Tips for Real Classrooms

 

Tips for Real Classrooms

    You can be a prospective teacher or a new teacher who struggles with how to overcome problems in your classroom or you can be a  professional teacher who looks for new ideas to refresh your teaching style. 

Whether you are professional or not, you are in the right place to find out more about helpful tips for real classrooms: 

• Decide on agreeable and positive classroom rules: If you are a new teacher or you are at the very beginning of the academic term, it’s useful to decide on agreeable and positive classroom rules with your students to prevent possible classroom management problems in the future. Besides, you need to type these rules in big size and support with visual aids so that everyone in your classroom sees and makes sense of them. 

• Be well-prepared: You should prepare lesson plans by considering duration of the lesson, topic, goals, objectives, students’ proficiency level, age, characteristics, learning styles and interests. At this point, you had better think of preparing back-up activities for extra time at the end of the lesson. 

• Get to know your students very well: Some students can be tactile, visual, auditory, kinesthetic. Your games and activities should address different senses and learning styles so that you reach everyone in your class. 

• Decide on what kind of game you should prefer if you plan: Some classes may prefer cooperative games to competitive games or vice versa. After getting to know your students very well, you should decide on the type of game that is appropriate for your class. 

• Make a difference and start your lesson in an enjoyable way: You can start your lesson with a short ice-breaker activity to get your students’ attention and to help them get ready for the lesson. 

• Make smooth transitions in your lesson: You should make smooth transitions among pre, while, post phases of the lesson by setting your activities in meaningful contexts and linking them so that you have a more engaging lesson. 

• Use materials that can grab attention: If you have a very noisy class or you make a transition between activities, you can get your students’ attention with materials that make noises. For instance, you can ring a bell if you have one or you can fill a colourful can with beans, in that way, its colour and the noise you make when you shake it can grab attention, easily.

• Create a suitable classroom arrangement: 

• Some students may be noisy when they sit together. You can ask them to sit next to another friend for your class to make sure that they do not interrupt the lesson. 

• Some students could have problems with sight and hearing. You can ask them to sit on a desk close to the board. 

• Some students can be quite introvert and shy. Therefore, you feel that you need to help them improve their social skills by grouping them with other extrovert and social students they can easily communicate with, especially for pair and group works. The same thing is for multi-ability classes, as well. You can group students with different skills together for tasks.  

• Differentiate tasks: Some students in your class could have a higher proficiency level than other students. Considering ‘’i+1’’ in Krashen’s Theory and your students’ different proficiency levels, you can prepare tasks in a slightly higher level than your students’ level. On the other side, the level of activities in the course book can be lower or higher than your students’ proficiency level. You may need to adjust them to their level by omitting, adding, changing some questions and using other adaptation techniques. 

• Bring new materials to your class: In order to enrich your classes, you should bring engaging and visual materials like authentic materials that are specifically for native speakers (e.g. films, cartoons, magazines, newspapers, etc.), pictures, flashcards, videos, songs, story books, pop-up books, puppets, realias (real objects), toys, origami, kirigami, etc. 

• Integrate technology into your class: You can prepare or find instructional presentations, online games and activities if you are willing to bring innovation to your class. However, it’s important to keep in your mind that you should set a balance between online activities and real-life activities. 

• Finish your lesson in an engaging way: You can summarise or ask the students to summarise the lesson, briefly by asking what they do and learn during the lesson; you can assign homework if you feel that they need more practice. 

It’s better to remember that these ways will help you cope with problems and create a more engaging and enjoyable real classroom environment in the long term.