EDUC 311 CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

“Effective teacher is the one who gets most of his/her students to learn
most of what they are supposed to learn.”
Characteristics of effective teachers:
 Enthusiasm
 Warmth and humor
 Credibility
 High expectations for success
 Encouraging and supportive
 Businesslike
 Adaptable/ flexible
 Knowledgeable
Good Teacher: starts lecture on time, provides a review, gives advanced
organizer, asks higher-order questions, etc.
Effective teachers:
 Provide students with the opportunity to learn the knowledge/skill
they are expected to acquire.
 Ensure that the curriculum and desired outcomes are aligned, that
they are congruent.
 Possess some personal attributes and professional characteristics.
EFFECTIVE TEACHER
Personal Attributes and Characteristics
 Motivating Personality
 Orientation Toward Success
 Professional Demeanor

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 Professional Skills and Abilities
 Establishing Set
 Using Variety
 Optimizing Instructional Time
 Using Questions Effectively
 Providing Clear Instructions
 Monitoring Students’ Progress
 Providing Feedback and Reinforcement
Teachers with motivating and stimulating personality:
 Enthusiastic
 Warm
 Have sense of humor
 Credible
Enthusiastic Teachers:
 Confident
 Enjoy what they are doing
 Respect and trust students
 Are committed to students to subject matter
 Dynamic, stimulating, energetic, expressive
 Variety in speech, gestures and facial expressions
 Moving around the room
 Maintain eye contact with all students
 Encourage participation by all students
 Vary pitch, speed (intonation)
 Change in facial expressions (mimics and gestures effectively)
Teachers with warmth and humor:

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 Promote a supportive, relaxed, satisfying and educationally productive
environment
 Help establish positive, supportive interpersonal relationships with
students
 Help classroom relationships to be fostered
Effective Use of Humor:
 Reinforces learning
 Improve long-term retention
 Defuse tension
 Promote trust
 Reduce discipline problems
 Avoid sarcasm or cynicism
 Be careful about teasing
 Use warmth and humor in moderation
Credible Teacher:
 Trustworthy
 Creates a relaxed, supportive environment where students trust the
teacher to help them be successful
 Helps develop open and honest teacher-student interaction
 It includes your credentials, the messages you send to your students
and your behaviour.
 Regardless of your degrees, qualifications and position, you are
credible only when you are credible in the eyes of your students.
Effective Teacher: - believe in students’ abilities to learn
- believe in their own ability to help students to be
successful
High expectations for success

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Effective teachers: believe that all students can master the content and
that they themselves have the ability to bring about students’ learning
Research: When teachers’ expectations of students are raised, students
learn more.

 Receiving more academic guidance helps learning

 Hold high expectations for students
 Convey to your students that you expect them to be successful and
that you will help them to do so.
 For students who have problems and are unsuccessful attempt to
structure assignments and activities that can be successfully
completed. Good for motivation and confidence
 Keep students challenged and motivated by making assignments more
difficult.
 Get to know your students’ strengths and weaknesses and provide
opportunities for more success in problem areas
 Maintain high expectations for yourself as well: be well prepared, use
class time efficiently, provide substantive feedback, exhibit thorough
knowledge of your subject, convey confidence and calmness, dress,
act, speak professionally, work to correct deficiencies in your own
professional ability.
Encouraging and Supportive
Effective Teachers: - encouraging, supportive
- help students feel that they are accepted as
individuals
- recognize their effort and potential not merely
correct answers

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 - help students see that they can work through their
problems mostly on their own
How to demonstrate encouragement and support of your students:
1- Focus on using positive comments about students’ abilities rather than
comments about their performance.
2- Be aware of and note improvement, not just perfection.
3- Help students learn to work through their own problems and evaluate
their own work.
4- Be optimistic, positive and cheerful.
5- Demonstrate good, active listening when students are speaking (focus
our attention on the student, nod, etc.)
6- Provide several alternative routes to task completion and allow
students some degree of choice.
Effective Teachers: Knowledgeable (both subject-matter and pedagogy) (Is
that so crucial?)
Effective Teachers: Businesslike
 Task-oriented: focusing classroom activities on tasks to help students
learn
 Engaging students in meaningful, academic tasks
 Goal-oriented, serious, deliberate, organized
 Goal-oriented:Establishing clear, realistic, specific objectives and
communicating these to students.
 Serious:Seriously treated subject, professional and confident image,
appropriate verbal and nonverbal behavior.
 Deliberate: When students fail in understanding the lesson, activities
should be adapted. Alternative activities should be used as quickly as
possible.

