What skill is required for good classroom management
Important points for good classroom management are decisions and actions. The actions are what is done in the classroom. The decisions are about whether to do these actions. Any moments you feel that you’d better change something in the class, you’ll have several options and you’ll have to choose one action that you believe is the best way for the class and students so they can study more comfortably. Having plenty of options that you can implement and choosing a proper action in the bunch of options are very important for a good teacher and those skills make students believe you and build a good relationship between students and teachers.
What we shouldn’t do in teaching speaking is to have students have a conversation without giving them any specific topic and frame. In order to improve students’ speaking skills, of course we have to get students to speak English and to communicate with other students using English. It is a good way to do some activities to have students communicate with each other with fun so they can speak English for a long time without getting bored, however, what if students have no specific topic or frame? They’ll be confused and have no idea about what they need to further talk about. That situation could make teachers lose students’ credit because students always want to feel that they are protected by teachers.
One good way to teach listening class is to use the ‘big to small’ task sequence. This method will work well for many standard course book and classroom recordings. According to this method, we start listening class with easy and general questions, then we ask students more detailed questions. If we ask students some difficult, detailed questions from the beginning, students will lose their confidence since those questions might be too difficult to answer for some students. First, we need to build students’ confidence with a couple of easy questions and then, we have students challenge some difficult questions. This will be effective for listening class.
Lastly, I’d like to mention what the advantages are to use magazines or newspapers as teaching materials. One advantage is that magazines and newspapers are quite familiar to us in real life, so students can learn real issues in English from those materials. Another advantage is that newspaper consists of a lot of categories; sports, politics, gossip, job advertisement, real estate information, comics, etc. Besides, those are usually including a lot of pictures, so Teachers can easily make many activities from newspaper although teachers have to choose appropriate issues as teaching materials for students.
by Yohei
