Best Practices
About My Work
This page contains a collection of artifacts and reflection notes of best practices during my internship at Al Bahya Government Boys' School.
Behavior Strategies
Best strategies to prevent/control misbehavior in a boys' only classroom
In this section I gathered strategies that I found very helpful in controlling behavior in a boys' classroom.
Classroom Rules
‘Experienced teachers don’t deal with problems, they prevent them from occurring’ (Petty,1998). Rules are fundamental to order teaching and learning process. Prior to teaching, my main goal was to establish appropriate classroom rules that will teach boys simple life rules: to respect each other, respect teacher, care about school resources, be friends. It was impossible to conduct lessons due to poor behavior of boys in the classroom.
Silent Language
Silent Language was another strategy i have implemented to control noisy classroom. Not to overwhelm students, I decided to introduce 3 signs. "Bathroom/Water", "Your help needed", "Finished". This idea came from the observation, classroom was getting very noisy at times with "Miss, miss, miss..."
It is a great strategy for preventing misbehavior in the classroom.
Attention-Getters
Classroom management as i said earlier is key to creating an effective learning environment. I have noticed that attention signals are very effective tools in controlling behavior, managing transitions in a fun and friendly manner. Without them, teacher often looses a great amount of teaching time.
Building stronger relationship with my students
Misbehavior often starts outside of the classroom. To prevent this and get to know my students better I decided to spend recess with my class. Also, i took on morning duties, where I had to come at 6:30 morning to monitor students. The outcome was really amazing. 30 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes recess allowed us have stronger connection with boys. Now I know their interests, problems and understand the nature of certain misbehavior.
Activities to match individual learning style of my students
Multiple Intelligence (Gardner, 1983) Creating different activities for better learning is another way of preventing misbehavior. When students are engaged, have various activities to perform during the lesson they tend to be less disruptive and more on task. From my experience, boys are more active and need various activities to fulfill their needs for move. Creating kinaesthetic, visual, verbal-linguistic to fulfill individual need to speak, move will create better learning outcome and prevent misbehavior.
Home-School Connection
During my teaching practice in the boys’ school I have noticed how important is Home-school connection in managing behavior, completing homework, attendance and overall progress of students. Bringing these worlds together benefit students tremendously. In most of behavior-related issues in my boys’ class, sending note on dojo system makes wonders. This way, parents are aware of what is going on in the school and can improve their child’s behavior by talking to him at home. Sending reminders on WhatsApp group give better chances of students completing and bringing in their homework on time, study for a weekly spelling test etc..
