Your classroom management is the way that you manage students’ learning by organising
and controlling what happens in your classroom …
• Or the way that you consciously decide not to organise and control.
• Or the way that you delegate or relinquish such control to the learners.
It is also what happens (or doesn’t happen) when you avoid or remain ignorant about
these choices.
The classroom management choices you make play a large part in creating the
individual working atmosphere of your class – how it feels to be in a room with you as
a teacher. Whether it is an enjoyable, engaging place to be learning or whether it is dull,
uninvolving and uninspiring. They re ect what you believe about teaching and learning,
about learners and their potential and about the relationship of teacher to learner. They
reveal how everyone relates to the class as a whole and to the hierarchy of the learning
institution you are a part of.
Behind each selection of a technique is an intention – the thing that you want to happen.
A teacher who always keeps the students in whole-class mode and never makes use of
pair work or group work of any kind may be a teacher who believes in such ‘traditional’
educational approaches, or one that has never thought about or questioned them very
much. Or perhaps this sort of teacher is afraid of losing control over things or thinks that
whole-class teaching is what the school or students expect and demand.
Similarly, at another extreme, a teacher who runs lessons in which the students always
take the lead and decide what they want to do and how they want to do it may be
working in such a way based on de nite beliefs. Or perhaps that is simply what they have
always done – and they will continue to do so – in the absence of clear ideas about how
things might be done differently.
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