Chapter I.

Class Management in English Language Teaching

Class management - the ability to control and inspire a class – is one of the
fundamental skills of teaching. If we want to manage the classrooms effectively, we
have to be able to handle a range of variables. These include how the classroom space
is organized? Whether the students are working on their own or in groups and how
we organise classroom time. We also need to consider how we appear to the students,
and how we use our most valuable asset – our voice. A strong classroom management
system helps all students develop positive classroom behavior, study habits, and
organizational skills. Classroom management is an integral part of teaching, and
techniques of managing pupils both can and must be acquired by the teacher.

1.1. Teacher as a Class Manager

A common theme underlying different methods of language teaching is that

second language learning is a highly interactive process. A great deal of time in
teaching is devoted both to interaction between the teacher and the learners, and to
interaction among the learners themselves. The quality of this interaction is thought
to have a considerable influence on learning. The nature of classroom interaction and
how teachers can influence the kind of interaction is also very important. An effective
classroom organization plan involves advance planning of a lesson, from beginning
to end, using a variety of procedures. For the teacher, this means utilizing classroom
management techniques all throughout the lesson in order to maintain a consistent
learning atmosphere.
A teacher carries a big responsibility in her classroom. One reason is that all
students depend on her/him. Everything the teacher says will have an impact on the
students. If the teacher feels joy or feels anger, it will be spread among children
because the attitudes of the teacher gets contagious. If the teacher laughs, students
also laugh, why? Because teachers are responsible for the social behavior in the
classroom. The teacher must create a warm and protective environment but at the
same time professional.
Teacher's physical presence can play a large part in our management of the
classroom environment. And it's not just appearance. The way they move and stand,
and the degree to which they are physically demonstrative can have a clear effect on
the management of the class. Most importantly, the way they are able to respond to
what happens in class, the degree to which they are aware of what is going on, often
marks the difference between successful teaching and less satisfactory lessons.
All teachers, like all people, have their own physical characteristics and habits,
and they will take these into the classroom with them. But there are a number of
issues to consider which are not just matters of personality or style and which have a
direct bearing on the students' perception of the teachers.
Teachers need to consider how close they should be to the students they are
working with. Some students are uncomfortable if their teacher stands or sits close to
them. For some, the other hand, distance is a sign of coldness. Teachers could be
conscious of how close they are to their students, should take this into account when
assessing their students' reactions and should, if necessary, modify their behaviour.
Deciding how close to the students the teacher should be when her work with
them is a matter of appropriacy. So is the general way in which teachers sit or stand
in classrooms. Many teachers create an extremely friendly atmosphere by crouching
down when they work with students in pairs. In this way, they are at the same level as
their seated student. However, some students find this informality worrying. Some
teachers are even happy to sit on the floor, and in certain situations this may be
appropriate. But in others it may well lead to a situation where students are put off
concentrating.
All the positions teachers take - sitting on the edge of tables, standing behind a
lectern, standing on a raised dais, etc - make strong statements about the kind of
person the teacher is. It is important, therefore, to consider what kind of effect such
physical behaviour has so that we can behave in a way which is appropriate to the
students we are teaching and the relationship we wish to create with them. If we want
to manage a class effectively, such a relationship is crucial.
Some teachers tend to spend most of their class time in one place - at the front
of the class, for example, or to the side, or in the middle. Others spend a great deal of
time walking from side to side, or striding up and down the aisles between the chairs.
Although this, again, is to some extent a matter of personal preference, it is worth
remembering that motionless teachers can bore students, while teachers who are
constantly in motion can turn their students into tennis spectators, their heads moving
from side to side until they become exhausted.
Most successful teachers move around the classroom to some extent. That way
they can retain their students' interest or work more closely with smaller groups.
How much the teacher moves around in the classroom will depend on cur
personal style, where she feels most comfortable for the management of the class and
whether or not she wants to work with smaller groups.
In order to manage a class successfully, the teacher has to be aware of what
students are doing and, where possible, how they are feeling. This means watching
and listening just as carefully as teaching. This will be difficult if we keep too much
distance or if we are perceived by the students to be cold.
Awareness means assessing what students have said and responding
appropriately. According to the writer Michael Lewis, a colleague of his, Peter
Wilberg, put this perfectly when he said that «the teacher's primary responsibility is
response ability»! This means being able to perceive the success or failure of what is
taking place in the classroom, and being flexible enough to respond to what is going
on. We need to be as conscious as possible of what is going on in the students heads.
Perhaps our most important instrument as teachers is our voice. How we speak
and what our voice sounds like have a crucial impact on classes. When considering
the use of the voice in the management of teaching, there are three issues to think
about. Clearly, teachers need to be audible. They must be sure that the students at the
back of the class can hear them just as well as those at the front. But audibility cannot
be divorced from voice quality: a rasping shout is always unpleasant.
 It is important for teachers to vary the quality of their voices - and the volume
they speak at - according to the type of lesson and the type of activity. The kind of
voice we use to give instructions or introduce a new activity will be different from the
voice which is most appropriate for conversation or an informal exchange of views or
information.
Just like opera singers, teachers have to take great care of their voices. It is
important that they breathe correctly so that they don't strain their larynxes.
The way that teachers talk to students - the manner in which they interact with
them - is one of the crucial teacher skills, but it does not demand technical expertise.
It does, however, require teachers to empathise with the people they are talking to by
establishing a good rapport with them.
Apart from adapting their language, teachers also use physical movements and
gestures, such as shrugging the shoulders for 'who cares?' or scratching the head to
show puzzlement. Many teachers also use gestures to demonstrate things like the past
tense (pointing back over their shoulders).
There are two general rules for giving instructions: they must be kept as simple
as possible, and they must be logical. When teachers give instructions, it is important
for them to check that the students have understood what they are being asked to do.
The contexts in which teachers work have an important influence on teaching,
since different settings involve teachers in different kinds of roles.

