The little phrase "running a room" is one I picked up from behaviour consultant Tom Bennett a few years ago. I notice he uses it as the title of his forthcoming book on behaviour. I'm sure that book will be worth reading. When I wrote Becoming an Outstanding Languages Teacher in 2017, I chose to begin the book with a chapter called Running a room. This is part of that chapter and may be a useful read, particularly for trainee (pre-service) language teachers.
Starts and ends of lessons
Jane is an outstanding teacher.
Before the lesson begins her students are lining up outside the classroom. They’re quiet or talking calmly. She stands by the doorway as they enter in single file. She says bonjour to each student. Because her school has a clear uniform code, she sometimes has the odd word with them about their appearance, maybe a little ça va?, a bit of personal chit-chat in English here and there: “What lesson have you had? How was it?” “How did that piano exam go?” “Did you watch that football game?” She shows that she knows something about each student and knows them all by name. She asks them to use some French they recently learned as their entry code.
Her classroom is all ready to go. It’s bright, at the right temperature, decorated with samples of student work, some useful French phrases, some positive behaviour statements, a map of France and a few posters showing aspects of French culture. There’s a reading corner with a selection of French magazines and on each student table a mini-whiteboard and tissue. The computer and interactive whiteboard are fired up and raring to go. On her desk there’s a pile of marked exercise books waiting to be handed out.
The class is now in the room having taken out their materials. They’re calmly standing behind their tables, facing the front (because they can see the teacher better that way). Jane is standing front middle and expects total silence at this point. She’s smiling, communicating relaxed vigilance to the class. She scans the room from left to right, front to back, then greets the class with a Bonjour tout le monde! They reply in unison Bonjour, madame. She asks how they all are and they reply in unison Ça va bien merci, et vous? She says Asseyez-vous. She asks them to hold up their equipment: pencil case, workbook, pen. They do so in unison. The students sit down in their allocated places in a pattern and listen attentively to what she’s going to say next. She can immediately see who’s absent and makes a note.
That may all seem very familiar to you, but routines like this don’t just happen. You can have that start to every lesson by modelling and practising all the desired behaviours and especially if your school's ethos supports best behaviour. Students have to learn routines, they like them and teachers have to practise them until students get them right. Be insistent, persevere and don’t accept second-best. Use eye contact, make sure the students know you’re looking at them as individuals, preferably with a smile – a smile communicates confidence. Definitely smile before Christmas.
The first few minutes of a lesson are critical. In the real world lessons don’t always start perfectly, but you can help the process along with a trick or two. With younger classes you can tell them you’re going to count down in the TL from 20 to zero and that they must have all their materials out by the time you get to zero (you can adjust your speed to the class). Or why not have the class recite or sing the alphabet as they come in and they have to have all their books ready by the time they get to Z? When it comes to the class sitting down, you could occasionally break the routine by saying they can sit down when they hear the first letter of their name? Students like to know what they should do, they appreciate clarity and feel safe with routines, as do you.
The mood of a class when it arrives partly depends on the previous lesson. If they’ve been quiet for an hour they may feel like being noisier now. If they’ve been allowed to be too noisy in the previous class this could carry over to your lesson. The outstanding teacher is aware of these subtle, or not so subtle, changing moods and adapts to them.
What if you get late-comers? In most cases you don’t need to make a fuss; you can defer any individual comment until later to focus on your priority, getting the lesson off to a great start. Make sure the class has seen you’ve noticed the latecomer. Perhaps you’ve taught them to say Excusez-moi, je suis en retard. Just occasionally you may need to make a big fuss, show real or feigned disapproval. In this way the rest of the class knows that you don’t accept lateness and that they may feel foolish if late. This isn’t being mean to students; it’s showing them how much you care. If a whole class is late for no good reason you may need to have them back at break or lunchtime to make your point.
Some teachers prefer to have a task ready on the board or on students’ tables for them to do straight away. This may work well, especially if students arrive in dribs and drabs, but in general I’d go for a whole group activity to set the tone, give lesson objectives and have everyone in the same mindset. Worksheets are best placed face down on tables if you intend to use them later. If you hand out sheets during a lesson do it while walking round talking about something else so you minimise “dead time”.
Ends of lessons need tidy routines as well. You can use a song as you did at the start to minimise any time-wasting chit-chat. Have all the students stand up. Try to end the lesson on a positive note, e.g. by mentioning a good website you came across, giving a compliment to one of the students or even telling an amusing story. Then you can end with a Rangez vos affaires or equivalent and ask the class to stand up together. To ensure an orderly departure you can let them out in rows or boys first, then girls (or vice versa). Even that last trick makes the class listen to whether you’re going to say boys or girls first. They’ll soon let you know if you’re favouring one group over the other!
