Classroom management refers to a process that teachers use to keep the classroom environment conducive to learning and prevent disruptive behaviors from students. Effective classroom management techniques help increase meaningful academic learning and facilitate social and emotional growth. Here are some things that you can consider for classroom management:
1. Build a trusting relationship with your students: When students trust their teacher, they tend to feel belonged and safe in their classroom and this minimizes the incidents of disruptive behaviours. To make students feel belonged, you should respect the child’s identity and experiences, avoid labelling them, and avoid using sarcastic remarks against them.
2. Keeping parents in the loop is important to help students focus on learning. Disruptive family environment can lead to disruptive classroom environment. Keeping in contact with parents will help you communicate students' progress to parents and gauge that the family environment is conducive to the child.
3. Celebrate students’ hard work. Show students that you value their efforts. You can use display boards to help students display their work next to their names. These works can also serve as teaching-learning material for pedagogical activities and will help build students’ self-esteem and self-worth.
4. Make sure that students understand why and how behind the rules. Make reasoned arguments to talk to students about classroom rules. You can also encourage students to collaborate in drafting classroom ethics. This will help build student ownership about classroom ethics.
5. Even when you observe a disruptive behaviour in classroom, avoid using punishment and reward system. Instead, you can encourage the students to reflect on their actions about why they did so, was is right, and why or why not should they change it. Provide students behaviour specific praise and criticism.
6. You can use soothing background music in your classrooms for making it peaceful for the students to learn and concentrate.
7. Plan your lessons in advance with activity-based learning approach. In the age of technology, students’ attention spans have drastically reduced and it is hard to concentrate for them while sitting quietly. Include a lot of activities in your lesson plans to help students learn and use their energy.
8. Use a consistent tone of voice that is neither too threatening/intimidating nor too violable.
