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Classroom management is a necessary and highly unique aspect of teaching. Contrary to popular belief, I do not think it should be referenced only in respect to children's classes. But rather towards a broad outlook on what it really means to manage a class (everything between disciplining ill-behaved children to using humor to lighten the mood of an otherwise flat adult class. Classroom management is anything and everything a teacher deliberately does in order to maintain or shift the dynamic of the class. I began my teaching career substitute teaching and quickly discovered that classroom management would be the most challenging aspect of the job. I taught primarily middle-schoolers, and it wasn’t about disciplining bad behavior, but rather keeping the students engaged and focused on tasks they needed to be doing. I needed to be an interesting person, make genuine connections with the students whenever possible. This would garner their respect, and naturally make them more studious. Fast-forward a few years and I am teaching English as a second language to nearly all ages of students, many of whom cannot understand my words well enough to make genuine connections. I quickly realized that I needed a better understanding of how to properly manage a class. Fortunately, I had a great teacher. This teacher’s secret weapon was eliminating downtime between activities as much as possible. I learned the art of becoming highly animated, full of energy, and never allowing a dull moment in the classroom (especially with young learners). I found it to be highly effective, but also incredibly exhausting. I needed something else in my arsenal if I was to succeed day in day out. I learned another very important aspect of managing a class—routine activities. I noticed my students began recognizing patterns in my lessons and would sometimes transition into certain activities without my explicitly directing them to do so. This not only saved me precious time but also allowed me to relax a little; save my energy. At one point I took this gem of a discovery to its max and quickly realized that my students would get bored knowing what happens next at every turn. Bored students meant poor classroom management. This made sense to me, so I scaled back the routineness of my lesson plans and discovered that a balance between routineness and unpredictability is what’s needed. Keeping a routine at the very beginning and end of class while mixing up the middle with various unanticipated activities has become the bedrock of my lesson-planning approach for the sake of attaining good classroom management. I look forward to continuing my ESL teaching journey. Whether surprising my young learners with a brand-new language game or whipping out never-before-seen authentic materials as targeted language support for my advanced adult learners, my students can now expect the unexpected, while still holding a certain degree of anticipation for how the class will be run. Building lessons by developing a routine all the while inserting unique and interesting activities into it, executing said lessons with flare, witnessing how my students behave in their reactions throughout the class, then reflecting on the class after the fact, and doing this over again and again is a process I’ve found to be incredibly enjoyable.
