Chapter 4: Classroom Management Classroom management is foundational to your teaching practice. The word “practice” is intentionally chosen because proficiency-based teaching is, in many ways, like a yoga practice or a meditation/prayer practice. It is more like an exercise in mindfulness and self-control than it is a set of nifty activities or “tricks”. In this chapter you will explore some foundations of this practice. It is strongly suggested that you return to them when needed later during the instructional sessions, which helps you effectively and efficiently move the new ideas presented here into your daily teaching practice.
The Importance of SLOW Slow pacing is the absolute foundation of classroom management. We must mentally prepare ourselves to speak extremely slowly. Way more slowly than we want to. It should be painfully slow to us. It is worth it, in many ways, but especially in classroom management, because students who comfortably comprehend our speech are easier to manage. It’s ultimately, like so much in managing others, a question of self-esteem. Students’ self-concept is a fragile thing, especially in a new language, which in a way is like building a brand-new identity, and so we want to speak slowly enough that we never lose any of them in a thicket of unintelligible sounds. We want to write or draw on the board, or place our hand or pointer physically upon a visual aid (or the projector screen displaying the visual) to support every utterance, and then walk over and point to the support before we say the word, each and every time we speak, and then take a moment, before we utter another word, to sweep the room with our eyes to check for the “light of comprehension” before moving on to another language chunk, which we will then support by, again, physically indicating the visual support, pausing, and sweeping the room again. Slow speech is of the utmost importance for student comprehension, and student comprehension is essential for classroom management. Students who do not understand what is going on in class are more apt to tune out and be disruptive. However, without a well-managed, attentive, calm class, it is virtually impossible to speak slowly enough to stay comprehensible. It is a feedback loop: A calm, well-managed class feels patient and this allows us to relax into slow speech, without feeling pressured to go faster. See the images on the next page for a detailed look at how slow “SLOW” is.
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