Class management Class management skills are important since they help to ensure the success of the teacher

and the activities used during the classes. There are cases when the most effective activities can become useless if they are not properly organized and disruptive behaviour can spoil the best classes. Students groupings may also lead to a cooperative atmosphere in the class, maximizing student practice. The roles of the teacher Jeremy Harmer (The Practice of ELT) identified 8 roles that the teacher may have during the classes: 1. Controller: certain stages of a lesson lend themselves to this role very well. Teachers tend to do a lot of talking, being the most important source the students have for roughly-tuned comprehensible input. But it is vital that control should be relaxed to give students a chance to learn. 2. Assessor: the teachers job to assess the students work, to see how well they are performing. The students quite naturally expect it. There are 2 types of assessment: correction and organising feedback. During an accurate reproduction stage, students errors and mistakes will be corrected almost instantly. Gentle or mild correction means not making a big fuss about the mistake, the student doesnt have to repeat his / her sentence correctly, as the purpose is developing students fluency. When accuracy is aimed at, correction plays a very important role. Organising feedback occurs when students have performed some kind of task. Content feedback concerns the assessment of how well the students performed the activity as an activity, rather than as a language exercise .Form feedback tells the students how well they performed linguistically. The teacher records the mistakes and brings them to the students attention after. Some of the more prominent errors can be written on the board. Students have to identify and correct them. Feedback also means telling the students what went right and not only what went wrong. 3. Organiser: The success of many activities depends an good organisation and on the students knowing what they are to do. The main aim of the teacher when organising an activity is to tell the students what they are going to talk about (write/read); give clear instructions about what their task is, get the activity going and then organise feedback when the activity is over. This includes (some useful tips): - Never assume that students have understood the instructions-check, use the students native language for this. - Plan beforehand what to say, and then say it clearly and concisely. - Be careful about when to get students look at the material (not at the same time while giving instructions-divided attention).
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The organisation of an activity can be divided into 4 main parts. In the first, the teacher gives a lead-in (introduction to the subject; start thinking about the subject): E.g.: Youre going to test your artistic powers by drawing a picture. The idea of this exercise is to see how well you can talk about a picture and give instructions. Stage 2 is giving instructions (the students are told exactly what they should do.) Finally the teacher initiates the activity. E.g.: Has anyone get any questions.. no? Good. Then off you go! The lead-in - instruct (demonstrate) initiate - organise feedback sequence can almost always be followed when the teacher is setting up activities, i.e. when the teacher is acting as organiser. Once the activity has started, the teacher will not intervene unless it is to use gentle correction. 4. Prompter - the teacher needs to encourage the students to participate or needs to make suggestions when there is silence or confusion. This role has to be performed with discretion by the teacher, the idea being that of not taking over from the students, but helping them only when it is necessary. 5. Participant - especially in simulations for e.g. playing roles themselves. The danger is that the teacher will tend to dominate. The advantage is that the students can practise English with someone who speaks it better than they do. 6. Resource- the teacher should always be ready to offer help if it is needed (language that the students may be missing, especially in writing tasks). Students can consult the teacher when they wish. 7. Tutor- in the sense of someone who acts as a coach and as a resource when students are involved in their own mark (self-study) and call upon the teacher mainly for advice and guidance. The teacher helps them clarify ideas, limit the task, point out errors in rough drafts, advise them about how to learn. The tutorial role (a counselling function) is often appropriate at intermediate and advanced levels. This role somehow incorporates parts of other roles previously mentioned: organiser, prompter and resource. 8. Investigator - teachers themselves will want to develop their own skills. It is possible to go on teacher training courses and to attend seminars. But teachers can also develop by themselves or with colleagues by investigating what is going on, observing what works well in class and what does not, trying out new techniques or by keeping a teaching diary. Teachers who do not seek their own personal and professional
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development may find the job of teaching becoming increasingly monotonous. Student groupings Lockstep: is the class grouping where all the students are working with the teacher, being locked into the same rhythm and pace in the same activity. It is the traditional teaching situation, where a teachercontrolled session is taking place. - Advantages: all the class are concentrating, they get a good language model from the teacher, it can be very dynamic and many students find it comforting. It is very good for feedback and giving instructions. - Disadvantages: students get little chance to practice/ talk at all. Lockstep always goes at the wrong speed: either the teacher is too slow for the good students (who might get bored) or true lesson is too fast for the weak students (they may panic and not learn). Shy and nervous students also find working lockstep bad for the nerves since they are likely to be exposed in front of the whole class. It involves too much teaching and too little learning. Pairwork: (e.g.: for QA practice, information gap, exercises, and simulations). It increases the amount of student practice (20 students are talking instead of one). Pairwork encourages student cooperation, which is