Section 3: Classroom Etiquette

Chapter 20: Problems in the Classroom

In the classroom a huge variety of problems can easily arise. For example, there are students that run around during class time, students that don’t ever want to listen to the teacher, students that hate being at school, students who try to talk over you, students who use their native language instead of ever interacting in English, and students that hit or push other students. These things can all be handled with classroom management tips, every student and class is different so you will have to sometimes work on and perfect your own method. Always moving to discipline or yelling is definitely not ideal and rarely actually works on students when you have a problem. A very effective method of getting students back on track and listening is counting down from 5 to 0 (5….4….3….2….1….0) and expecting them to be sitting down and listening and if your students do not listen or ignore you, you can take away something from them like a sticker or give them a repercussion with whatever method you use to reward or punish your students. However, with this method you should not be overly harsh and use it mostly as a tool to get your students listening and on track. Learning what brings your students back into the lesson and what you can use in order to get them to listen is a very important system to set up as soon as possible with your students. Being able to control and get your students listening after just counting down from 5 to 0 is something that is very helpful and it cannot be underestimated in how important a simple system is in your classroom.