Planning Classroom Procedures
Tips for Planning Effective Classroom Management
Orienting students around classroom seating arrangements is an important part of planning classroom procedures.
Getting to know your students is an important part of classroom management. Some students will try and test the limits of your classroom procedures. This is where your classroom seating charts will begin to serve you. All new teachers should use a classroom seating chart in order to learn the names of the students fairly quickly. Remembering the students' names right in the beginning of the school year helps to develop a more personal and direct contact.
A classroom seating arrangement to get to know the students' names however is not maximizing the usefulness of this tool. Students need to taught the classroom procedures that are inclusive of a classroom seating arrangement.
Classroom procedures of this kind include the following classroom arrangements:
- group work
- pair work
- frontal work
Over to You: What type of classroom arrangement is suitable for the type of lesson you wish to teach? When you know this, you will also be able to come up with a number of classroom procedures suitable for the classroom activities.
It is advisable not to use more than two classroom arrangements in a given lesson. For every classroom seating arrangement, students need to be taught and constantly reminded of the following classroom procedures:
- listening to instructions before being directed to performing a given task
- work procedures during the task
- terminating the task on-hand
Teach children when they are allowed to rotate around their desk, get up to use the computer, turn or move their desks to sit with another student or move back to their frontal classroom arrangements. This activity is the bulk of planning classroom procedures. Remind children five minutes ahead of time that the group work or pair work will be ending and they will need to return to their seats for the remainder of the lesson. This is the perfect time to sum up the activity, ask students what they thought of the lesson, how it could have been changed, and what they learned from such an activity.
Use your seating chart to check and see who is still not in his or her seat or if some students are trying the limits of our authority by seating in another person's seat. This is where effective classroom management techniques come in.
What kinds of classroom procedures do you recommend for a new teacher starting out? What procedures are you still having trouble with? Feel free to start a discussion and/or email me with any concerns or questions you may have for starting out the new year. There is still time! Good Luck to all new teachers!