The teacher as controller. Teachers as controllers are in complete charge of

the class. They control not only what the students do, but also when they speak
and what language they use. The teacher as controller is closely allied to the
image that teachers project of themselves. Some appear to be natural leaders
and performers, while some are quieter and feel happier when students are
interacting amongst themselves. Where teachers are addicted to being the
centre of attention they tend to find it difficult not to perform the controlling
role and this has both advantages and disadvantages.
 When teachers are acting as controllers, they tend to do a lot of the
talking, and whilst we may feel uneasy about the effect this has on the
possibilities for student talking time it should be remembered that it is
frequently the teacher, talking at the students' level of comprehension, who is
the most important source they have for roughly-tuned comprehensible input.

The teacher as assessor. A major part of the teacher's job is to assess the
students' work, to see how well they are performing or how well they
performed. Not only is this important pedagogically, but the students quite
naturally expect it, even after communicative activities. We must make a
difference between two types of assessment: correction and organizing feedback.
Gentle correction involves showing students that a mistake has been made but
not making a big fuss about it. Whereas, in the accurate reproduction stage, we
insist on students saying the sentence, phrase or word correctly once they have
been told about their mistake, with gentle correction the teacher says things
like 'Well that's not quite right… we don't say "he goed …", we say "went".'
The important point is that nothing more happens. The student doesn't have to
repeat his or her sentence correctly; it is enough that a mistake has been
acknowledged. This kind of gentle correction, used in the right way, will not
seriously damage the atmosphere of pairwork or freer conversation.
Organising feedback occurs when students have performed some kind of
task, and the intention of this kind of assessment is for them to see the extent
of their success or failure and to be given ideas as to how their (language)
problems might be solved. We must make a distinction between two different
kinds of feedback Content feedback concerns an assessment of how well the
students performed the activity as an activity rather than as a language
exercise. Thus, when students have completed a role play the teacher first
discusses with the students the reasons for their decisions in the simulation.
Form feedback, on the other hand, does tell the students how well they have
performed linguistically, how accurate they have been. When students are
involved in a communicative activity the teacher will record the errors that are
made so that they can be brought to the students attention after whatever
content feedback is appropriate.

The teacher as organizer. Perhaps the most important and difficult role the
teacher has to play is that of organiser. The success of many activities depends
on good organisation and on the students knowing exactly what they are to do.
The main aim of the teacher when organising an activity is to tell the
students what they are going to talk about (or write or read about), give clear
instructions about what exactly their task is, get the activity going, and then
organise feedback when it is over. This sounds remarkably easy, but can be
disastrous if teachers have not thought out exactly what they are going to say
beforehand.
The teacher as prompter. Often the teacher needs to encourage students to
participate or needs to make suggestions about how students may proceed in
an activity when there is a silence or when they are confused about what to do
next. This is one of the teacher's important roles, the role of prompter.
The role of prompter has to be performed with discretion for if teachers
are too aggressive they start to take over from the students, whereas the idea is
that they should be helping them only when it is necessary.
The teacher as participant. There is no reason why the teacher should not
participate as an equal in an activity especially where activities like
simulations are taking place. Clearly on a lot of occasions it will be difficult
for us to do so as equals. The teachers might join simulations as participants,
sometimes playing roles themselves.
The danger is that the teacher will tend to dominate, and the students
will both allow and expect this to happen. It will be up to the teacher to make
sure it does not.

Teachers should not be afraid to participate since not only will it

probably improve the atmosphere in the class, but it will also give the students
a chance to practise English with someone who speaks it better than they do.
 The teacher as resource. The teacher should always be ready to offer help
if it is needed. After all we have the language that the students may be
missing, and this is especially true if the students are involved in some kind of
writing task. Thus we make ourselves available so that students can consult us
when (and only when) they wish.
The teacher as tutor. This is the role the teacher adopts where students are
involved in self-study or where they are doing project work of their own
choosing. The teacher will be able to help them clarify ideas and limit the task ,
for example; the teacher can help them by pointing out errors in rough drafts;
the teacher can also offer the students advice about how to get the most out of
their learning and what to do if they want to study more.
This tutorial role - which approximates to a counselling function - is
often appropriate at intermediate and advanced levels. It is a broader role than
the others we have mentioned since it incorporates parts of some of the other
roles, i.e. organiser, prompter and resource.
The teacher as investigator. All the roles w e have mentioned so far have
had to do with the teacher's investigator behaviour as it relates to the students.
But teachers themselves will want to develop their own skills and they will
hope for a gradually deepening insight into the best ways to foster language
learning.
Teachers who do not investigate the efficiency of new methods and who
do not actively seek their own personal and professional development may
find the job of teaching becoming increasingly monotonous. Teachers who
constantly seek to enrich their understanding of what learning is all about and
what works well, on the other hand, will find the teaching of English
constantly rewarding.