Make sure you leave enough time for your end routine. It’s very easy to be too rushed. If you need to fill time, individual students can use an exit code, e.g. a phrase they’ve learned recently, a verb form, a time or a weather phrase. Give yourself and your class plenty of time to write down any homework - you don't want students telling you next time that they weren't sure what to do. Some say you should set the homework earlier in the lesson; that’s great if the lesson sequence allows for it.
Planning lesson sequences
You hopefully have a well-organised scheme of work or curriculum plan in your department. It's both difficult and unwise to plan every lesson too far in advance because you have to adapt to the pace and the needs of the class in front of you and they’re all different. Most teachers make a broad plan for weeks ahead, but prepare detailed lessons a week or two in advance. Last minute preparation isn’t advised, but it happens and can produce fresh, successful lessons. This gets easier with experience and excellent teachers are great improvisers. Over a sequence of lessons try to mix up the skills you’re going to practise. Allow for some reading, listening, speaking and writing. Remember that students become good at what you practise. If you do lots of oral work they’ll probably get better at oral work. If you do lots of grammar, they’ll get good at grammar, and so on. Research suggests that meaningful input and interaction are the key recipes for success.
Think about the timing of your lessons with the class. Plan for a greater amount of “passive” work like listening, gap-filling, dictation, computer work and reading in the afternoons. The students are tired, so are you; you may find it hard to get a class going for oral work. Conversely, morning lessons may be better for a larger diet of oral work (pair work, group work, question and answer, other teacher-student interactions, repetition and games). Be flexible, though. Great teachers sometimes change what they’d planned to do if the mood of the class is not as expected. There’s no doubt that feeling the class mood and having a degree of flexibility are important attributes. We’ll look at this in more detail later.
Over a sequence of lessons, plan to recycle language from one lesson to the next. Your start to the lesson might be a quick recap of a grammar point or some vocabulary from the previous lesson: “Who thinks they can remember five shops in Spanish?” “Who thinks they can go through the verb fahren for me?” (Note that adding the word “think” makes the task seem less intimidating to students.) Or: “I’ll give you the name of a food item, put your hand up and tell me if you think you should put du, de la or des in front of it”. “I’ll give you a sentence in the present tense, you try to put it in the past and change one item.” But don’t just revise from the previous lesson, go back over various things you’ve done in the last few lessons. You'll find no shortage of ideas for starters in course books, online or from colleagues. Remember that many students’ memories are nowhere near as good as yours. The use of spaced learning or “little and often” is essential for language teachers.
Planning individual lessons
If you have hour or even two hour-long lessons, you need to build in plenty of variety. The attention span of youngsters is often quite short. In a one hour session you might include four, five or more different tasks. It’s usually best to put oral work nearer the start, when students have more energy. It’s a good idea to set short time targets to create a sense of urgency: Vous avez cinq minutes. Break up the pattern of oral work by moving between whole class question and answer and bursts of pair work. Pair work is easier to manage than group work and each student gets to speak more.
Make sure that students know what you intend to get done in the lesson (usually in English) and what the outcomes will be for them. “By the end of the lesson you’ll be able to…” This doesn’t necessarily mean writing up the objectives on the board. But you don’t need to spell out objectives at the very start; you may prefer to get straight into your starter or main task, then spell out the aims later. Why not invite the class to work out what the aim of the lesson is?
Great teachers make sure each task follows on logically from the previous one, constantly reinforcing the main learning points. You may only be working on one or two key areas in a whole lesson. To maximise the recycling of language you can repeat tasks in slightly different ways. You might do a task from a worksheet or the board orally and then get the class to do the same task in writing. This leads to a quick transition, reinforces previous learning and practises more than one skill.
Be crystal-clear with instructions, perhaps checking with the class that they’ve understood. Say in English: “Who can explain what we’ve been doing?”. Don’t use a questioning intonation when you give an instruction. Students are quite happy to be told what to do firmly and politely.
Try to ensure tidy, prompt transitions from one task to the next. This can be a tough one, especially for inexperienced teachers. When you stop one task there is a natural release of tension and students may start talking off the subject at that point. You may actually want a little of that, because it acts as a “pause for breath” before the next task. On the whole, however, it wastes valuable time and you have to work at transitions just like you have to work at starts and ends. Bring the class to silence with a familiar noise, a firm clap, a bell, a countdown or just by raising your arm, telling students they have to raise their arm too when silence is needed. Try saying “Class” with a particular sing-song intonation which students get used to and even copy. Tell the class why it’s important to have a quick transition. Let them into your thinking, making them part of the process. If you have a reward system, why not tell them that the first three to finish will get a merit/stamp/house points, etc?
