By Ms. Bandan Preet Mahajan
Founder, Genius Edutorial

2020 & 2021 made us witness a hybrid model of offline and online teaching-learning methodology. It also made us realise as educators that issues pertaining to classroom management exist in both modes. As an eduleader for the last 20 years, after a lot of research and deliberations with parents and co-educators, I was able to draft the following initiatives that we as teachers can adopt in our classrooms both offline and online for effective teaching-learning. So, are you ready to make a transition from being just teachers to being educational rockstars?

Let’s ace it and let’s work towards:

A – Academic Excellence

C – Competence Building

E – Enrichment of Knowledge of our Students

Let’s begin.

1. Model ideal behavior by being polite with your students and yes, don’t forget to wear your smile and confidence to the class every day. Be an empathetic listener who reflects compassion through verbal and nonverbal cues.
2. Set some ground rules for your classroom with the help of students’ review and post your classroom expectations where they are clearly visible. A word of caution here though. Expectations should be clear, simple, positive, objective and documented properly.
3. Engage with students as you are teaching and how do we do this? Well, to begin with, make friendly eye contact with the students. Encourage them to focus on what is being taught by asking questions, using chatbox activities & using their names. Remember, sometimes disruption is just misguided energy that simply needs to be invited into the conversation. Take it seriously but not personally.
4. Give tangible and intangible rewards wherever possible. As an instance, issue a token every time a student reflects desirable behavior in class. Towards the end of the month, a prize may be awarded to the student who earns the maximum number of tokens.
5. Involve students in open-ended questions rather than closed-ended ones. This will encourage healthy and fruitful discussion in class. Believe me, even the most introverted students would be encouraged to participate in it, as they will not be facing any evaluation apprehension.
6. Make your communication ICE – Interesting, creative, engaging. Plan your lessons meticulously a day before delivery. It helps a lot. You could go ahead with techniques like peer learning, flipped classroom, collaborative learning for more engagement in your classroom.
7. To sum it all up, I am of the firm opinion that the 3 Cs of effective classroom management are – connection, consistency and compassion. The pointers so discussed above do not obviously form an exhaustive list but yes, they are quite sufficient, to begin with. You can keep adding to the list through your personal experiences. As they say, once a teacher is always a teacher, but I would like to expand the same by saying once a teacher, always a teacher and a learner!