Classroom Management and Student Discipline

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

I recently encountered two of my former students in a Chiang Mai restaurant, and asked them how they were doing in the job market. They had completed their training in December, and both quickly began to teach. But their working situations are as different as chalk and cheese. One teaches six classes of young Thai teenagers in a public school, and each of her classes has perhaps 50 students enrolled. The other works as a one-to-one English tutor, and teaches only 18 hours per week. His students are mostly Thai adults, but they also include two Korean teenagers.

As far as classroom management is concerned, this study in contrasts illustrates the extremes that English language teachers are likely to experience.

Think about it: The teacher with hundreds of students is dealing with individuals she will never know by name. The situation militates against her being able to give personal attention to anyone. Her students are there because the law requires them to study English. Their previous English teaching has been from teachers with mixed (generally poor) language instruction skills. The distractions of the classroom are legion for both teacher and student. Many of her students have raging hormones and little motivation to learn English.

In the tutor-teacher’s case, the situation is upside down – or, some would say, right side up. The students only get personal care. The teacher gets to know them quite well. They are studying English because they want to learn the language, and are therefore highly motivated. Their previous language instruction is irrelevant, because their tutor rough tunes to their level, and heals the areas important to them. And besides having motivation, his students are more mature. They do not let their hormones disrupt the operation of the classroom.

Without a doubt these classes illustrate two extremes in classroom management. But has one of these teachers been dealt a bad hand in the gin rummy of teaching, while the other got a royal flush? I suggest not. When I asked the two teachers how their first month had gone, both said “I love it!” Different strokes for different folks.

Classroom Management: And this brings us around to the issue of good classroom management. Teachers have to manage their classrooms well so their teaching can be effective. Good management creates an environment that helps students learn. Good classroom management reveals and influences your attitude, talents, perceived role, voice and body language. It strongly affects teacher-student interactions, including the challenges associated with teaching to large groups.

Okay, enough of the abstractions. What exactly is classroom management? It is what you do to make your teaching area a good place to learn in. For example, the physical environment of the classroom can contribute to student learning; while all classroom seating arrangements have strengths and weaknesses, you have to decide which one works best for you. There are ways to arrange classroom seating to encourage student interaction. Should you set your students’ chairs in a horseshoe? A circle? How about the old standby, rows of student desks? Each works best in different situations. As a classroom manager, your job is to think through seating plans and other physical arrangements (like making sure the classroom isn’t too hot) that will work best for your students.

What else can you do to optimize the learning process? Perhaps nothing is more important in a classroom than letting your students feel safe – the process Stephen Krashen calls lowering the affective filter. A huge part of your role as a teacher is to build a positive climate, letting your students know there are rewards for taking risks in your classroom. Classroom management involves looking after such details as having a place to post student essays, for example.

One way to make students feel safe is to clarify classroom procedures and rules. Part of helping students feel secure is to establish clear rules and class routines. And it involves discipline. Let’s talk about that.

The Learner’s Age: One place to start is to consider that each class you teach is likely to include students of about the same age. Thus, your students will probably be children, adolescents or adults, not all three. So let’s look at those three groups in age rank.

1. When you teach children, it is important to differentiate between two life stages – young children who are 5-8 years old, and mature children who are 8-11. In terms of how their minds work, the mature children are cognitively close to adolescents and adults. Young children, by contrast, are cognitively closer to Martians. According to one popular text on teaching English to children,

The adult world and the child's world are not the same. Children do not always understand what adults are talking about. Adults do not always understand what children are talking about. The difference is that adults usually find out by asking questions, but children don't always ask. They either pretend to understand, or they understand in their own terms and do what they think you want them to do.

In both cases, young learners have special requirements. They have short attention spans, and require lots of physical play and teacher patience. They sometimes have trouble differentiating between fact and fiction. They have little life experience, but buckets of honesty. And while they may have respect for authority, they have a great deal of imagination. A teacher may feel that on some levels communication is impossible.

