Classroom Management Strategies

 

Ø  Do you suffer from boredom and side conversations among students while carrying out your lessons in class?

Ø  Does the class end before the learning outcomes are achieved?

Ø  Do you have students who often cause problems and interrupt you during lessons? 

Your answer to these questions may be yes, and you may be looking for ways and strategies to help you manage your classrooms and provide a safe educational classroom environment that contributes to increasing student participation and achieving interaction between them.

In this article, we present to you a set of strategies and ideas that will help you manage the classroom effectively, whether teaching is face-to-face or remotely, in addition to introducing you to the types of students in general within the classroom and how you can deal with them.

Effective Classroom Management Strategies

Here is a set of effective educational strategies that will help you manage the classroom effectively:

ü  Strategy 1

Prepare a set of general rules to control your students’ behavior in the classroom and provide a safe classroom environment, provided that the rules and laws are clear, positive, written, and posted in front of them in the classroom, and that they are reminded of them and stress the importance of adhering to them on an ongoing basis. A regulation should be drawn up. Rules in partnership with students.

ü  Strategy 2

Model the behaviors you want in front of your students as they affect them, students gain more from what they see than what they hear, so you must use clear language and an appropriate volume while showing interest in them and not interrupting them while answering.

ü  Strategy 3

Creating rules and routines to organize the work of groups and students, such as determining the mechanism for requesting help from their fellow students using red and green cards, and setting rules for the level of sound, such as using the idea of a volume control meter when the sound is higher than the permissible limit, and other ideas.

ü  Strategy 4

Giving tasks that suit the skills and abilities of your students, as students may tend toward some undesirable behavior for fear of appearing weak or unable to carry out the required tasks, or vice versa. Your distinguished students may be able to finish the task quickly and feel bored and cause problems and disturbances.

ü  Strategy 5

Obtaining feedback from students about the class lesson in general, such as using the smiley face method, the frowny face method, verbal hints, and other methods.

ü  Strategy 6

Ensure that there is continuous reinforcement for your students, such as an individual reinforcement board and a group reinforcement board, while making sure to mainly praise good behaviors, thank students for them, and distinguish students who do everything asked of them or students who take initiative.

Giving students options to achieve what you want from them, such as:

ü  Will you stop talking to your colleague during the lesson? Or do you prefer to sit alone?

ü  Do you want to finish your homework alone? Or do you want your colleague to help you?

ü  Are you going to do your homework now? Or will you write it during playtime?

Ideas That Contribute to Achieving Effective Classroom Management

First: Turn off the light and turn it on by explaining to your students that the goal of turning off and turning on the light is to pay attention and leave what they are doing or remain calm. You can also agree with them on other goals for turning on and off the light.

Second: Asking a question by explaining to your students that when someone needs to ask a question and the answer is important to all students, they must raise their hand. However, if the question is a special question, such as: Can I drink water? The student must place the hand on the heart, or any movement that you and your students agree on.

Third: The five-by-five strategy by explaining to the students that when the hand is raised open, the students must do the following in five seconds:

Ø  Keep looking at you

Ø  Leave what is in their hands

Ø  Immobility

Ø  Calm down and don't talk

Ø  Listen

There are many ideas and strategies that you can be creative in creating and implementing to achieve discipline within the classroom and make a difference in the behavior of your students, so research and be creative to manage your classrooms, and do not hesitate to share them with your fellow teachers.

Strategies for Managing Virtual Classes

We present to you a set of strategies that you can employ during synchronous learning with students to manage your virtual classes as follows:

ü  Strategy 1

The teacher builds a routine for teaching and time for virtual classes while involving students in setting several rules, such as answering any questions related to homework within the first two minutes or writing them in the chat box, using the raise hand icon to participate, or ask a question, and so on.

ü  Strategy 2

Control and reduce the source of distractions at the beginning of the class. It is best to identify distractions from the beginning of the class by naming them and giving students a short time to remove them, such as distracting backgrounds or digital programs that students can access during class while directing them to sit in quiet places at home.

ü  Strategy 3

Setting behavioral and academic expectations. You can use incentives to reinforce positive behavioral expectations, as well as set academic expectations from students and know which students participate in the answers by raising their virtual hands or using small conversations within groups in breakout rooms using the Zoom application.

ü  Strategy 4

Activate the webcam by directing all students to activate the camera to communicate visually with them, as well as turn on or mute the sound according to the instructions.

ü  Strategy 5

Using multi-educational media that will maintain students’ attention and focus, and assigning them tasks related to what is presented during the implementation of virtual lessons, such as having group tasks carried out in breakout rooms.

ü  Strategy 6

Employing active learning strategies, as these strategies focus on involving students in their learning process and making them the focus of the learning and teaching process.

Last Words

Successful teachers are those who work to manage the classroom effectively using various strategies that suit the classroom situation. Therefore, we invite you to apply these strategies with your students and share them with your colleagues, especially the new ones, because these strategies will direct the students’ behaviors towards the desired behaviors and work to organize their learning process. Whether it is face-to-face learning or e-learning.