Classroom Management Tool

Classroom management is the hardest thing for a teacher. One student over there comes to board, writing something ; one over  there is trying to find his books while you are giving instructions ; and one over  there is talking with his peer and does not understand and follow what you are talking about. There are at least 15 or 20 of them. And.. You have to deal with ALL of them. If you are teaching especially in primary school, what I will say to you is “ Allah kolaylık versin”.  I was observing first and eighth graders this semester, and teacher is shouting at one of those who is interrupting his frienSd all the time and is saying “ Enough Efe!”. So what? Will Efe listen to you? NO! He does not do what he is supposed to do. Besides, he stands up, moves around, and when he wants, he sits. That is it. He does not listen to teacher, me, his friends or anybody. So, here starts the action. You should do something, but what?

It is big question mark. Efe is 13 years old, and what can you do for him? Can you give him punishment, will it be effective to stop him? Can you give him reward, and like what?  Is he a child? No! Then, what can you do for him as a teacher?

In my opinion, before desinging a tool for classroom management, you should love them, know them, respect them. Although they are kids or  teenagers, they are human and have feelings; you can’t simply shout at them and wait them to be silent. When you are teaching to young  learners, they are, let’s say, more easy to manage. You can do kinestetic activities that require movements, and physical activities, like singing , dancing, role-playing etc. You should keep them busy in order  for them not to cause any trouble.  For example, one of my  co-operative teachers in Doğus chooses 2 policemen from the class. Every student is dying to be a policeman for that lesson. Then, during the whole lesson, these two students, one of them being a male, and the other being female, are observing their friends and when they see any problem, any interruption, they run to the board, and write their names.  The students are fourth graders and they enjoy doing that. I am not sure whether this kind of a method is suitable or not, because students are just peaching on their peers. It may hurt some students and maybe some students would not want to write their best friends’ name on the board. It is like a black list. When teacher sees names on the board, those students could not go out for a break and have to stay in class and do extra exercise. However, for this class, this method works well. Nobody has any problem with it, and everyone wants to be the “BAD” guy who is informing on his friends. They may be accustomed to it, and because nobody wants to miss the break, they go all silent in order not to enter the “black list.”

When it comes to my methodology, I probably would not use such kind of a tool. I generally try to be polite as much as I can. I am not in favor of punishment, but instead I may use rewards although it is not that beneficial,as well. Together at the end of the lesson, we will do whichever activity they want ; it can be speaking about a particular topic, discussing on interesting facts or ideas that they want to talk, singing a song, watching videos, playing games, of course related with English, drawing, and  so on.

Video Critique Task

For the first video, it is amazing to see such kind of a class. Teacher  teaches them math as if she teaches them a song! They are singing, they are moving, they are talking and no problem occurs while all of these are happening. At the beginning of lesson, teacher reminds the students rules and they talk to their partners and say each and every rule one by one. Besides,  she chooses a student : Julia. And I can see that she is really happy to be a student leader and practice class rules with her peers.  They know what to do and how to behave.  They are active, energetic and self-confident. I was thinking how this could happen in a classroom. They are little, young learners. Before I watched the video, I would think it is almost impossible to manage young learners without setting up harsh rules in classroom. I can see here how effective a teacher can be. She is walking with them, she is doing the same movements with them, she is repeating numbers with them. I mean she is REALLY with them. I am impressed and love that video! Students are always working with their partner and when teacher says to students “ Partner check”, they hold their partner hand and I think it gives them a good feeling and affect them positively. They feel secure. While I was watching the video, I realised that one couple is not doing what teacher says  and she immediately realises that, and takes action, moves to them and touches upon his shoulder and prompts him. Therefore, we can say that she is trying to engage each and every student to activities without forgetting anybody or focusing on only particular stretch  of classroom.

For the second video, the class is extremely crowded. I heard there are fifty students. I always thought that our English classes ,here, in Turkey are too crowded, but now my opinion has changed. Now, it seems that we are partially in better conditions than in China. Desks are too close. Some students are reading a text and I can not really catch each word because they are not reading it loudly enough maybe they lack self-confident,  or maybe it is the normal way that they speak in class. Teacher says somathing and students has to do it although they may not want to be a volunteer for it. This is the case in Turkey, as well.  In addition to all these, what really catches my attention is that students are said to work with a partner, which is expected to consist of  two people, but they are three! And the one who is sitting at the edge cannot engage in discussion, which is something very disturbing for me. Teacher does not do anything about it, and those students can not hear their friends’ talking, so they are sitting on the slideliness. Therefore, when we compare two classes, of course the first one wins!

Critical Incident Analysis

Startings are always hard..

Incident

On  November  19th  at around twelve twenty , students in 1-C class were wandering around ; some of them were  in front of the smart board trying to write something;  some  of them were sitting quietly wondering what was happening; and some were just looking at me as if I had to do something. There were totally seven students and for that number, there was too much noise. They probably could not understand instructions and did not know what to do and just went out of control. Teacher was trying to calm them down, but it simply did not work. They were resisting to sit back and be silent. They were talking with each other in Turkish and did not follow teacher’s dictations. In the end, they gave up and somehow they sat back to their desks, but the teacher was anxious and also glad.

Tutor’s Reflections

The teacher was me. I was very pleased that I had dealt with this, in the end. It was my first teaching experience. The students were so young, so active and so energetic. It was hard to control them. At first I was really disappointed. I thought that I really messed up everything and I was very unsuccessful. However, co-operative teacher whom I work with trusted me and told that depending on my first teaching experience, I was fine and  I did a good job. I was very glad to hear that, but still I felt upset because I had expected  a better unofficial presentation from myself.

Learning Points

The problem might have been resulted from the way I gave instructions. I was trying to explain a game that we would play together about “fruits”. I realised that I did not use simple vocabulary to express the rules of game. Although the game was a very enjoyable one, I could not get my message across to students and therefore the game was not effective for me and also for them. We could not get benefit of it.  What I could do actually was to know learners very well before deciding to teach them. I should have learnt their real profile, their interests and what they could know and understand. Although I was not nervous at all during class time, I could not control them. I should have explained each and every step clearly and slowly. One another probable reason of such a problem might be because of the fact that I had never worked with such a young group of learners and did not completely know their needs and abilities. I should have analyzed them carefully in order not to have come across such kind of problem again.