2. When you teach adolescents, you are dealing with a different crowd. They often have attitude. They respond to peer-pressure. They are often insecure, their hormones may be running wild, and they are developing life experience. As they go through the rapid transition between childhood and adulthood, they are often seeking knowledge and self-identity. Many challenge authority, and in the language classroom that means you.

3. Adults are another story. They have life experience and, because they are unlikely to be taking English because they have to, they are likely to be well motivated. They are also likely to be more tolerant and self-aware, but they may be status conscious. This latter issue can be an issue in a number of ways. For one, in terms of age they are peers of the teacher. If they are wealthy, older or high-status professionals, they may consider themselves to outrank you. Therein lay minefields. Don’t ever believe that adult students won’t ever give you discipline problems. Most won’t, but some do.

An article by US educator Budd Churchward suggests a way to apply the thought of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg to the problem of classroom discipline for children and adolescents. His ideas put the lie to the urban myth that a class full of young adolescents is a class out of control. Purveyors of this notion, which is common in the United States, for example, support it with such unexamined statistics as the one that the dropout rate for America’s urban teachers is 40-50 percent. Does this mean the students were out of control, the teachers got offers for better jobs, or the teachers were ready for a change?

Kohlberg developed theories about the stages of moral and ethical reasoning among people. Through his work, which included in-depth studies of youngsters from many parts of the world, he developed a scheme of moral development consisting of three levels (each made up of two separate stages). He suggested that almost everyone, regardless of culture, race, or sex, experiences at least the first four stages.

The Encyclopedia of Psychology explains the four stages thus:

Each stage involves increasingly complex thought patterns, and as children arrive at a given stage they tend to consider the bases for previous judgments as invalid. Children from the ages of seven through ten act on the pre-conventional level, at which they defer to adults and obey rules based on the immediate consequences of their actions. The behaviour of children at this level is essentially pre-moral. At Stage 1, they obey rules in order to avoid punishment, while at Stage 2 their behaviour is mostly motivated by the desire to obtain rewards. Starting at around age ten, children enter the conventional level, where their behaviour is guided by the opinions of other people and the desire to conform. At Stage 3, the emphasis is on being a "good boy" or "good girl" in order to win approval and avoid disapproval, while at Stage 4 the concept of doing one's duty and upholding the social order becomes predominant. At this stage, respecting and obeying authority (of parents, teachers, God) is an end in itself, without reference to higher principles. By the age of 13, most moral questions are resolved on the conventional level.

For purposes of classroom discipline, Churchward says that only these four of Kohlberg’s stages are important.

The Learner’s Stage: At the risk of over-simplifying his ideas, here is a brief review of the approach to discipline that Churchward develops. It strongly reflects Kohlberg’s stages.

1. Stage 1 discipline problems, he argues, involve recalcitrant behaviour. This is the power stage, in which might makes right. The students refuse to follow directions. They are defiant and require a great deal of attention. “Fortunately, says Churchward, “few of the students we see in our classrooms function at this stage. Those who do, follow rules as long as the imbalance of power tilts against them. Assertive teachers with a constant eye on these students can keep them in line. Turn your back on them, and they are out of control.”

2. Self-serving behaviour is the ruling characteristic of Stage 2; Churchward calls it the reward and punishment stage, in which the student’s key question is, “What’s in it for me?” In class, these students behave either because they will receive candy, free time or some other reward, or because they do not like what will happen to them if they do not behave. “Most children are moving beyond this stage by the time they are eight or nine years old”, Churchward explains. “Older students who still function at this stage do best in classrooms with assertive teachers.” Assertive teachers – the ones who insist on class control – are the ones who fare best with stage 1 and 2 students.

3. Churchward characterizes Stage 3 as one of interpersonal discipline, in which the student is out to make the teacher’s day. In this stage the student’s main question is “How can I please you?” He adds, “Students functioning at Stage 3 make up most of the youngsters in our middle and junior high schools. These kids have started to develop a sense of discipline. They behave because you ask them. This is the mutual interpersonal stage. They care what others think about them, and they want you to like them.” These children need little discipline. Ask them to settle down and they will. They rarely need a heavy-handed approach to classroom discipline.

