CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT: LARGE CLASSES

PEDAGOGICAL PLANNING

To manage a large group is difficult but not impossible. The video suggests starting the level, course or year by having a diagnostic test in which you as teacher will know the students´ need and strengths and then you can prepare your lesson plan easily. Something really important is that we as teacher must not label students as intelligent, fool, etc because that leads to other problems.
When having a big group, something that I have experience is that you can not remember all the students´ name very well, but you must find the way you can do it because if not students may not feel important in the classroom in you do not call them by their names. With a big group, it is recommendable to have groups work and in that way you will rotate your attention to them, I mean you will not be paying attention just to the same students and believe me that will help you to remember their names.

CLASSROOM LEARNING SYSTEM

Here is really important that a teacher uses all his/her creativity to create a nice environment, but how? Well what I could see in the video is that when you change from one activity to another one it has to be smoothly, it means that the change must not feel like “hard” let say. The explanation must be given clearly. Something else that I liked is that we should somehow find the way how students may help us to check their work or their partners´ work and I think it would be nice to do this.

STUDENTS BEHAVIOR

This is really important cuz from this depend how successful your class will be. In this part students can help us to establish the classroom rules everybody will follow. The treatment is really important too because you must be fair (treat all students equally), we can not humiliated students, and of course we must respect all our students as we are going to ask them that.

I think that in our country some of these ideas are already applied, but we can take into consideration the other ones in order to do a better job.

USING INTERNET TOOLS

It would be nice that somehow you as English teacher can have your students interact with internet tools, but you have to be careful as not all the students will feel comfortable using or working on them.

To be honest the last time we were working with internet tools, I felt disappointed. First because the computer did not work well, so when the teacher was explaining something, I was lost and I could not do anything. Second I think is because the tools the teacher gave us are not well-known well at least for me, so I did not feel like motivated to work on those tasks let’s say, but I could realize that some of my classmates were eager to work on them which is nice.

I think it can be important to use internet tools with the EFL students as they can help us to carry out any task but as I have said before we have to be careful on what we want students to learn and what the purpose on those tools is, I mean we can not bring any web sites we want. We need to have a clear objective on why we want our students to know about a web site.

Maybe the use of these tools can be related with the logical intelligence as these people have a clear idea of the information they are acquiring, and because they like to solve any difficulty they may have and for me using internet tools have some difficulties.