Classroom Management

According to the ¹Glossary of Education Reform, Classroom management refers to the wide variety of skills and techniques teachers use to keep students organized, orderly, focused, attentive, on task, and academically productive during a class. This definition is mainly what we learnt after taking didactic courses. 

If you ask to a student who attended a didactic course, what is classroom management? he/she will answer that is the activity to keep the class in order and the act of controlling discipline.  But is that what really classroom management means? Is all about discipline and order for developing a given activity in class?

Let’s give you an example; you are teaching 5th grade students, you have developed some appropriated techniques for controlling inadequate behaviors, you organize the chairs of the classroom in a position students are not allowed to speak with their classmate, and you have to give a two hours English class to 40 students. In order to make all students participate, you plan individual presentations for the class, so each student will make their presentation of any topic. In the first five minutes a big part of the students would be paying attention then some of them will start to talk or to stand up, or throwing some paper airplanes etc, What happened? 
 In this situation we saw that to keep a class in order, on task, and attentive is not just a matter of controlling techniques. Classroom management involves: activities, time management, materials, facial expression,  attitude,  body language. As teachers we can’t think that if we yell on students or talk them “with authority” students will pay attention and behave well, some students are distracted because the way or the shape of the class activities.

I think classroom management is an important topic and through many courses we have seen it as a topic of little importance. If we learn that everything is connected (the lesson plan, materials, discipline, controlling techniques, time management, body language) and if we take into account that everything is important because all those aspects work as a whole body for making a successful class, we will stop to blame students for their lack of interest in our classes.

1. http://edglossary.org/classroom-management/