4. The last stage of classroom discipline involves self-discipline. This is the social order stage, characterized by the student belief that “I must behave because it is the right thing to do.”

“Students functioning at Stage 4 rarely get into any trouble at all,” Churchward says. “They have a sense of right and wrong. Although many middle school and junior high school students will occasionally function at this level, only a few consistently do. These are the youngsters we enjoy working with so much….You can leave these kids alone with a project and come back 20 or 30 minutes later and find them still on task.” Many adolescent students do not operate at this stage, but they are near enough to it that they understand how it works. “Cooperative learning activities encourage students to function at this level,” he adds. “The teacher who sets up several groups within the classroom gives students a chance to practice working at this level.” You should wait close by, though, ready to step in when needed.

Churchward’s ideas are useful and relevant, and he does a good job of developing a practical application for Kohlberg's theoretical concepts. Put in the context of managing the classroom, his thinking offers a helpful understanding of the psychology of our younger learners, and contributes to the larger issue of class management.

On Churchward's website – which also promotes a computer system for managing classroom discipline (free trial available) – is a description of 11 techniques for better classroom discipline. I recommend you take a look at it.

The Great Motivators

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

For teachers, four key factors affect the rate at which a student learns a second language. (I am referring to external factors. Although they clearly have roles to play, such considerations as attitude, aptitude and previous experience in language learning don't count in the context of this discussion.)

The most important factor relates to the student's primary motivation. Language theorists often describe a language student's primary form of motivation as either instrumental or integrative motivation.

Instrumental motivation is the weaker form. Common among those learning English, for example, with no intention of ever living in a country like Britain or Canada, instrumental motivation is the prime mover of those who want to learn a language as a tool for some secondary purpose – talking to tourists, for example. Integrative motivation is a greater force. It is the motivation of those who are learning a second language in a new country, and they are learning the language so they can integrate into a new society.

The second fundamental factor affecting language learning is the amount of time the student spends in class and practicing the language. Generally speaking, more motivated students spend more time; less motivated students, less.

The third factor is the teacher’s approach (for example, communicative language teaching or audiolingualism) to language teaching. The fourth is the instructor's teaching effectiveness and style.

You can probably see a big problem here. The myth of the great teacher whose motivational abilities inspire her students to world-shattering achievements is essentially flawed. I think of this as the paradox of motivation. The student's main motivator - integrative or instrumental motivation - is the one factor the teacher essentially has no control over. And that motivation drives the second most important factor behind student success, time spent on task.

What's a teacher to do? Accept this reality, and develop your ability to motivate students in secondary ways. Primary motivation notwithstanding, the teacher's motivational skills are still critical for both learning and teaching.

Good teachers use many teaching qualities to motivate students. These include a combination of variation and structure in teaching activities. They find ways to show the practical value of learning English. They encourage and nurture their students, and many excellent teachers also bring sympathy and empathy into the classroom. They make the physical teaching space as compatible with learning as they can. They offer tools for learning (for example, mnemonics) and they conduct the class in a fair and balanced way. They also provide the students with consistency and fairness, and they do everything they can to help the students feel safe.

What TEFL teachers think: In a recent class, I discussed this problem with my TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) students, and asked them to brainstorm ways to motivate their students. They concluded that there are five areas where the teacher can really make a difference: in their lesson plans, in classroom management, in teaching style, in testing and assessment and in professional development. By no means were their ideas exhaustive, but they were good. Here is a summary.

1. Create great lesson plans: Choose great topics. Provide interesting and varied activities. Develop medium-term class themes. Have attainable goals and objectives, which provide real challenges but seek progress, not perfection. KISS (Keep it short and simple). And use authentic materials and situations for classroom teaching.

2. Classroom management: Attend to your students’ comfort and convenience. Find ways to visually represent class progress. Set up the classroom effectively and use equipment as effectively as you can.