Try to mix up your interaction styles with the class. Don’t talk too much to them, they’ll probably get bored and learn less, but don’t forget that teacher talk is important because it supplies high quality TL input at the right speed, tailor-made for the class and you may have interesting stories to tell which increase their cultural awareness. Elicit responses, ask for hands up and sometimes say that you’re going to just select students to answer. The no hands up technique, favoured by many, is a controversial one since we don’t want to make students uncomfortable with language learning, or even terrified, yet we do need to ensure they’re concentrating. If you use the no hands up technique sparingly it can work well. The class comes to attention and you just need to ensure that you don’t throw an impossibly hard question to a student.
I’d argue against random questioning using lolly sticks with names on or digital spinners, for example, since I believe the teacher is the best judge of who to ask at any point and how to differentiate between students using skilled questioning. But you have to be careful – research suggests teachers find it hard not to favour the confident students with their hands in the air. If you want to ensure all students are joining in, sometimes get them to write their answers on a mini-whiteboard, allowing them some more thinking time and you to see their responses.
I’d advocate using pair work a lot when you’re confident the class will do it usefully. Use games when they have a clear learning goal and you’re sure students won’t abuse the situation. Your lesson doesn’t need to be “fun”. It’s great when you’re having fun, but the main aim is for students to be engaged in cognitively stimulating and therefore enjoyable activity. Games with a clear learning purpose are described in Chapter 6.
Use technology if you’re confident with it. Teachers sometimes report that students who aren’t very comfortable learning a language will be more at ease and learn more with a screen and microphone in front of them. Technology is great for us language teachers and you may choose to use it a good deal, but any digital task needs to be linguistically useful, providing high quality input or practice opportunities. You’ll find technology tips at the end of most of the chapters of this book.
When you start teaching you’ll need to write out your lesson plan in some detail, preparing exactly which questions you’re going to ask, how you’re going to drill an item, how you’re going to mix, say, group repetition with individual oral work. This takes time and care. With more experience these skills become second nature and your preparation is less time-consuming, allowing you to focus on other areas of your professional life. The “dissecting a lesson” chapters in this book give examples of interactions you can plan for in detail.
Last of all, assessment for learning (formative assessment) techniques are important (see Chapters 12 and 13): checking all the class is following, using mini-whiteboards, skilled questioning techniques and the rest, but your personality counts for a lot. Children want you to be firm, friendly and fair. They want to be supported, so when someone is stuck, you can engender a supportive atmosphere by saying “Can anyone help her?” Let’s now look at some useful lesson starters.
Great lesson starters activities
Starters or “warmers” get the class in the right mood, help you manage your classroom, but, above all, are an effective way to recycle language, providing students with more TL input and practice. Having a flying start sets the tone for the whole lesson. You can do random starters, but it’s better if they fit within your individual lesson or lesson sequence, complementing other activities, either recapping material from the previous lesson or prefacing the content of the lesson to follow.
Seating plans
Effective teachers nearly always have a seating plan which can later be adjusted depending on the behaviour of individual students. Consider a boy-girl plan to encourage best behaviour. Why not change your seating plan every now and again? If students always work with the same partner they’ll always hear the same accent, the same errors, always be in the comfort zone and maybe not do enough work. Saying “Now go and work with someone you don’t know very well” freshens up lessons and gets students to put in a bit more effort. Some students just need to sit apart from each other for their own good.
To learn names you could either draw your seating plan out, use a digital planner, or get the students to make name plates which they put on their desk for the first few lessons. Many teachers take a photo of the class or individual students for their planner. As you walk around the class in the early days try to memorise names by looking at exercise books. When handing these out, get students to put up their hand when you call their name. Great teachers get to know their students quickly.
Correcting
How much should I correct? In class oral work you need to find a balance. You may allow your quickest student to answer first to give a good model, but be prepared occasionally to use the no hands up (“cold calling”) technique to make sure all students are alert and ready to respond. If someone makes an error, usually correct with a positive tone. Use the “return to student” technique, i.e. if a student makes a mistake or can’t answer, go to other students, then return to the original student so they have a chance to do it well without your help.
When it comes to pronunciation errors, make the whole idea of pronouncing accurately fun. Try to get students to enjoy making those strange sounds. Use “back-chaining”, e.g. in French a student says “natashion” instead of “natation”. Get the whole class to say “on”, then “ion”, then “tion”, then “ation”, then “tation”, then “atation”, then the whole word. Then get the first student to say the word. Try speaking English with an amusing TL accent; get students to do the same just to enjoy the sounds. For more on enjoying sounds see Chapter 5. Research into error correction provides no clear answers, but most good teachers do selectively correct and provide “recasts”, i.e. corrected versions of the student’s response. I’d go along with this since recasts provide more input for the student and show other students who heard an error what the corrected version should be.
