One of the key aspects of being a good ESL teacher is being able to control the environment you work in. Your classroom management skills are crucial to being able to produce a productive ESL environment for your students to learn in. The classroom environment can be a minefield for new, inexperienced teachers and understanding classroom dynamics can make your life as an ESL teacher immensely easier. Taking a TEFL course at Chiang Mai University, Thailand will provide you with the confidence you need to step into an ESL classroom. Until then, here are some things to take into consideration.
Firstly, as a teacher you need a certain level of respect from your students to be effective in the classroom. However, demanding respect from your students will never work. You should always command respect, but never demand it. Commanding respect is voluntary whilst demanding it is forced. Also, never get into a direct confrontation with a student. As the teacher, you MUST win any kind of confrontation because you are the authority figure in the classroom. If you lose, guess who becomes the new authority figure! Also don't shout if possible, students feel like they have won if they can make you raise your voice
In the TEFL course, there are many different ways we show you to control the classroom without raising your voice. Here are just a few things you can do. Just the position you stand in can have an impact on how your students behave. If you have a student who is being noisy and constantly disrupting the class, just the action of you walking over and standing next to him without even looking at him as you continue teaching can have surprising results. Also, how you use the tone & inflection in your voice can help to nip any disruptive behavior in the bud. If you are about to do some ESL practice and you have 2 or more kids sitting next to each other playing up, instead of having one child sit away from the other, you can do it subtly. Number all the kids off for the activity, 1,2,3,4 and 1,2,3,4 etc, and they will automatically be separated into groups without it being too obvious.
One final thing to think about that can play a big role in how your students behave is how you seat them. There are a number of different patterns, (rows, islands, a horseshoe, a circle, staggered chevrons), but the one I prefer is the horseshoe. It lets you see all your students at once without letting any of them hide like they can in the traditional "rows" pattern
During the Chiang Mai University TEFL Course all of these techniques will be taught in detail which will give you the confidence to take control of your classroom. If you can implement some of these techniques, you should find that your teaching won't be disrupted, your lessons fly by and you reach your terminal objective with ease.
