Classroom Management

At first my teaching tool was a ‘Respect Tree’ which grows whenever learners behave, contribute to the lesson and respect the teacher and one another. If by the end of the week the class had successfully grown their tree, they received a reward of freshly baked home-made cupcakes the following Monday morning. This would allow learners to start their week on a positive note. This tool was used as a class reward system meaning it was based on the class as a whole. This became a problem as the whole class did not behave well enough to receive the award. They simply did not care about the reward system. Discipline in this school was challenging and after the first two weeks of only using the ‘Respect Tree’ tool I noted that learners were never going to fill their tree which resulted in those well-behaved learners losing out and being neglected. I felt it was unfair to those learners who did behave, contribute to the lesson and showed respect. In order to reward these learners, I added a second part to my classroom tool.

The second part was an individual reward system, ‘Happy Box’. Learners received dots next to their names whenever the teacher noticed them being respectful, behaving or contributing to the lesson. There were three levels to the boxes. Depending on the number of dots they obtained by the end of the week they picked a prize from the corresponding box. 5 dots = level 1, 10 dots = level 2 and 15 dots = level 3.

My teaching strategy was to simply address the bad behaviour immediately. I did this by calling the disruptive learner outside of the class to address the situation away from friends so that the learner was not tempted to act out in order to get a reaction from their friends. To prevent it from occurring I asked the offending learning a question either related to the work under discussion or asked them if they required assistance with their work. I also used facial expressions to convey to the learner that their misbehaviour was not being overlooked but that the work being discussed was so important that I would not stop my lesson to address them directly and that they should be paying attention. I walked around the classroom frequently in order to discourage misbehaviour. This proved effective as I did not allow learners the opportunity to behave like clowns during the lesson. I also did not single out a learner in class which would have made them feel as though they were being targeted.