Chapter 9: Who’s The Boss around Here? Managing Your Classroom 131
✓ No smoking in the classroom.✓ No eating during the lesson.
✓ Mobile phones must be switched off or on silent. If a student leaves the
room to answer a call, he’s only allowed to re-enter at the teacher’s dis-
cretion.✓ Students shouldn’t speak to each other while you’re addressing the
class and only one student can speak to the class at a time.Keeping Order
Once you’ve set up the course and the classroom you need to think about
managing the people. Your aim is to build confidence in your students so that
they respect your guidance and instructions. At the same time, you should
encourage a learning environment that sees all the students treated fairly
by you and their classmates. When a student is disruptive you need to deal
with the matter efficiently so that there’s minimal distraction from the lesson.
Learning English is the priority so other matters that students choose to
raise shouldn’t use up valuable lesson time.These tips can help you set the right tone and expectations for your students:✓ Teach classroom language. Tell students the words they need to com-
municate their learning problems to you. It’s easy to lose control of a
class when they stop speaking English in favour of their mother tongue,
but if they know how to say things like, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.
Could you repeat please?’ they can let you know when things are going
wrong. You can put phrases like this up on the wall or ask students to
write them at the back of their course books.
I teach words such as stationery, classroom furniture and several
polite requests too. One example is Would you excuse me for a moment?
because when students lack this kind of vocabulary they fall back on
their own language again.
✓ Don’t start until everyone is listening. There’s nothing worse than
shouting over boisterous students in an attempt to teach the other qui-
eter ones. It’s best to ask for silence and wait for it. Those who want to
learn actually help you to maintain order.
Some cultures find speaking over one another acceptable so you may
want to point out what you consider to be good classroom etiquette at
the start of the course.