Classroom management is paramount to the success of a teacher. If your class are chatting and being noisy all the time, they miss out on your instructions and their learning suffers as a result. But at the end of long afternoon, pupils can become apathetic as home time comes around and suddenly they become immune to the sound of the teacher’s voice. If you feel this is happening to you and you feel yourself becoming more and more frustrated with your class, don’t scream yourself hoarse to get their attention, try out some of these easy class-quieting tricks.
Establish the rules early on
Before your class even enter the classroom, set up the behavioural expectations of your classroom. If they won’t line up in an orderly fashion, don’t let them through the door until they are quiet. This is relatively easy to do, if you see a child talking, make them move to either the front or back of the queue (if it’s a group of talkers, send them to different ends of the queue to split them up.) When everyone is inside, have a short exercise ready for the students to tackle as a warm-up. You can either set a question based on the previous lesson or offer an introductory question to today’s topic that gets their minds ticking over. Just make sure that it’s simple enough for the whole class to understand, so you don’t get queries too early on. Tell the class that they have 5 minutes to do this task in silence and anyone who doesn’t finish it or starts talking will have to stay 5 minutes at lunchtime.
For key stage one pupils, reviewing work as soon as you enter the classroom may not work so well. Instead try this, give your pupils a series of nonsense instructions that have physical elements, like ‘stand behind your chair.’ Once everyone has done that, give another command, ‘put your hands on your head.’ Again, when everyone does that, give the ‘be quiet’ command and put your finger in front of your mouth until everyone copies you. Then give them the command to sit down and hopefully you will have the class’s undivided attention by then.
Survey Questions
To reduce chatter when coming to the end of a class activity, ask a number of survey questions to gradually bring the whole class together for listening. For example, you might say, ‘everybody who’s birthday is in May, come and sit down’ and so on, until the entire class is listening out for their birth month to be called out.
Visual Cues
Using non-verbal signals to silence a class can also work very well. A very simple method to use is to get your pupils to raise their hands when they see you raising your hand. It is thought that this silent visual signal is enough to illicit a silent visual response, as the child mimics your behaviour. Plus it saves you from using your voice completely.
If your class is assigned into coloured groups, get cards with each of the colours on them and hold them up in order of which table is the quietest. The quietest table gets theirs held up first and they can earn a class reward, then the next group gets theirs held up and so on, until every group is waiting to see if they get called last or not. The loudest ‘losing’ team as a consequence can be the last to be allowed to leave the classroom at the end of the lesson.
‘Quieter’ noises
Many teachers like to use a special noise to grab their pupil’s attention. These are known as ‘quieter’ noises and can be anything from a bell to a whistle to even a clapping pattern, that will be instantly recognisable to their class as the ‘time to be quiet’ signal. After practicing with the class a few times, reward the students that demonstrate a rapid response to your signal. This will encourage the others to tune in and respond quickly also. It is important to remember a few things though if you’re using a quieter signal, they must be potable and be with you at all times. If you signal just sits on your desk, a pupil could walk past and sound it and after a while your class will stop taking it seriously. It is also a good idea to use it sparingly so pupils know that you really mean ‘listen up’ when you make that sound. They have to be loud enough to cut through class noise but so loud that they disturb other classrooms.
What other methods do you use when trying to get your classroom quiet? Share below
