Classroom Observations - Classroom Management (21-25)

 Classroom Management

In my latest observed lessons, I focused on classroom management, during which I identified different common issues present over a few different lessons. It was important to see the issues presented, how the teacher responded to them, and the final results of the situation. This is why I dedicated multiple hours in different grades and classrooms to this section to see a variety of behaviour problems, which ones are more common, and which ones are classroom or age-specific, as well as the way that the teachers dealt with them. 

One of the main problems I've witnessed in most of the classes, especially the younger ones, was the students giving verbal answers in Polish rather than English. As well as asking and answering other questions in that language. I think that the reason why this happens is because the students know that the teacher understands what they say. It is much easier for them to communicate in Polish rather than English as it is their mother tongue, whereas answering in English would take a lot of thinking and processing to get the right vocabulary and grammatical structures. A lot of the time, the questions that the students ask, or the answers that they give, are phrases or sentences that they already know and should be familiar with as most often they are correct responses to the teacher's questions, but because it is easier to use Polish they will sometimes default to it. The way that I have seen the teachers deal with this issue, and others like it, is through redirection and repetition. By this I mean, repeating the question and asking the students to give the answer in English. An example of this is the teacher saying " I don't understand" or "Ask me again in English", which prompts the student to do so in English as they have no other choice as the teacher will not acknowledge a Polish answer. At this stage, some students may give up on answering as they think it is too difficult, however as the teacher already knows that the student knows the answer, they will often try and encourage the student to answer with the vocabulary that they do know, even if their sentence structure or grammar is not fully correct, as long as they get the point across it is a success. I have seen multiple examples of this, where a student searched for the words that worked in context and even though it was not said clearly in the correct sentence order, the fact that they were able to answer anyway was a huge success. The fact that they actually tried to ask or answer in English shows progress and Improvement in the use of the language. Of course, the content of the question posed by the student is also very important, if the question is unrelated to the topic of a lesson or is something important that the student has to say, it can be impossible to expect the student to ask or answer in English. When the question is too hard or the student genuinely struggles with the answer, the teacher prompts the correct answer by giving help or hints to what the students are expected to say. And even then, sometimes even answers in Polish can be good as it shows that they understand what is being said (even if they can't fully reply in English). 

Another major issue that I have noticed throughout the majority of the classes was students talking between each other, most often in their mother tongue, disturbing both other students and the teaching of the whole lesson and proving that they are not fully paying attention either. While this is not necessarily a language class issue and more of a general classroom problem, it does disrupt the class nevertheless and so is something that I picked up on for this classroom management section. First, it is important to notice the level of disruption that this brings, as sometimes talking between classmates can be beneficial if they are talking about the work and helping each other or explaining something. But if it happens way too often, and often off-topic, to a point where it has to be dealt with, it becomes much more serious. It also depends on whether the students are talking to each other in the target language or their first language, as using the target language can sometimes be excused, as they are still learning and practising their speaking skills in this way. Yet when it gets out of control, it is important to enforce the rules and manage the classroom. 

The ways that I have seen this be managed most commonly have been through verbal warnings to either the whole class or individuals. From what I've seen, addressing the whole class about this issue as a " volume warning" is a solid start, then is the issues still persist, follow up with individual student warnings. When it comes to these there need to be some consequences if rules are constantly broken and the students don't listen, the most common consequences that I have seen have been based on losing break times, or informing parents about their child's behaviour and adding a behaviour note to their reports. They seem to work well most often in this school as I have not seen anyone lose their break so far. More serious disturbances, however, I dealt with more serious consequences. 

Another problem that can manifest in different ways is the students trying to disrupt or derail the lesson or a topic through different means. One of the ways this can be done is by students being uncooperative with what is being asked, claiming that they have never been taught a simple concept which they had been over many times in the past, or asking irrelevant (but somewhat important) questions unrelated to the work. An example of one of these was during a grammar review, a student asked "Why do we need to learn and remember the proper grammar, people would understand me anyway even if I say 'my mum don't speak English', I will still get my point across." While this may seem like a genuine question that is important to answer, the teacher's answering had to waste a lot of time that could have been used for other revisions to argue the differences of formality. After the lesson ended, I found out that the teacher had this exact discussion with the same class in the past already and had already known the answer, but wanted to sidetrack the lesson and have it explained once again. However, often the issue can be genuine and not understanding the concept (for example when some students forgot to include the word 'have' in a present perfect sentence and the teacher had to stress the importance of it and explain why), students still often do this to avoid work. Due to these issues, the teacher was not able to get through all of the content that had been planned for the lesson and so had to alter her plans and schedules for the next classes. 

The last example that I want to talk about can happen in a specific situation, that being group work. Class management when the students are working in groups can be quite difficult as there is a lot more to manage with them working together, but it can be also very rewarding for the students. Volume levels, unrelated chatter, and not doing the work can be big issues that can be hard to manage especially if the students are allowed to pick their own groups and work together with their friends. However, in my observations, I have seen a lot of good management techniques for these situations and made sure to take note of them. The first and most important aspect of group work is the teacher giving clear instructions before the activity begins, for example, "you have to finish all of the sentences because you don't know which one is going to be asked of which group". By giving this kind of introduction it ensures that the students will put a lot of effort into answering the questions as they have to focus on all of them which gives them less time to mess around and go off-topic. The second most important management technique when it comes to group work is checking in on all of the groups and making sure that they are on task and working together, some of the common phrases that I heard from the teachers during group work were: "are you finished?", "work together", and "you're working in a group, why aren't you discussing what you need to do together?". It is through these, among others, that keep the students focused and on track as they know that the teacher is listening and expects answers from all of the groups. 

While there are other different classroom management issues, the ones that I have mentioned here are the most common problems that occur among different classes and age groups and knowing how to deal with them is, in my opinion, important for effective classroom management which will produce better results and keep the class more under control than without them.