3. Teaching style: Your teaching style consists of attitude, presence and rapport. Here are some comments on each.
• Attitude: Know your students’ names. Activate their prior knowledge and nurture their abilities. Be knowledgeable and authoritative, but modest. Be passionate about teaching. Be punctual. Dress and groom professionally.
• Presence: Empathize with your students. Enable your students to have fun. Show your personality, and vary the ways you teach
• Rapport: Appeal to different learning styles, especially kinaesthetic. Be conscious and respectful of your students’ culture or cultures. Give genuine praise and recognition. Involve the students in their learning; for example, use KWL (“what you know, what you want to know, what you have learned”) charts to develop and measure class content. Offer appropriate counsel and advice.

4. Assessment: Give your students good and regular assessment and testing. Get them to help each other. Monitor the class through feedback, and use prizes as rewards from time to time.

5. Professional development: Keep a log of your classroom performance, on occasion get someone to video your performance, and periodically ask a colleague or friend to assess your teaching. And take advantage of whatever professional development training you can get your hands on. We can always improve, and we must.

The Value of Testing

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Students hate tests, and so do teachers. For the student, they are a pain to study for and a worry to take. For the teacher, they are a nuisance to give and a bother to grade. But research shows that failing to give tests is bad educational practice. This is because if you test your students, they will probably better retain the material you are presenting. And oddly enough, they can do so without studying more or harder.

The Testing Effect: The journal Psychological Science noted this outcome in a 2006 report. According to the researchers, “Taking a memory test not only assesses what one knows, but also enhances later retention, a phenomenon known as the testing effect.” They added, “Testing is a powerful means of improving learning, not just assessing.”

Oddly enough, tested students can actually do better with less study. According to a media report,

….students who relied on repeated study alone frequently developed a false sense of confidence about their mastery of the materials even while their grasp of important detail was sliding away. By comparison, students who were either tested repeatedly or tested themselves while revising scored dramatically higher marks. A group of students who read a piece of text 14 times, for example, recalled less than a self-testing group who had read the piece only three or four times.

Now, let’s move from the immediate findings of this research to the realm of common sense. Teachers have long known that testing plays a key role in teaching and learning.

Self-tests in language promote retention, while process-focused tests (for example, writing a journal or preparing to give an oral presentation) activate language. Testing has many other uses. Through testing, both teacher and learner get a better sense of the student’s progress. They encourage students to self-evaluate and they promote autonomy in learning. We can use them to provide a sense of closure to a unit or a course of study. They can give your students a better sense of where their competence has improved, and they can give you feedback on how effective you are as a teacher.

Traditional and Alternative Assessments: Traditional forms of testing fall into four basic categories. (1) Proficiency tests give general information on student language proficiency level. They are not specific to any particular program. (2) Placement tests are designed to be appropriate for a specific program. These tests should reflect the goals and ability levels in the program and help you place students within the program. (3) Achievement tests, which should be part of every language curriculum, should be specific to the goals and objectives of a specific language course. (4) Finally, diagnostic tests focus on individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. You can use information from diagnostic tests to help your students improve in particular areas of weakness.

There are many ways to create standard tests for language students. They are commercially available, and many schools have files of hoary old tests you can borrow or emulate. A frequently raised concern about these tests is the question of whether they have validity (they measure what they are supposed to measure); reliability (the tests are consistent); and objectivity (the assessment is unbiased). In terms of this discussion, those are issues for another day.

From the communicative language teaching perspective, a more pressing weakness of traditional testing is that it is neither communicative nor authentic. Given the importance of assessment as a teaching aid, however, it is worth looking at alternative ways to test foreign language students. For language learners more than for other learners, perhaps, alternatives are particularly important.

There are four obvious forms of alternative assessment. Observe your students, writing notes in student records. Meet with them. Have them write journals. And have them create portfolios of their work. These are just a sample, however, and they are not systematic. For system, consider a review by Jo-Ellen Tannenbaum.

The Alternatives: The American educator wrote a commentary on alternative assessment. She pictures the landscape in these words:

Many educators have come to recognize that alternative assessments are an important means of gaining a dynamic picture of students' academic and linguistic development. “Alternative assessment refers to procedures and techniques which can be used within the context of instruction and can be easily incorporated into the daily activities of the school or classroom”. It is particularly useful with (language) students because it employs strategies that ask students to show what they can do. In contrast to traditional testing, “students are evaluated on what they integrate and produce rather than on what they are able to recall and reproduce”. Although there is no single definition of alternative assessment, the main goal is to “gather evidence about how students are approaching, processing, and completing real-life tasks in a particular domain”.

