Classroom management

Good evening everybody!

Long time, no see! In the last days I so super busy with the Cambridge Film Festival and the foundation of the International Student Film Association that I had barely time to eat or sleep! Thankfully, life is slowing down to its normal (hectic) pace again and I thought I would give you an update on how the PGCE is going!

I am now in week two of my block placement and teach every day.Overall, I have taken over two German and one French class and so far, it has been very enjoyable. I am not half-dead because of the workload and find the whole planning process fairly easy. Of course this might be because I have worked as an EFL teacher before but I have to say that it was quite new to me to plan so much in such detail- in most efl lessons all you get is a board pen and 10 min preparation time if you are lucky :-D

Now, the only class that is causing me a little bit of trouble is a 28-kids strong Year 8 group. I teaching them in both German and French and although they are a lovely bunch they are incredibly chatty and find it really difficult to listen to each other and to me. I am not used to such big groups and they get each other so excited that they just won’t calm down! As you might have realised I am trying to be an inclusive teacher and educator and don’t like the thought of having to send students out of the classroom or ‘punishing’ them for something such as chatting. I also think that making them write lines can be a tedious and annoying task for them.

From an ‘alternative’ point of view, I would love to try to focus their attention on something that they find relevant and that will foster skills which they can apply at any time later in life even if the foreign language is forgotten. I am not a bad teacher and I always try to make my lessons as engaging and useful as possible. However, if you have 28 students and some of them want to listen to what I have to say and others don’t a predicament arises: how to win over the reluctant students if (1) they don’t want to listen and (b) everybody has to prepare for exams? Even group work is not successful, because their thought just go completely off topic as soon as you don’t check up on them constantly.

So far, have tried to gain class attention by clapping, counting down, picking out the trouble makers, using a bell, lowering my voice, raising my voice, standing on a chair, raising a hand, standing in the middle of the classroom and actually sending people out. I have tried to reason with them and repeated the rules that they have agreed to when they came to the college. I wish I could have written them down together with them but tough luck. They are all nice kids and they will also give your their attention once you ask them to- for about a minute that is. Through the constant classroom management debacle, little learning is going on and the students who are paying attention get really annoyed.

I am working in a state school where children know exactly what is expected of them. It is not an overly strict environment and I guess in comparison to other schools of the same size, Sawston is a really very friendly and positive. Yes, we could blame the exams and the class size and the fact that students are forced to engage with subjects they are not interested in, but if you look beyond that: What can you do? How can you make students listen?? I am looking forward to observing some more lessons in the next weeks and will feed back as soon as I have some new ideas.

On another note, I have more or less finished my MPhil proposal which needs to go out this Friday and will post a link as soon as it is properly done. In my research, I would like to draw a map of the democratic schools in Europe and see how and if democratic education practices can be in cooperated in the British state school sector. Let’s see what Oxford and Cambridge think about that and if I can find some funding...