I still clearly remember how I felt walking into my first class of 45 Grade 1 students. I was really nervous despite the fact that I’d already taught young learners in small classes for five years. How could my old ESL classroom management tricks and techniques possibly work in such a large class? How could I control that many students?
I learned a lot that morning and I’ve learned more since then, including that I wasn’t alone in my fears. Most new preschool and primary school teachers in public schools worry especially about how to manage their students. It’s what I’m most contacted about by teachers both here in Ho Chi Minh city and beyond.
I’ve also learned that most new teachers have a narrow, limited view of ESL classroom management. Many of them end up struggling – often until they bitterly quit and look for work elsewhere.
The Limited View of ESL Classroom Management
New teachers usually focus on only a few key elements to improve behavior within their classrooms. There’s a lot to remember! Each of these basics is necessary for classes to run smoothly for the long term, though they’re not everything that’s needed.
ESL Classroom Management Basics
Behavior Management Systems (BMS)/Reward Systems:These are visual systems used in every lesson to show students, groups, teams or the whole class how well they’re doing. These often use points, stars, characters or other child-friendly elements. Many teachers give out small prizes such as candy, stickers, stamps, or the chance to play a fun game.
Related Post: This Behavior Management System Will Rescue Your ESL Classes
Rules: These tells students what to do (or what not to do) in class. They should help guide students in how to be successful and secure in class. Good ESL class rules are also easy to understand visually, action oriented, and positive (do this – not don’t do this)
Related Post: Set Rules for Success in ESL
Teaching Persona: This is the unique personality that each teacher brings to their class. There are teachers who are a mix of strict or relaxed, funny or serious, energetic or low-key, in-between and more. There is no “right” persona but there are common mistakes made at the extreme ends, plus different reactions from students. Finding your persona is an important early step.
Rapport: This is the connection teachers make with their students and how easily they get along with them. Some teachers walk into a classroom and have an instant rapport with their students. Others take time to build those relationships. Rapport is closely tied with teaching persona, but it also includes getting to know each student and class’s personality, chemistry, and interests.
Routines: These include how to start each lesson, how to pass out papers, how to choose participants, how to get everyone’s attention and more. They’re done in every lesson, either by the teacher or students. Teachers who intentionally set and practice routines get much better behavior from their students. They have smoother lessons because everyone is clear about how things should be done.
Related Post: Attention Routines – Save Your Voice & Sanity in ESL
All of these are critical for great classes. One thing to avoid, though, is thinking of ESL classroom management as separate from the rest of a lesson. I’ve met many teachers who just think effective management means just having the right rules and reward system, plus having a fun teaching persona. They often also divide their classes into teams to compete against each other. They also use a few games such as Slap the Board or Sticky Ball to entertain their students.
That formula got me and many others through some long months. Unfortunately it often sours or fails to fix every classroom. I had multiple classes each week that I dreaded going to within a few months. The limited view of effective classroom management includes many crucial elements, but it wasn’t enough for me or others to be successful in large public school classes for the long term.
The Holistic View of ESL Classroom Management
It wasn’t until later; after chaotic classes, training, reading, and observations that I finally put the pieces together (I’m a slow learner). Effective classroom management is deeply integrated and connected with every aspect of your lesson in a complicated web. Failing or succeeding to manage each strand greatly affects how well the rest of your lesson holds up. You can have the clearest rules, the coolest reward system, the most awesome prizes and an amazing teaching personality but still have everything fall apart if you drop a strand or two.
Put simply, there are three additional major strand groups that new teachers should watch to perfect their ESL classroom management. Each of these is complex in its own right and takes time to get good at, but being aware of the connections will be a great start.
Empathy and Understanding for ESL Students
As new teachers there’s so much for us to keep track of that it’s very easy to forget about our students. We see them and we interact with them, but we often forget that they’re real people, too. We want them to be the model students of our imaginations. They should sit nicely, speak quietly, raise their hands, listen to the teacher and do their best. Unfortunately, our imaginations ignore the basic needs of the actual children who are sitting in our classrooms.
Movement: Children have growing bodies, tons of energy and a real need to move their bodies. Sitting in chairs for long periods, even just ten or twenty minutes, can make them restless and uncomfortable. We should include activities that involve moving their arms and legs. These help students engage and focus in both those activities and the rest of the lesson.
Related Post: Move Your Students with Kinesthetic Learning and TPR in ESL
Success: Kids need to feel capable, successful, and get recognition from adults and their friends. Growing up is in part a process of getting better at a widening range of skills. They want to know and show that they can do things – and they need others to see them. We make them feel successful by giving meaningful praise and reviewing their accomplishments at the end of each lesson.
Related Post: ESL Classroom Management – Catch Them Being Good!
Important: Children need to feel important and also able to make their own choices. We all need autonomy, even preschoolers. We can give this to them by using their names, making eye contact, letting them make small decisions, and giving them opportunities to independently use English in games.
Related Post: How to Handle Difficult Students in ESL Classes
Secure: Students need to feel safe and cared for. Children who don’t feel secure are unable to play, learn, or focus. We can foster security by setting clear rules and routines, being consistently calm and in-control, and organizing classes for positive culture with healthy levels of stress and risk.
