Here are four useful strategies to help deal with the class that just won’t settle:
1. Allow some cooling off time of a few minutes after transitions and breaks to allow them to settle.
Use this time to chat to individuals and small groups, settle them, deal with any problems and establish a calm, relaxed atmosphere.
2. Teach ROUTINES to the students
Routines are the perfect way to develop consistency in the classroom – they give your students a clear roadmap to follow and reduce confusion as well as excuses for misbehavior.
An example of a routine at the start of the lesson is the countdown technique. Mix this with with lots of proximity praise and there is a chance students will develop a habit of quietening down when you ask them… “5; OK it’s time to stop and look this way. Excellent, very quick on that table. 4; pens should be down, books and mouths should be closed, very good you two, you’re listening to me. 3; still too much noise over here, that side of the room are perfect. 2; Just waiting for the last few people now, all conversations should be stopped, hands on the desk in front of you. Well done, you’ve got it. 1; thank you.
3. Have a visual reminder of noise levels such as coloured cards/traffic lights or a ‘noise level meter’.
When green is up the noise level in the room is fine. Orange – warning, level is too high and needs to drop immediately. If it doesn’t drop after an agreed time, red card goes up. Red. Stop the activity, take a minute off break and insist on silent working for 5 minutes.
4. Take control at the door – don’t let them in the room until they’re quiet
The lesson actually starts outside the room – if students are uncontrollable outside the door there is no point in letting them in – the behavior standard has already been set.
Spend time speaking to students in the corridor in a friendly calm manner – set the tone for the lesson. Shouting and giving orders breeds a desire to retaliate. When you are ready, tell them to line up quietly, those that do so can go straight in the room and get on with a starter activity. The others either didn’t hear you or are choosing not to. Either way, they need a little more calm persuasion. This is the time to iron out problems they may have, settle disagreements etc. – not inside the room.
How would you approach your 4th suggestion (Take control at the door) when you as a teacher are required to change classrooms instead of the students? You can’t keep them outside when they are already inside. Thanks for the input.
Thanks for your post.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution when it comes to managing behaviour – no strategy is going to suit every situation. However, in this particular case, surely you can take the class back out of the room if they are out of control?
English foreign language teacher in French Senior High School. Students between 15 and 19 years.
I have read through much of your material over the past two weeks of school holidays with great interest as I have a VERY ROWDY class of 31students and am at my wits end as to how to get things quietened down.
It seems a good part of the problem is that I have these students from 4pm to 5pm Monday and Tuesday and from 11am to 12pm on Wednesday. (they have 8-9 hrs of class every day except Weds so ….)
Last lesson of the day each time !!! Oh la la !!
I often have trouble getting them to settle when I arrive in their class so am going to try your pointer N° 2 with praise as I am often caught up in the ‘yelling’ technique. (I have a bigger voice than all you guys combined type thing !! Which I hate.) and seem to be constantly putting students on detention for misbehaviour. That’s not my style at all as it goes against my way of doing things which is usually to try to get the kids involved and motivated so that the work just seems to GET DONE without us even really realising. No pain but as much gain as possible !!!!
I also have trouble with 4 or 5 students who are constant SIDETRACKERS or what I call HANDBRAKES. They will do almost anything and everything to get the class off the topic, to interrupt what’s going on etc. If you have any advice for this I would be really grateful.
I’m having a fantastic time with all my other classes but just don’t seem to have what it takes with these guys.
Thanks for listening to my ‘wingeing’ and any advice would be gratefully accepted.
Fraussie.
Hi Fraussie,
Thanks for your post. I’ll be uploading a webinar later this month on taking control of the noisy class which will address these issues in detail.
Thanks, am looking forward to it
Will let you know how I get on with pointer N°2 on Tuesday.
Fingers crossed
Hi Fraussie,
I know EXACTLY what you’re up against! I had a similar problem with a similar class (similar in size and temperament) at the beginning of 2009. (Though not, thank heaven, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon! Yeek!) Everybody had trouble with them, not just me.
Then I started lining them up outside the door, just WAITING until they’d quietened down, and then told them what the focus of the lesson was. Then starting with the best kids, I asked them to tell me, what their goal was for the lesson. At first I got wishy-washy things like, “I’ll be quiet and listen to you .”(Yeah! Right!)” So after a day or two of this, when they’d got used to the process, I made them be really specific: “By the end of the lesson I plan to have .. finished the good copy of my essay… corrected all the mistakes in yesterday’s work and finished the draft copy of my poster …). I didn’t let them into the room until I was sure they meant to really try to do what they’d said they’d do, and if they lost focus when they got into the room, I made them come out and start over, leaving them until last so that they didn’t have an audience! (There was always a starter activity, and the lesson outline on the board.) The first time I tried it, it took 45 minutes to get them all into the room. Nerve-wracking! After that, the time it took dropped dramatically, until in the end they could do it in about three minutes.
Any off-task behaviour during the lesson was dealt with immediately – usually by making them take their work out into the corridor, and taking lunch or break time off them if it wasn’t completed to a satisfactory standard.
I can’t begin to tell you what a dramatic difference this made to their behaviour, focus and work output! After only a few weeks, I could trust them to work in groups, trust individuals to run errand, and even trust them to continue working if I had to leave the room for any reason.
Of course I shared the strategy with their other teachers, but they put it into the ‘too hard’ basket, and continued to have problems with the class – they even locked one teacher out of her classroom. By then, we were comfortable enough with one another for me to ask them “Why? You don’t behave like that with me. How can such nice kids behave so badly/” The toughest girl in the room said, “She doen’t respect us like you do.”
So … for what it’s worth …
Good luck!
Your tips are very useful and effective. I appreciate the step process that are given to try this and then try another. It’s very useful and provides a ladder to which you may calm down as well as give students a chance to change their behavior.
Thanks to all that you have communicated and shared via emails. I am a more effective teacher not a yeller as much.
Thanks for the tips