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  Organized: Organizing the lesson based upon the established goals.
(furniture, resources, materials, equipment, activities should be well
organized to achieve goals and enhance learning)
Effective Teachers: Adaptable/ Flexible
 Be aware of the need for change and be able to adapt those changes
(improving with time)
 Get to know your students’ characteristics, attributes, preferences and
interests.
Effective Teachers: Knowledgeable
 Good teachers know their subject matter well. (Is that enough on its
own?)
Research:
 Knowledge of subject matter is important but not sufficient for
effective teaching. What seems more important is the teacher’s ability
to combine knowledge of the subject, knowledge of teaching and
knowledge of students in order to implement effective instruction.

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PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND ABILITIES OF AN EFFECTIVE
TEACHER

 Establishing set
 Using variety
 Optimizing instructional time
 Using questions
 Providing clear instructions
 Monitoring students’ progress
 Providing feedback and reinforcement

Focusing and Engaging Students’ Attention

In order to get students’ attention at the beginning of a lesson and to hold
their attention throughout the lesson; teachers must be skilled in
establishing set and in using variety.
1. Establishing set
 Set induction – provide advance organizers or lesson entry
 Capture students’ attention or provide them with a framework
for the lesson
 Help students’ relate new material or information to what has
previously been learned
 Determine students’ entry level knowledge prior to introducing
new content (establish what students already know about the
topic)

**Learning is increased and made more efficient when new

material is related to previously learned material.

Eg. “Remember yesterday we talked about……Today we are

going to talk about…..”
2. Using Variety
** Variety in class promotes motivation and learning

**Variety has a positive effect on students’ attention and involvement.

** You can bring in variety through your classroom behaviour including

 nonverbal behaviour
 instructional approaches
 classroom organization
 questioning

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  types of assessment
 gestures

!! Don’t teach every lesson for the entire year in the same way, with
the same activities arranged in the same order, using the same
monotonous voice patterns and few gestures!!

Variety in instructional activities and materials:

 Vary your instruction through using a variety of instructional
alternatives: cooperative learning, discovery learning, direct
instruction, discussions..
 Help students use five senses (see, hear, feel, taste, smell)

Variety in interaction with students:

 T<Ss, Ss >Ss
 Don’t spend an entire class period standing in one spot in the front of
the room lecturing to students.
 Include some questioning, group/pair work and some discussion
 Reinforce/praise students’ for desirable performance
 Inform students about their progress (verbal/written)
 Vary your reinforcement and praising techniques:

**smile at students
**maintain eye contact
**move closer from time to time
**laugh
**gesture towards students
can often be reinforcing and convey support and interest as well as
variety in class.

3. Using Instructional Time Efficiently

*Students learn more when they spend more time engaged in learning
activities.

Question: How can Ts use instructional time more efficiently?

 Time on Task
 Maintaining Momentum
 Smooth Transition

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 Time on Task
 No individual student is likely to be engaged 100 percent of the time
on a task.

Borich (1992) “Effective teachers maintain an academic engagement rate

of 80 to 95 percent.(P.341)

 However usually students spend about 30% of the instructional time

engaged in academic activity.

How can teachers improve their use of time?

1. Deliberately use most of the time for instruction rather than other tasks
such as checking attendance, late start, early end and excessive games.
2. Have materials, equipments, and activities planned and ready.
3. Establish and enforce rules requiring students to be on time, to be
prepared for the class.
4. Plan more instruction more than you need. You may finish the activities
earlier than you think so you have extra back up materials ready.
5. Rather than giving “free time” at the end of the lesson, review the lesson.
6. Use and enforce signal which indicates the end of the lesson.
7. Give clear instructions, check understanding, give feedback.
8. Create and maintain a highly interactive instructional pattern.
9. Spend the majority of your time on teacher-directed activities where you
can monitor students’ activities.
10. Reinforce students verbally and non-verbally.

Momentum: This term is related to effective use of time.

Kounin(1970) “Momentum refers to flow of activities and the pace of

teaching and learning which is maintained in the classroom.”

