“The teacher who is interested in controlling ripple effects can generally do so
best by giving clear instructions to the child rather than by exerting pressure on
him,” Kounin and Gump wrote.
Instead of handling disruptions after they’ve happened, it can be more effective
to set up conditions in which they are less likely to occur. Here are eight
classroom strategies that teachers have shared with Edutopia (Youki Terada,
2019)
1. Greet students at the door
2. Establish, maintain, and restore relationships
3. Use reminders and cues
4. Optimize classroom seating
5. Give behavior-specific praise
6. Set clear expectations
7. Actively supervise
8. Be consistent in applying rules
These strategies are described in Enhancing Effective Classroom Management
in Schools: Structures for Changing Teacher Behavior article (2017) with
definitions:
1. Physical layout
Arrangement facilitates typical instructional activities, orderly, arranged for safe
teacher and student movement.
2. Expectations
Teacher broadly describes and explicitly teaches how students should behave.
3. Routines
Teacher outlines and teaches steps for completing needed classroom procedures.
4. Behavior specific praise
Teacher delivered verbal statement that explicitly identifies and affirms a
student behavior.
5. Active supervision
Teacher monitors classroom by moving, scanning, and interacting frequently
with students.
6. Opportunities to respond
Teacher solicits student response with high frequency and using a variety of
strategies (individual, group, written, or verbal, etc.)
7. Reminders about behavior
Before a behavior is expected, teacher makes a statement reminding students
what to do.
8. Consistent responding
Teacher adheres to classroom expectations and routines and provides consistent
error correction and additional instruction/ re-teaching when problem behavior
does occur.
The research was the reason to remember the unic experience from the
past.
Being a young teacher is not an easy role among those who are older and more
skillful. However, there are people who were born with the gift of teaching.
There was a group of students who struggled wit their tutor almost every day.
Their tutor was a PE teacher and could allow all the students to omit her classes.
And one day several boys gathered together as a basketball and football team
and asked that teacher to present the team in school football tournament. The
teacher refused. Moreover she was offended by that suggestion. And the young
English teacher from primary school was the only one person to accept. It had
been the first step to create the sport team at school. It had been spent a lot of
hours to organaze the application process with taking photos, getting and paying
needed fee, finding out the vehicals to get to places of tournament.
The result was predictable and the teams lost that year and next ones. But ten
years ago the was a short report given by the school administration annonced
the victory of the school in football competition.
As for the English teacher who was reassigned to work with high school she
could tell the story about the poem in the class.
The class had a student with Down’s syndrome who was a brilliant student
despite some disabilities. She learned the poem of Tobias Hill “Breaking” by
heart because of the teacher who had dedicated the lesson to the meating with
the poet. The poem was long enough and full of difficult words and the girl
were struggling telling that. The miracle was that nobody in the class was noisy.
Approximately twenty teenagers in the classroom were sitting quietly and they
were listening carefully as if something extremely important.
References
Enhancing Effective Classroom Management in Schools: Structures for
Changing Teacher Behavior, 2017
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1137898.pdf
Tobias Hill
https://prabook.com/web/tobias.hill/3753077
Youki Terada, 8 Proactive Classroom Management Tips, August 7, 2019
https://www.edutopia.org/article/8-proactive-classroom-management-tips