A new teacher recently used our training room to teach her class, it is common one might find classroom management challenging. Below are 3 tips to overcome and be better at classroom management.
Adopt a normal voice
Most newbie teachers raise their voices when they speak, be it in a classroom or seminar room style setting, however this lesson will be learnt hard when one loses the voice one day. The important tip here is not to raise your voice to get attention as it harms your vocal cords. Also, this is not effective as your voice is usually drowned within the classroom and the students’ voices.
When the class is quiet then you speak
This golden tip works wonders. When you suddenly quiet down, you will many times realise that the class will suddenly be quiet too. This ‘mirroring effect’ works much better than you trying to out raise the voices of the entire class. Your good students will also ask the rest to be quiet when they realise you are no longer talking. Similarly, you should adopt this tip when for example an aeroplane flies past the classroom.
Set certain hand signals with the students
Educate and share your common hand signals with your students. This can vary from a certain hand signal asking them to quieten down, queue up. One popular attention seeking hand signal to try using is you can first raise your hand, then expect everyone in the class to raise their hands. You will wait till the last man’s hand is raised, before you lower your hand and start to speak. The rest of the class will also follow suit. Try it, you will be amazed how effective this hand signal will work.
Some of other popular hand signals are clapping your hands a numbers of times, and you will expect a similar response from your students. Another is knocking on the white board a number of times and this should quieten down your students.
In summary, set some house rules and hand signals so that you do not over strain your voice.
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