 Classroom activities: orderly, changes happen easily, without

disrupting the instructional flow.
 Pace: smooth, relatively rapid instructional pace-maintained

Goal

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 to maximize students’ engagement to help them work through
relevant materials & activities as quickly& successfully as they
can.
 By adapting the pace of your instruction to ss, abilities&
success& by working to maintain a smooth flow of class
activities with few disruptions & little ‘down time’, you help ss
learn more.
 The pace of instruction must be adapted to the difficulty/
complexity of required task.
 Maintaining momentum best works in teacher-directed
activities
 Adapt momentum to the difficulty of the task

e.g. slower pace for higher order thinking

quicker pace  for lower order thinking

 Effective teachers learn to monitor and deal with concurrent

classroom activities.
 Reduce disruptions before and during activities.
How can we use instructional time?
1. Optimizing Time: Students learn more when they spend more
time engaged in learning activities.
2. Mandated Time: The formal time scheduled for school or
academic activities.
e.g. 50 mins for each class
14 weeks in one term

3.Allocated Time: The amount of mandated time intended/

scheduled for academic activities.
e.g. 50 mins a period
4. Academic Instruction Time: Allocated time is which the teacher
is actually conducting instructional activities. Excluding checking
attendance, dealing with disciplinary problems, preparation for the
course.
5. Academic Learning Time/ Engaged Time: Time which students
are actively and successfully engaged in activities. Excluding
daydreaming, chatting, misbehaving.

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 4. Using Questions
The most effective teachers establish and maintain a highly interactive
classroom- a classroom characterized by student-student and teacher-
student dialogue rather than simple teacher talk. Integral to this type of
classroom is the teacher’s ability to use questions effectively. Bellon,
Bellon and Blank (1992) state, “Questioning is the instructional process
that is central to verbal interaction in the classroom.”
Effective questions require students to actively process information and
compose an answer. Good questions are believed to increase students’
engagement, raise the level of thought, and help students organize their
thoughts, guide students more successfully through academic tasks, and
allow the teacher to monitor understanding and to provide feedback.
Questions must be clear and concise:
 use natural, unambiguous language appropriate to the level of students
 include only the terms, words and information students need in order
to answer the question
 discard unnecessary words and parenthetical expressions
Types of questions:
 Avoid asking rhetorical questions or questions that have only one
answer: closed-response questions which can be answered with a
simple yes-no or true-false response
 Ask questions which require students to process or think about what
they are learning and to compose an answer
 Ask one question at a time otherwise students’ thinking about the
original question is interrupted
 The lower and higher-order questions: level of thought required in
order to answer the question
 Convergent and divergent questions: direction of thought required to
reach an answer (convergent: from broad or general to narrow or

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 specific: yes-no questions and factual questions are examples of
convergent questions. Divergent: require thinking that moves from
the narrow or specific to the broad and general
 Questions that emphasize content or process: content questions deal
directly with the information being learned. Process questions are
used to stimulate students’ thinking.

5.Providing Clear Instruction

Instructional clarity refers to the ability of the teacher to provide
instruction which help students come to a clear understanding of the
material. According to students clear teachers emphasize important points by
repeating them, writing them on the board, pausing after they are stated, and
reviewing them. They monitor students’ understanding (that is, clarity of
understanding) by asking questions and providing students with activities
and experiences, which allow them to apply their knowledge. When students
do not understand, clear teachers repeat, review or rephrase important points.

6. Monitoring Students’ Progress

Effective teachers are adept at monitoring students’ understanding, not
just their behavior. They carefully and continually assess students’
performance and progress and check for understanding in a variety of
ways. If understanding seems lacking, effective teachers use this as a cue
to review and possibly adapt instruction.
7. Providing Feedback and Reinforcement
Effective teachers frequently provide students with information about
their academic performance. This is most commonly done through
feedback and reinforcement. Reinforcement is meant to improve students’
motivation, while feedback is intended to inform students about the

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 accuracy of their performance. In order to use these skills effectively,
teachers must understand each of them and how they can be applied.
Feedback (sometimes called knowledge of results, or KR) is primarily
intended to:
1- inform students about the quality and accuracy of their performance
2- help them learn how to monitor and improve their own learning
Teachers must be able to use both feedback and reinforcement effectively.
Reinforcement is intended to strengthen and increase the frequency of a
desirable behavior or response, usually by providing some type of reward.
Reinforcement let students know that they have done something good in
the hope that they will do it again or with greater frequency.

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