4.3. Classroom Management in Young Learner Classes

Classroom management with young learners is highly important. When you manage the classes, the rest follows easily and quickly. It is necessary to silence the students to teach.

The problem is not instruction, method or technique. The problem is to have students sit down… Almost every teacher’s problem is about classroom management. When the class is silent, they have very good lessons and they leave the classroom happily. They may even say ‘how nice it is to be a teacher’.

Some beginning teachers may have serious problems especially in classroom management in their first year, particularly in a private school. It happens because of the teacher’s inexperience and the hyper activity of the kids.

The teacher should be confident about his competence in subject area in order not to hear students implying ‘the teacher doesn’t know anything’.

Find the source of the problem in the following situations:

1. The teacher asks the students to work in pairs to complete a cutting-coloring activity. She explains what the students do very quickly and she uses the target language all the time. She does not let them ask questions, she does not show them how to cut, paste and color. The students start talking to each other.

2. Two boys are sitting together and they are very angry with each other. They are almost about to fight. The teacher warns them harshly and goes on with her lecture. However, the boys start fighting.

3. The class is working on a vocabulary puzzle activity. The teacher asks the students to work in groups of 4. Some groups are very strong and they easily find the vocabulary items in the puzzle, while some groups are very weak and they give up trying. The teacher is angry with the groups which cannot finish in time.

4. The teacher checks the homework with the class. The students to respond are chosen randomly. Each time a student makes a mistake, others start shouting and giving the correct answers.

5. The class is very crowded and noisy. The students are not happy with the seating arrangement. Some students always want to change where they sit because they cannot see the board clearly or they do not want to sit in front of the windows. However, some students do not. The teacher is tired of dealing with seating problems.

6. It’s the last lesson before the lunch break. The students are really hungry and they do not want to wait for the lunch queue. After two minutes, the bell will ring. However, the teacher asks the class to copy 10 sentences on the board. The students are really pissed off and they are complaining. The teacher becomes very angry and does not let them go for lunch before they finish the sentences.

7. The new unit in the text book is about ‘travelling’. All of the students are very excited to tell their travelling experiences. However, the teacher starts telling her own experiences. At the beginning the students are really happy to hear them, but later they get bored of listening and they start whispering their experiences to each other in their mother tongue.

8. It is time to listen to a song. The students are very excited, but the teacher does not know how to use the new tape recorder. She tries for a few times, and then one of the students helps her with the tape. When the students are ready to listen, they realize that the quality of the cassette is very poor and no matter how high the volume is, the students cannot hear properly.

9. The teacher has planned to finish the unit in the text book. However, half of the class has gone for the Children’s Bayram rehearsal. There are only 12 students in class and they do not want to study English, all they want to do is to play a game or to chat on their own. The teacher insists on finishing the unit.

10. The teacher has given homework of 10 pages for the weekend. There are 24 students in her class. On Monday, in the first lesson of the day, she asks them to take their homework out and she checks every page of the homework. The students are bored of waiting for teacher’s check. Then, the teacher tells the students that they will check the answers for every question. She spends the whole 2-hour lesson on Monday.

Please discuss how you would deal with the student’s disruptive behavior in the anecdotes below

Situation A: ‘I was teaching English to first grade primary school students… The lesson was the last lesson of the week and the students were involved with a coloring activity with some paper and crayons. One of the students started throwing his crayons to the student sitting next to him one by one. The other boy was not responding, although he was trying to protect his face with his arm. I approached the trouble maker and took his paper and the rest of his crayons saying: ‘If you don’t use them for coloring, I’ll have the crayons’. He started shouting at me but I did not care. He approached to the teacher’s desk, and hit the coloring papers on it. The papers were all over the desk and the floor. He ran singing: ‘you can’t catch me!’ in Turkish. The rest of the class was in dead silence waiting to see what would happen.”

Situation B: ‘I was teaching English to fifth grade primary school students… I was teaching a lesson on the types of animals, including mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, and arachnids. The names of these five animal types were written on the board, and I asked students to give examples for each type of animal for a review. After a couple of examples, one of the students stood up, came to the board, and wrote the name of one of the other students as an example for ‘reptiles’. The whole class went crazy; they were laughing and praising the boy for doing such a funny thing, while teasing the one whose name was on the board’.

Read through the examples of troublesome student behaviors in the classroom listed below

What do you think about the level of severity attached to each of them? Identify 5 you believe to be minor and 5 that are at the top of your severity scale. Then compare your answers with a peer.

1. Having authority challenged.

2. Talking out of turn.

3. Making statements that seemingly have.

4. Coming late to class.

5. Leaving early with no notification.

6. Backpack shuffle.

7. Eating in the classroom.

8. Doing homework for other classes.

9. Reading a book.

10. Sleeping during class.

11. Shouting at others.

12. Swearing.

13. Name calling, making racist, sexist, homophobic, nothing to do with topic etc. remarks about others.

14. Talking about students behind their backs.

15. Consumer mentality: I paid for this; thus I want …

16. Coming to class unprepared.

17. Constantly phoning office or home.

18. Cheating.

19. Sexual hits & sexual harassment.

20. Aggressive and hostile verbal attacks.

Please discuss the solutions below and decide if they are acceptable or unacceptable:

I. The teacher throws chalk/rubber/ pen/pencil/ book to the student(s) who has an unacceptable behavior in class.

II. The teacher ignores the cell phones, the late comers and/or the missing coursebooks.

III.  The teacher insults, humiliates and/or swears at the students.

IV. The teacher sends the student to the principle/ vice-principle/discipline committee and/or calls the parents.

V. The teacher asks another student or a group of students to decide on what to do and/or lets them take action.

VI. The teacher uses physical punishment such as slapping.