How much target language?
Language teachers talk a lot about this and it’s fair to say that opinions vary! I’ll put this as simply as I can: students need to hear lots of the TL (what’s sometimes called in the second language acquisition jargon “comprehensible input”) to allow their brains to exploit their natural language learning capability and for language to enter long-term memory. But students also need to develop a relationship with you and clearly understand what they have to do in a lesson. So my rule of thumb would be to use the TL most of the time, maybe in chunks of ten minutes or so, then release tension with some English. Try not to constantly “echo”, by which I mean don’t use a bit of TL then instantly translate it into English. Why would a student bother to listen to the TL if they know you’re going to translate it all the time?
Remember that even experienced teachers tend to over-estimate how much a student understands in the TL. You’d be wise, therefore, to use English occasionally to make sure everyone knows what’s going on and to get feedback. Some argue for lots of translation for this very reason, but I’d argue against this point of view since it's bound to reduce the overall amount of input the students receive. Whatever you do, don’t lose the class! Students often report that that their interest flags when the teacher doesn’t use English enough. Match your use of TL to the needs of the class, but try to use as much TL as you can. Don’t get lazy about it just because it seems easier at the time.
Ultimately the amount of TL used depends on the quality of the lesson planning. A well thought-through lesson with good support via gestures, physical objects and other visual aids will allow you to use lots of the TL with nearly every class. Exploit mime, flashcards, pictures, PowerPoint, written words on the board – whatever it takes.
Vary the teaching mode
Language learning is demanding on the ears and eyes, but you can mix up your planning to include gesture, body movement, drawing and song (“Simon Says” is a super whole-body game which works with all ages – see Chapter 6). If you value chanting verb paradigms, get classes to do so while pointing in different directions for the various persons of the verb – sideways for third person, forwards for second person and so on. You can sing them too; use the Mission Impossible theme for –ar verbs in Spanish or Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush for avoir in French.
Students can spell out words in the air with their fingers or noses. Get them to move around the class looking for words you’ve stuck on walls. Get them to come up to the front and use the board. Let them play teacher from time to time. Have them jump up and down while singing the alphabet to an American marines marching song. Get one student to draw while their partner describes. Even using a computer, tablet or mini-whiteboard allows a fidgety child to be busy with their hands. Mathematical children may particularly enjoy number games and code-breaking vocabulary games. Musical children may enjoy singing. Artistic children may like making posters or drawing on the board.
Keeping them on task
Creating a successful learning environment is the number one priority for teachers of any level of experience. Learning won’t occur if students are inattentive and misbehaving. Where behaviour is already good and supported by an excellent school ethos and behaviour policy the challenge is to stretch classes to the limit with engaging and challenging activities. Many classes, however, take a good deal more management and effective teachers use a range of strategies to generate the right environment. A detailed discussion of behaviour management is beyond the scope of this book, but I can’t stress enough that this is the number one priority in teaching and obviously a major concern for those new to the profession. I would recommend any teacher to read Classroom Behaviour by Bill Rogers (2015) and Teach Like a Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov (2015).
Great teachers often use humour and a competitive element, e.g. dividing the class into teams for activities. They respect every student in the class, act promptly on low level disruption, minimise confrontation by taking the sting out of situations and show empathy with students, grasping what they may be finding hard or threatening. They use eye contact and facial expression to communicate feeling, employ techniques such as tactical pausing and take-up time (allowing students to take in an instruction before they act on it). They rarely shout; indeed they may speak deliberately quietly to gain more attention. They’re well-organised, business-like and punctual. They’re not over-bearing, but employ what can be termed “relaxed vigilance”.
They make effective use of their physical presence, e.g. they don’t always stand or sit in the same place in the classroom. They move to the back when all the class is focused on reading aloud from the board, creating the feeling that the class and teacher are working together. They sometimes place themselves near unsettled students or they gently move towards students who may be at risk of going off-task, having a quiet word in their ear rather than making a fuss in front of the class. They don’t create a distraction by moving around too much.
Great teachers sometimes award points or certificates for positive behaviour and achievement, tracking them over a period of time. They don’t praise in a routine way, but selectively and often confidentially, beyond the hearing of the class. They always show respect and never belittle any student. If they feel the need to criticise a class for poor behaviour or work, they quickly move on in a positive manner. They try not to let a bad lesson get them down; the students will forget it more quickly than the teacher. They’re usually “authentic”, i.e. when they show disappointment, anger or pleasure it’s because these feelings are genuinely felt. In general, they have a “no excuses” attitude, with a degree of flexibility, showing that they care by expecting the highest standards.
