Classroom management

Abstract

Whilst successful teachers operate in many different ways, they have one thing in common – an ability to manage their classrooms effectively. As Wragg (2001) points out, without this basic skill, the most inspiring and knowledgeable teacher will fail. As you go through your first School Experience you are gaining first hand experience as to what teachers are doing to address the varied challenges of the National Minimum Curriculum. You are also realizing that secondary school teaching implies more than just teaching a particular subject. You need to know about formative and summative forms of assessment, portfolios and profiling, learning styles, motivation theory, differentiated learning, identification of learning difficulties, gender issues, parent participation and a host of other things. Whilst teachers have to think of content (i.e. knowledge of a particular subject), of lesson planning and preparation, of activities, handouts, ICT, etc., we also realise ‘that we are employed so as to take a group of students and turn them into interested and productive learners’ (Bezzina, 2001, p.13). Therefore, the first thing teachers need to know is how to manage a class full of students. This is what this chapter aims to address. This chapter focuses on what we consider to be some of the most important issues when discussing the area of classroom management. These are treated in a number of sections. In the first section we discuss a more inclusive definition of classroom management which goes beyond mere discipline and control. This takes us to a consideration of the requirements at the psychological level of the teacher to manage the class effectively. From there we move on to discussing the characteristics of the classroom as a learning environment which we consider to be another important requisite in the process of learning to teach. Undeniably, this process also involves the acquisition of basic skills which we describe at some length in the concluding section.