Managing a class requires four elements: strategic organization, adequate pacing, clear transitions, and engaging teacher presence. Teachers can employ the steps easily.
Four Elements of Effective Classroom Management
The four elements of seamless classroom management are strategic planning, adequate pacing, clear transitions, and engaging teacher presence. A well managed class should hum along like a cooking show where the teacher is the host-chef, the materials are organized like the ingredients and supplies, the instruction is clear, and the pace is comfortably brisk. Tying all of the elements together is then like serving an evenly heated meal; sequence and time are of the essence.
Strategic Planning: Organization
Planning a class means organizing the teacher’s instruction and activities in a logical, linear way. The sequence of class events must be clear and make sense to the students.
Students need to have something to do, a bell-ringer activity, the minute that class begins. The bell-ringer hooks them into the class, focuses them, and settles them into the class routine. The teacher can then move on to the instruction of the day, practice activities, and an ending re-cap in an appropriate sequence and manner for the students and the subject.
Class Events
- Bell-ringer, or walk-in-the-classroom activity
- Teacher explanation of class events and what the students will learn to do
- Review activity
- New content or skills
- Practice activities
- Re-cap of what was done, or learned in the class
Class events can be sequenced in a customized way for different types of classes, like a class devoted to project work or an assessment.
Pacing: Managing Minutes
A student’s attention span is one-half of his or her age. Keep this in mind when developing activities. Students get frustrated when too little time is given to a task, and too much time on a task invites distractible behavior. Younger students require more simple activities with more repetitions in a single class, where older students need only one or two more complex problems or tasks.
A lesson is the sum of its allotted minutes, and it needs to be dissected minute by minute. Each class event should be assigned the time appropriate for the students’ attention span and the targeted content and skills. A fourth grader will take much longer to copy notes, or look up a word in the dictionary than a tenth grader. Flexibility is key when students take less or more time for an activity because the teacher has to move into another activity or change course instantly.
Setting the Agenda: Daily Purpose
Students are programmed to enter a class and wait for the teacher to lead the action, or to direct them to work independently. Today’s students want to know the purpose of a lesson, and when the teacher tells them, they are receptive and ready to go. The teacher sets the pace when he or she tells them what they’ll be doing and in what order. Telling students approximately how many minutes they will have for an activity, problem, or assessment augments their focus and lends a bit of urgency to each task.
Transitions: Orchestrating Change
Transition time between class events is challenging to manage, and empty minutes between activities set the stage for students to jump off task and misbehave. Attention grabbers keep the students with the teacher for those vital seconds or minutes.
Attention Grabbers
- Rhythmic hand-claps
- Gesture
- Repetitive phrase
- Chant or song
- Percussion instrument or noise-maker
- Symbol, sign, or flag
A class full of students needs direction in clear, overt ways just like a busy, four-way stop intersection does. The teacher is an adept traffic cop, signaling and directing students to their next task. Each class activity must have a starting signal, direction, and then an ending signal.
Teacher Presence: Move Around and Connect
All teachers can make their classroom presence strong and appealing. Some charismatic teachers draw students to them with little effort, and these pied pipers have the advantage of immediate draw. Employing the basics of teacher presence keep students’ sustained attention and prevents discipline lapses.
Move around the Whole Class
- Give the opening introduction from a designated spot
- Move to another area to give instruction
- Move from student to student during full class practice or Q & A
- Stand next to students with behavioral lapses
- Move after during transitions between class events
- Sit in on each group during group work
Connect with Each Student
- Greet all students
- Use eye contact will all
- Ask each student about his or her life
- Laugh with students
- Solicit student opinion on the effectiveness of activities, tasks, and assessments
- Give students a voice on appropriate issues
- Ask students for help with classroom tasks
The four elements of effective classroom management, strategic planning, adequate pacing, clear transitions, and engaging teacher presence, don’t require innate talents or specialized knowledge. Teachers can take one element at a time, and give it the thought and trial and error necessary for it to develop. Putting the four elements into practice takes risk-taking, practice, and flexibility.