The best teachers are aware of motivational theories such as self-efficacy, i.e. the strength of one's belief in the ability to complete tasks and reach goals. They manage to create in their students the self-belief they need to persist with activities. They do everything they can to build confidence and remove anxiety in students. Equally they know how much students are driven by instrumental goals, e.g. getting a good grade in the exam, as well as, for some, integrative goals such as wanting to be part of the TL culture and community.
A sense of responsibility and pride can be engendered in students in a number of ways, e.g. as we’ve seen, you can get individuals to lead the class, or they can run a club, teach a partner or a younger student. You can send a postcard home to parents praising an achievement, relay a message to a class tutor or nominate someone “student of the month”. You can use exercise books as a privileged, confidential means of communication, praising or requesting improvement where needed. You can write a personal note to students and request a reply. Class exchanges, study trips, Skype sessions, Facebook groups and email exchanges can all enhance students’ integrative motivation.
Crucially an effective teacher has highly-developed empathy skills. What does this mean?
Cognitive empathy
This is the capacity to understand another's perspective or mental state. In teaching we can say that it refers to the teacher’s ability to marry every level of their teaching (e.g. planning lessons, classroom delivery, feedback provision, target-setting, homework) to their students’ thinking processes. We could break it down as follows:
1. An awareness of the cognitive challenges posed by language learning in general and by the specific language items you’re teaching. For example, knowing that the learning of adjective agreement is tough for English-speaking students because the concept doesn’t exist in English; or anticipating that direct and indirect object pronouns in French will be especially hard because of the word order problems they create; or being aware of the challenges posed by the German case system.
2. An understanding of how students respond to such challenges. This involves an awareness of how cognition in a language learning context is affected by individual variables, e.g. age group, gender, personality type, culture, etc. For example, younger students usually find it harder than older ones to apply grammatical rules taught explicitly. Some topics appeal to some groups more than others, depending on the make-up and background of the class.
Affective empathy
Also called emotional intelligence, this is the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's affective state. For the teacher this can work at a whole class level (feeling the general mood) or at an individual level (sensing at any moment how a student might be reacting emotionally to the task they’re doing).
Effective teachers seem either to do these things instinctively (the so-called “natural teacher”) or have learned to exercise them through reading, training or experience. Teachers who begin their careers very successfully enhance their skills with time and deliberate practice, while others who initially find the classroom hard can turn into excellent practitioners.
Learning aspects of cognitive empathy is easier for most teachers than mastering affective empathy, since you can, by contrasting English and the TL anticipate what will be easier and harder. For example, adjectival agreement, gender and tense usage are bound to be issues for English-speaking learners of European languages. A sound knowledge of second language teaching methodology is also easy to acquire, namely understanding the principles of natural language acquisition and second language acquisition theories.
Showing social and emotional intelligence requires observing and listening to students carefully, picking up any visual or spoken clues to their mood and detecting any relationship patterns between students. You can help the process along by effective assessment for learning (formative assessment) techniques, e.g. asking students how they feel about what they’ve learned, what their attitudes are to language learning, specific activity types and non-English-speaking cultures. Teachers with well-developed cognitive and affective empathy are able to avoid confrontation, be positive, make students feel cared for and self-assured, while not becoming over-anxious when things don’t go as planned. Anxiety spreads anxiety. Some teachers are, of course, more compassionate than others, but in general the more a teacher is able to look out to others rather than look in to themselves, the better.
It comes down to something Bill Rogers (2015) has written about: when students talk about their teachers they may mention subject-related matters, but they’re more likely to talk about the kind of teacher they have, whether they teach well and interestingly, and whether they’re fair, considerate, patient and have a sense of humour. Above all they talk about whether their teachers care.
Concluding remarks
You’ll often hear teachers say that the key to success in the classroom is establishing a good rapport with classes. This is quite true, but a great relationship alone is no guarantee of the very best outcomes. Subject knowledge, skillful planning and execution of lessons, awareness of pedagogical approaches and, as we’ve seen, a basic knowledge of second language acquisition theory are also important elements when it comes to getting the very best out of students. The rest of the book will examine in some detail a number of these areas, while Chapter 14 will attempt to distill these various elements. In the next chapter we’ll begin the process of dissecting lessons and analysing effective practice. What do you have to do in your lessons for students to really value your work?
Becoming an Outstanding languages Teacher (2017) is available from Routledge and Amazon.
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