Remember you are a great teacher! In order to teach, you must be able to manage your students. No matter how much potential you have as a teacher, if you are unable to control the students in your classroom, little learning will take place.
Classroom management is an integral part of teaching and techniques of managing students both can and must be acquired by the teacher.
Poor classroom management and discipline are widely considered the major education problem among the elementary and secondary teachers, even though the media has centered on school bussing, school financing, declining test scores , and student drugs . Since 1970 , student discipline or the lack of it, has been the number one school problem each year.
The problem of discipline is persistent in every elementary / secondary school and even in the private and public colleges and universities for the following reasons:
- Many students lack inner control and are unwilling to defer to teacher authority.
- Many teachers lack systematic methods for dealing with disciplinary problems.
- Many school administrators do not provide adequate support for teachers.
- Parents’ failure to discipline youth in the home.
Your personality, philosophy, and teaching style will directly affect your managerial and disciplinary approach. There are effective approaches to classroom management and discipline and you must adopt and coincide them with your personal characteristics. The following suggestions are for teachers applying discipline:
- Clearly identify expectations.
- Take positions. Say, “I like that” or “I don’t like that.”
- Use a firm tone of voice.
- Use eye contact, gestures and touches to supplement the verbal message.
- Give and receive compliments genuinely.
- Indicate consequences of behavior and why specific action is necessary
- Be calm and consistent, avoid emotion or threats.
- Persist, enforce minimum rules, don’t give up.
- Establish positive expectations for student behavior, eliminate negative expectations about students.
The following are the methods of effective classroom managers:
- Ready the classroom space, materials and equipment at the beginning of the year.
- Plan rules and procedures – teachers, make sure students understand and follow rules and regulations.
- Teaching is systematically done.
- Strategies for potential problems are planned in advance.
- Monitor student behavior and academic achievement closely.
- Stop inappropriate behavior – disruptive behavior is handled promptly and consistently before it worsens or spreads.
- Organize instruction- teachers organize instructional activities at suitable levels for all students in the class.
Clarity in instructions. Teachers provide clear instructions. These help keep students on the task and allow them to learn faster, while reducing discipline problems. Directions are clear, thus confusions are clear, thus confusion is minimized.
By: Mrs. Rose Anne C. Perez | Teacher III | Tomas Pinpin Memorial Elementary School Abucay, Bataan