Alternative assessments, she added, generally meet the following criteria:
• Focus is on documenting individual student growth over time, rather than comparing students with one another.
• Emphasis is on students' strengths (what they know), rather than weaknesses (what they don't know).
• Consideration is given to the learning styles, language proficiencies, cultural and educational backgrounds, and grade levels of students.

In her thoughtful article, Tannenbaum puts alternative assessments into five categories. The first she calls “non-verbal assessment strategies”, in which students use physical demonstration or pictures, for example, to illustrate their comprehension.

A second is the KWL chart. The initials refer to “what I know/what I want to know/what I've learned”, and she advocates using this tool to begin and end a unit of study. In an EFL class, you might begin by surveying students on their course expectations. At various points in the course, you could then assess what they know and what they are learning. At the end of the unit, you can work with the students to determine how much they have learned of what they wanted to know.

Tannenbaum also suggests oral performances or presentations as alternative forms of testing. “Performance-based assessments include interviews, oral reports, role plays, describing, explaining, summarizing, retelling, paraphrasing stories or text material, and so on.” Other possibilities include role play and oral presentations. She adds that oral assessments should be conducted regularly so you can monitor your students’ comprehension and thinking skills.

A fourth cluster of alternatives includes what she calls “oral and written products.” She suggests that the teacher can assess student progress include “content area thinking and learning logs, reading response logs, writing assignments (both structured and creative), dialogue journals, and audio or video cassettes.”

Finally, she advocates the portfolio of student work, collected over time to track student development. She suggests that portfolios should include a variety of materials -- audio- and videotaped recordings of readings or oral presentations, for example; writing samples and assignments; conference or interview notes and anecdotal records; and tests and quizzes.

Individualized assessment can be a time-consuming task, and it will drift into the realm of the virtually impossible if you ever find yourself with, for example, several large classes of university students. However, the case for assessment is compelling. After all, your responsibility as a teacher is to promote learning among your students, and the much-hated practice of testing can be one of the great tools toward achieving that goal.

What Research Says about Teaching Methods

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Educators base their systems of language teaching on language theory. Here is one summary of teaching methods, based on the work of two Canadian educators. In their technical but thoughtful book, Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada discuss contemporary thinking about how we learn languages, and illustrate how such ideas directly affect the classroom.

Here is a commentary on their five proposals for classroom teaching. The authors describe each method as an imperative the teacher might bring into class.

Grammar Translation and Audiolingualism. A traditional teacher coming into class would insist to her students, “Get it right from the beginning!”

Teachers from both the grammar translation and the audiolingualism schools do this. They emphasize speech, but are reluctant to let their students use it spontaneously. The reason is that they worry about their students forming bad, ugly habits that they cannot break. Since habits are hard to break, it is better to prevent them. Unbreakable habits of speech – they do occur – are said to be “fossilized.”

According to the two Canadians, research does not support the idea that avoiding fossilization by getting it right from the beginning is an effective way to teach. Just the contrary, in fact. In experiments, students learning by this method clearly did better when communicative activities were added to their lessons. That said, many adults prefer these structure-based methods despite their limitations.

Interactionism. The Interactionist view holds that second language learning takes place primarily through talking with other people (“conversational interaction”). When students have meaningful conversations in a second language, both sides of the conversation use behaviours that are quite useful for language learning. Here are some practical examples:
• One partner might make an effort to make sure the other has understood.
• The learner might ask for clarification to make sure he understood.
• The learner may repeat or paraphrase a sentence, to make sure she gets it right.
These are all excellent strategies for language learning, and they lead to the interactionist teacher’s imperative: “Say what you mean and mean what you say!”

