Journal 3

This is my third journal about the questions “How can you increase your classroom management abilities?”, “Can you communicate with the students effectively?”, and “Why is it so important to have good rapport with students?”

HOW SHOULD WE MANAGE THE CLASS?

         Teachers are always with students at schools, so interaction with students is inevitable. As prospective teachers, we should pay much attention to this issue because how we interact with students has great effects in our teaching. Being always with the same students might cause the relationship between teachers and the students to be too free and easy after a while. Classroom management is one area in which students, teachers, classroom environment, materials in the class are all included. Therefore, teachers may have difficulties in managing the class due to lack of control.

            What makes the classroom management difficult? I will try to give an answer to this question by giving examples from my training school experiences. In my training school; for instance, some teachers are very good at managing the class while some others cannot achieve it even for only five minutes. Considering the difference between these two types of teachers, it is of high importance for us to find classroom management methods. One of the teachers I observed was a native speaker, and there are a lot to say about classroom management in her lessons. First of all, both the teacher and the students did not listen to each other, they shouted at each other and the students did not respect to the teacher. When I first saw this situation I was shocked, and I thought whether they had a lesson or not. Before I observed that class, I had always thought that native speakers were better at classroom management than non-native teachers, but it is not actually so. In non-native teachers’ classes students obeyed the rules, listened to their teachers, and did what their teacher asked them to do.

            As for the classroom management in my official and unofficial presentations, it looked difficult to achieve at the beginning of the year. However, as I experienced the feeling of becoming a teacher, I became happier and more self-confident. I think I reflected my feelings to students, and we established a warm, personal relationship with the students. Therefore, we can say that it is crucial to make the students feel that we are really caring for them. If we can give the students this impression, there will be no problems at all. Students need to be cared and loved; therefore, everything is up to us.