviour is not acceptable, while stressing it is done in their interest).

 The effective use of reprimands:

• Correct targeting (It is important to identify correctly the student who is responsible for misbehaviour)
• Firmness (Use a clear and firm tone. Avoid pleading or softening the reprimand once it is used.)
• Express concern (Reprimands should convey your concern with the student’s interests or those of other students affected by misconduct.)
• Avoid anger (Don’t lose your cool, whatever the provocation. Speak assertively, not aggresively, and don not rise to any bait).
• Emphasis what is required (Stress what students should be doing rather than complain about bad behavior. Eg. “You may talk quietly with your neighbor” rather than “There’s too much noise in the class”

  The use of punishments: When reprimands do not work

• Focus on the misdeed (avoid personalized punishments so that the student is forced to consider the consequences of his/her action);
• Follow promptly after the offense (punishment will be more effective in modifying behavior if it follows immediately, although deferral can be effective if it causes an unpleasant anticipation of what is likely to happen);
• be consistent (students have a strong sense of grievance about variations in treatment either between individuals or between occasions);
•  fit the crime (the scale of punishment used should demonstrate the seriousness of the offence and the strength of the school’s disapproval);
•  be followed by reconciliation (Once a punishment is over, attempt to rebuild a positive relationship with the student).

9. Example of a classroom discipline plan:

 Rules

•  Follow teacher directions first time
•  Keep hands, feet and objects to yourselves
•  Be polite and friendly
•  Work hard

Rewards

•  Praise
• Good behavior
• Positive letter home

 Corrections

•  Warning
•  2 minutes away from the group
• 10 minutes away from the group
•  Detention
•  Interview with Disciplinary Master/ Senior Assistant/Principal
•  Parents called in