This method is based on the idea that, when given the opportunity to engage in meaningful activities, learners will “negotiate for meaning” – clarify and express their intentions, thoughts and opinions in ways that permit them to achieve their learning goals. “Genuine exchanges of information must surely enhance students’ motivation to participate in language learning activities,” the authors say. But then they ask, “Do they…lead to successful language acquisition?” According to the two authors, the research is ambiguous.

Communicative Language Teaching

Lightbown and Spada describe three other methods of classroom teaching, all of which fall generally into the scope of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). To simplify our review of CLT, it is worth quickly reviewing Stephen Krashen’s theory of second language acquisition.

Krashen’s ideas consist of five main hypotheses:
• The acquisition-learning hypothesis
• The monitor hypothesis
• The natural order hypothesis
• The input hypothesis, and
• The affective filter hypothesis.
As we discussed elsewhere, these ideas seem to describe quite effectively how learners acquire second languages.

Of particular importance, Krashen’s ideas have practical value for the classroom warrior wanting to deliver effective lessons. In the following commentary, I suggest that each of the last three Lightbown and Spada imperatives correspond roughly with one or more of Krashen’s hypotheses.

The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis. The authors describe a radical application of Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis in the form of a method of language teaching in which the students “Just listen, and read!” This kind of learning is most likely to take place in a well equipped language lab, where the students use tapes and readings graded to their individual level.

As long as the students are working with language they can comprehend, there is no theoretical reason they cannot acquire a second language. After all, Krashen’s primary thesis is that we can only learn language through comprehensible input. (He adds to this that teachers should stretch their knowledge of the language by providing them with “i+1” encounters – just a tad more of the second language than they can easily understand, to increase their comprehension.)

The “just listen and read” method assumes it is not necessary to drill and memorize language forms. Emphasis is on providing comprehensible input through listening and reading activities. Experimental research has found that this system is effective, but the authors sound a note of caution.

Students develop not only good comprehension (in reading and listening), but also confidence and fluency....However, research does not support the argument that an exclusive focus on meaning in comprehensible input is enough to bring learners to high levels of accuracy in their second language.

Students also need explicit instruction in the forms of language – for example, specific structures. Otherwise, their language skills will remain somewhat limited.

The Natural Order Hypothesis. Lightbown and Spada describe a method which focuses on teaching structural forms, but teaching them in developmental order. Their imperative? “Teach what is teachable!” The concept is that instruction cannot change the ‘natural’ course of development. This is because linguistic structures develop along particular developmental paths. Teaching advanced structures to beginners will not work because the learners do not yet have the ability to process (unconsciously analyse and organise) them.

That, at least, is the theory. As the authors explain, it is difficult to test because the “natural order” of language learning is still unclear. Some things are known – for example, WH questions and Yes/No questions are much easier to acquire than those using question tags (“It’s easy to do, isn’t it?”). However, as a learner begins to reach complicated structures, the difficult language structures are not too well defined.

The Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis. Lightbown and Spada describe one final method. While this course in TEFL finds value in many teaching methods, the authors’ last teaching method is the one we most strongly support. “Get it right in the end!” they say.

This method is the one most in keeping with Krashen’s “monitor model” of second language learning. As our study of Krashen explains, the monitor hypothesis is the idea that conscious learning serves primarily as a monitor or an editor for the language student. It plays a relatively small but necessary role in effective language acquisition, which comes primarily from exposure to comprehensible input and language practice.

The “get it right in the end” method recognizes the importance of explicitly teaching language content – making the study of structure, lexis and phonology a part of language lessons. However, it puts primary emphasis on the idea that students will acquire most language features will be acquired naturally if learners have adequate exposure to the language and a motivation to learn. This view largely agrees with “Teach what is teachable”, but “emphasizes the idea that some aspects of language must be taught and may need to be taught quite explicitly.”

Approach, Method and Technique. All these methods of instruction can play a role in a good language teacher’s toolkit. Communicative Language Teaching is based not on dogma, but on what works to help students learn language effectively. While we believe CLT is the most effective approach to language teaching, we also recognize that is effective because it is eclectic. CLT begins with the idea that the purpose of language learning is to communicate, and uses ideas and practices from any other method if they can help achieve that goal.

CLT is nothing if it is not pragmatic.