CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

Classroom management is talked about how and why the teacher might use the equipment available to them focus on the planning, interaction and language, about managing the planning before a lesson and managing interaction during a lesson.

A.    PLANNING

Teacher need an overview of the goals they and their students’ aim to achieve over the series of lessons, or a whole course. So, by skim through course book, or read through the material and the teacher’s guide in some detail at least to the end of the next unit in order to have an overview of what is coming up.

In some teaching situation, the teacher pauses after every few lessons and review and record what have been covered together with students. The teacher will give form to what has been done and connections will begins to appear. It will help students to remember and consolidate new language. In another case, some teacher use questionnaire to finding out about students’ need and preference, their background and motivation or called as needs assessment. It can inform the teacher and raise students’ awareness of the situation in which they use English, the skills they need and what is most important for them to work on. This should help with planning a course, choosing supplementary to add to what a course book offers, and help students to focus their learning efforts or usually called as lesson plan.

Before making lesson plan, teachers should find out exactly what their lesson plans should contain, how they should be laid out and how they will assessed. Teachers should clarify these three questions to support their lesson plan.

1.      What are the aims of the lesson?

2.      How am I going to achieve these aims?

3.      How will I know if I have achieved my aims or not?

B.     INTERACTION

It is mean who is speaking to whom. Teacher sometimes gives instructions to the whole class (T®Ss) and sometimes to individual (T®S). Sometimes, there will be an exchange between the teacher and the whole class (T«Ss) and sometimes the teacher will tell one student to say something to another (T®S®S). Sometimes students will communicate directly with each other (S«S).

1.      Teacher to students

The teacher leads the class in an activity, and this is where there is most control over the lesson and over what students say. The language teacher uses are first, experienced teachers grade their language to suit the level of the students they are teaching. Second, a very common classroom interaction is where the teacher asks question, the student or students respond and the teacher give some sort of indication as to whether the answer was acceptable or not. This is not good because the students have a passive rather than active. Moreover, there are few opportunities for most of the students to say something because often only one student can speak at a time.

2.      Student (s) to student (s)

Interaction between student (s) to student (s) is applied in pair work and group work. But some teachers worry about their lack of control when they use pair work or group work. Here are some suggestions:

·         Explain to the students that by working in pair or in group, they will have more opportunities to use the language, and without the pressure of speaking in front of the whole class and the teacher.

·         Starts the group works with ask students to do an exercise individually and then check it with their neighbor.

·         Another alternative is to start with an open pair - two students doing an activity in front of the rest  of the class before moving to closed pairs, where all students work in pairs without students listening.

So far, we have discussed that pair work and group work is almost same because they are S«S interaction. However it is not same. In pair work, when one student is silent, the other person is usually called on to speak. In group work, one student is dominating, or for another to remain silent and let the others carry out the task. The teacher needs to take action if one group member is dominating the interaction when other would like to speak but are not getting a chance. 

C.     FIRST LANGUAGE AND SECOND LANGUAGE

In classrooms where learners come from different language backgrounds, the teacher has no choice but to communication somehow in English. In this situation, we have found that even if we do speak the language of some of the students, we prefer not to, as it threatens the unity of the class.

You can speak simply and clearly, support what you say with gestures, facial expressions, and actions, but insist on running the class in English. At first you may meet resistance and/or giggles, but it is worth persevering because if you can engage your students in this small, English using community, you have made a most important contribution to either learning. However:

Ø  Do not insist on the use of English if the level of frustration on a particular occasion becomes too high.

Ø  In a monolingual class, use your knowledge of the shared L1 where this can help students to see useful comparisons or contrasts with English.

Ø  Try not to be discouraged if the students continue to use their first language among themselves.