Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in KAifAqu Guanweihui? Are you interested in teaching English in Yangzhou Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Good classroom management techniques can make class more effective, but there are no universal standards of classroom management. Different classes need different classroom management techniques. There are online classes and offline classes. When teaching, it’s easy to use your eye contact, gesture and voice to manage your offline class. Because students are right in front of you, they can understand what you are trying to say right away. During an offline class, I usually use eye contact to check if students are participating, to maintain the discipline, and to give them the a signal to start or stop. It works most of the time. I use gestures to convey the meaning of language, students are very interested to guess my gestures. So, it can also engage students and reduce the need for explaining. I use my gestures to tell the students when they are right and when they are wrong. When I cross my arms, it means “wrong”, when I give them a thumb up, it means “well done”. Students can easily understand these simple gestures. I use my voice according to the situations. When I am in a large, noisy classroom, I usually raise my voice to make sure every student can hear me. During an offline class, it’s easy to separate students in groups, or work as a class. At the same time, it’s easy for students to take part in group activities. When we are working as a class, students can interact with any other members in the classroom. But it also reduces the students’ speaking opportunities. So, sometimes, I let the students work on their own or in pairs. But during an online class, some of the classroom management techniques do not work as well as an offline class. Because, the gesture, voice and eye contact are limited by technology. For example, in an online classroom, most of the time, I can’t make direct eye contact with the students. In addition, when we are having an online class, students are in different places, most of them are at home, so, the classroom management techniques make not work as well as if they were in a real classroom. And it’s difficult to separate students in groups, that means they cannot work in groups. As a result, in an online class, teachers should use different classroom management techniques including: establishing classroom rules, frequent parent communication, variety of activities. Teachers are not able to see all of students at the same time in an online class. So, establishing classroom rules in the beginning is necessary. Because in an online classroom teachers’ abilities are limited, they can not remind the students immediately when the students are not paying attention, but the parents can. So communicating with the parents about the students’ behavior, cooperating with the parents to manage your class. This is also an effective way to manage online classes. Because online interaction is limited, students get bored easily. So the teacher shouldn’t frequently use the same methods to interact with students. Teachers should make their classroom management techniques flexible, to make your class more efficient.