Classroom Set-up: How chairs and desks in classes are organized can also affect our students. We should make sure everyone can easily see our faces and we can see theirs. If students can’t follow our faces then they often can’t follow us or our lessons. It’s also impossible to judge how a student is feeling if we can’t see their face. Preschoolers also often struggle with bumping into each other and keeping their hands to themselves. If they’re squished in next to each other then they’ll have difficulties focusing and will need to be spread out. We usually can’t rearrange students or chairs in many public primary schools, but we can at least be aware of our own positioning.
Children aren’t able to articulate these needs, but they feel them and they suffer when they aren’t met. Children “misbehave” in reaction to that suffering. As new teachers we often forget but we should understand and empathize with these needs; they’re the same as ours. If we can meet each of them then our students’ behavior and the rest of our ESL classroom management will be better.
Related Post: Four Common ESL Teaching Mistakes That Undermine Lessons
Lesson Planning & Activities with ESL Classroom Management
How well we plan our lessons for our students greatly affects their behavior. Students lose interest in teachers who come in without a plan and they get frustrated by unclear presentations. Beyond that somewhat obvious (but important) point there are several other issues that affect our ESL classroom management.
Predictable and Consistent: Students feel comfortable and confident when they know what to expect. They feel insecure and anxious with too much change. We should build opening routines and predictable lesson plan structures to give them that familiarity.
Stirrers and Settlers: They get restless when lessons are too settled. They also get overly excited with too many energetic, stirring activities. We can give them a mixture of activities to help balance their energy levels.
Related Post: Ride the Roller-Coaster for Better EFL Classroom Management
Rate of Participation: Many teachers lose their students’ interest with activities designed for just a couple students to play at a time. We should create activities that involve everyone or have very limited waiting times. Games with many opportunities to play keep everyone engaged.
Related Post: Increasing ESL Participation Rates
Clear Purpose: We can also quickly lose their attention if they don’t know the purpose or why they should try their best in a lesson or an activity. By telling students the goals at the start we can help them see the bigger picture.
Engaging: Teachers also have to deal with bad behavior when their lessons are boring. We can make students want to participate in our lessons by including a little humor, some colorful images, and connections with their interests.
Challenge: Lessons and activities that are either too easy or difficult quickly fall apart. Children like a challenge that they can complete, though a little help here and there is also important.
Personalized: Activities that let students make choices, talk about themselves or their interests are more engaging than using just robotic answers. We can also let students make choices about activities to give them more personalized control.
Successful: As above, students need to feel successful. They need to sense their progress within a lesson and a course. Tying activities together so they build on each other and reviewing content at the end each lesson helps students recognize their achievements.
A well-planned and executed lesson plan goes hand-in-hand with great classroom management. However, no reward system can save you if your lessons are poorly planned.
Teacher Talk & Instructions with ESL Classroom Management
Our time spent talking to students strongly affects our classroom behavior. Attention is an exhaustible resource and listening to a foreign language is especially draining. How we talk during lessons greatly affects how well our students behave – or misbehave. In addition, the quality of our instructions for activities can be the difference between success and failure.
Teacher Talk Level (TTL): I’ve watched many lessons dissolve into restless chaos because the teacher talked above their students’ abilities. Children are comfortable with not understanding everything, but they lose patience when they can’t follow their teacher’s lesson. We need to identify and match our students’ listening abilities and be intentional with language use choices.
Teacher Talk Time (TTT): How long we talk for and what we talk about also greatly affects our lessons. Telling personal stories, narrating a lesson “so, now I’m going to get the papers for our next activity”, repeating students’ answers, or verbally explaining concepts are examples of TTT that can easily derail lessons because they overtax students’ abilities and limit their chances for meaningful participation. We should count our TTT spans with preschoolers and many primary students in seconds, not minutes.
Visual Support & Gestures: Because young students often struggle with our TTL and TTT we should provide them with lots of visual and hand gestures. We can use drawings, pictures, and mimed actions to help them – especially the weaker listeners – understand our meaning.
Related Post: Use Gestures for ESL Awesomeness
Clear Instructions: I’ve watched many well-designed activities fall apart because their instructions weren’t staged or explained well. Doing things like getting ourselves completely ready, getting everyone’s attention, and distributing materials at the right time are necessary for running activities smoothly. We need to plan and stage our instructions carefully. I often recommend to new teachers to focus on building good habits here. Poor instructions are a common cause of bad student behavior.
Related Post: Ready Yourself for Awesome EFL Instructions
Improving Your ESL Classroom Management
As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into getting a class to run smoothly (and I’m sure this article has missed at least a few points). As you start building your teaching skills it’s crucial to pause and reflect after your lessons. Take note of what went well and what didn’t. Make theories about what to do better and try them out. When I’ve done this with new teachers after observations we’ve often discovered that problems weren’t arising from a lack of rules or BMS, but rather from issues with one or more of the other threads.
Speaking of observations, I suggest you try to observe colleagues as early and often as you can. My teaching got much better when I started watching other teachers’ lessons and discussing with them afterwards. You’ll get new ideas, see what works (and what doesn’t) and start seeing how everything connects in the classroom environment.
Good luck with your classes! As always, please like, share and comment below!
Are you looking to upgrade your classroom management skills?
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