important for the atmosphere and for the motivation. Problems: Incorrectness is a worry, but accuracy is not the only standard to judge learning by, as communicative efficiency is also vitally important. Noise and indiscipline depend on how the teacher organises the activity. The pairwork task should not be carried out for too long. If the noise rises, the teacher can stop the activity, explain and ask the students to continue more quietly. Students may use their mother tongue in solving the task. Students should be familiarised with pairwork at the beginning of the course by very short and simple tasks to perform and then the teacher can extend the range of activities offered. It may even be random. Pair-work is a way of increasing student participation and language use. Group-work: Advantages: - increases the amount of student talking time; - gives students opportunities to use language to communicate with each other; - students will show a degree of self-reliance that is not possible in the presence of the teacher(relaxation);
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more dynamic than pairwork because theres a greater possibility of discussion; - it is more relaxing because there is a greater chance that at least one member of the group will be able to solve a problem when it arises. The disadvantages are the same as those of pair-work. The biggest problem is that of selecting the group members. A lot of teachers form groups where weak and strong students are grouped together. Risk-the weak ones will not participate. Sometimes group of strong students and group of weak students can be formed and the teacher can give them different tasks and so not all the students necessarily work on the same material at the same time. As far as the size of the group is concerned, it is safe to say that groups of more than 7 students can be unmanageable. It is a good idea to have an odd number in each group, since in that way a split decision is impossible. It is possible to have a group leader who could have 2 functions: 1 To act as the group organiser (making sure that a task was properly done, the information was proper recorded). 2 To act as a mini-teacher where a student could conduct a drill or a dialogue. In practice, even when groups are leaderless, students tend to take on definite roles. Groupwork offers enormous potential. It can be used for oral work, tasks where decisions have to be made, reading, listening tasks, cooperative writing. It allows different groups of students to be doing different things in the same classroom. The use of mother tongue in the use of pairwork and groupwork is one of the biggest problems. Our attitude to the students use of their own language should change, depending on the activity they are involved in. It is important that students realize that; if they dont know this, they will not know why and when we insist English only. Disruptive behaviour: is not confined to one age group. Eleven year-old can become very noisy, adolescents completely unresponsive, adult students may publicly disagree with the teacher. Somehow, the teacher and the students have to agree upon a code of conduct (arriving late, forgetting to do homework, bringing food and drinks in the classroom are outside the code). The teachers code is to establish the code through discussions and examples. Although you have the code, students still behave badly. Causes of discipline problems:
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1. The teacher: Here is a list of things that teachers should not do if they want to avoid problems. - Dont go to class unprepared: Students automatically identify teachers who are not sure what to do in the classroom. Appear knowledgeable about the subject. - Dont be inconsistent about the code of conduct otherwise the students will lose respect for it. - Dont issue threats, without carrying them out. Hopefully threats are not necessary, but it is absolutely fatal to say that some action is going to be taken if is not. - Dont raise your voice in order to establish control. It only raises the level of noise in the classroom. A quiet voice is far more effective. - Dont give boring classes: Perhaps the greatest single cause of indiscipline is boredom. - Dont be unfair. A major part of the job is not to show preferences and prejudices in classroom. - Dont have a negative attitude to learning. A teacher who does not really care and who is insensitive to the students reactions to what is happening in the classroom will lose the respect of the students. - Dont break the code: if there is a ban on chewing gum, then the teacher should not chew gum. Homework must be corrected promptly. The code either exists for the group as a whole (including the teacher) or it does not exist at all. 2. The students: reasons why they behave badly: - time of day - the students attitude- how they view the class, the teacher, the subject. - a desire to be noticed can be disruptive ; this behaviour can be adjusted by involving the student and give him the recognition he wants within the context of the language class. - Twos company- two students being disruptive together are far more effective than one and they can gradually influence the whole group. The trouble-makers are separated or made to sit in front. 3. The institution: A lot depends on the attitude of the institution to disruptive student behaviour. If the institution does not have a recognised policy for dealing with discipline problems then it is up to the teachers to press for such a system. Action in case of indiscipline: Any punishment that hurts a student physically or emotionally is harmful in many ways. Measures that can be taken:
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a) Act immediately: when the code is broken, the teacher should act immediately. b) Stop the class: this is a clear indication to all the students that something is wrong. The teacher can wait until things improve. c) Reseating: make the students sit in a different place immediately; d) Change the activity-where a majority of the class seem to be gradually out of control. A quick writing task will often quieten students down. Antisocial behaviour can usually be cured if students are given something to do which will involve them. e) After the class-where a student is continuously making trouble, the teacher can split out the consequence; if disruptive behaviour continues, in private. f) Using the institution- when problems become extreme.