1.2. Types of Student Interaction

 While learners may have individual preferences for the kind of interactional
style they favor in the classroom, the interactional dynamics of a classroom are
largely a product of choices the teacher makes about the learning arrangements he or
she sets up within a lesson. Most teachers use the following learning arrangements
depending on the kind of lesson they are teaching, though teachers use some more
frequently than others. There is no real limit to the way in which teachers can group
students in a classroom, though certain factors such as over-crowding, fixed furniture,
and entrenched student attitudes may make thing problematic. Nevertheless, teaching
a class as a whole group, getting students to work on their own, or having them
perform tasks in pairs or groups all have their own advantages and disadvantages;
each is more or less appropriate for different activities.

1.2.1. Whole Class Work

Whole-group instruction is the most traditional and common form of classroom

organization. Teachers generally gear their teaching to the «mythical» average
student on the assumption that this level of presentation will meet the needs of the
greatest number of students.

In the large group the teacher lectures, explains, and demonstrates on a topic,
asks and answers questions in front on the entire class, provides the same practice and
drill exercises to the entire class, works on the same problems and employs the same
materials. Instruction is directed toward the whole group, but the teacher may ask
specific students to answer questions, monitor specific students as they carry out the
assigned activities, and work with students on an individual basis.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to whole-class teaching in
language classes. Among the advantages are:
 • It enables the teacher to teach large numbers of students at the saute time. In
some countries, classes of up to fifty or sixty students are common, necessitating
the use of many whole-class activities.
• In situations where a mainstream classroom contains a number of ESL
students, the ESL students can feel that they are a part of the mainstream group and
are functioning under equal terms with them rather than being singled out for
special treatment.
• It can serve as a preparation for subsequent activities which can be completed
individually or in groups.

However, critics of whole-class teaching have pointed out a number of disadvantages.

• Such instruction is teacher-dominated, with little opportunity for active student

participation.
• Teachers tend to interact with only a small number of students in the class, as is
seen from studies of teachers' action zones.
• Whole-class teaching assumes that all students can proceed at the same pace.
However, slower students may be lost, and brighter students may be held back.

Although teachers can adapt whole-class activities to encourage more student

participation (for example, by stopping from time to time during an activity and
asking students to compare a response with a partner), teachers need to include other
types of teaching in their lessons to provide learners with a variety of opportunities
for communicative interaction and individual language use within the classroom.
Whole groups can be an economical and efficient way of teaching. The method
is especially convenient for teaching the same skills or subject to the entire class,
making assignments, administering tests, setting group expectations, and making
announcements. Bringing members of a class together for certain activities
strengthens the feeling of belonging to a large group and can help establish a sense of
community and class spirit.
1.2.2. Group Work
 The use of group work activities is another frequently cited strategy for
changing the interactional dynamics of language classrooms. In addition to the
benefits of pair work activities, group work has a number of additional advantages.

• It reduces the dominance of the teacher over the class.

• It increases the amount of student participation in the class.
• It increases the opportunities for individual students to practice and use new
features of the target language.
• It promotes collaboration among learners.
• It enables the teacher to work more as a facilitator and consultant.
• It can give learners a more active role in learning.

Successful group work activities involve decisions about the following factors:

Group size. An optimum size for group work needs to be determined based on
the kind of task students are carrying out. If the group is too large, student interaction
is affected; only a few students may participate, the others remaining silent or
passive.
Purpose. Group activities need a goal, procedures, and a time frame to
accomplish them, if they are to be focused and productive.
Roles. Decisions need to be made concerning (he different rules of group
members. Will they all have the same role? Are a group leader and secretary
required? Will students take on different personas in completing a task?
In general it is possible to say that small groups of around five students
provoke greater involvement and participation than larger groups. They are
small enough for real interpersonal interaction, yet not so small that members
are over-reliant upon each individual. Because five is an odd number it
means that a majority view can usually prevail. However, there are occasions
when larger groups are necessary. The activity may demand it see the poem
activity above where the number of students depends on the number of lines
in the poem), or we may want to divide the class into teams for some game or
preparation phase .
 But there are also disadvantages of group work.
• It is likely to be noisy (though not necessarily as loud as pair work can be).
Some teachers feel that they lose control, and the whole-class feeling which
has been painstakingly built up may dissipate when the class is split into
smaller entities.
• Individuals may fall into group roles that become fossilised, so that some
are passive whereas others may dominate.
• Groups can take longer to organise than pairs; beginning and ending group
work activities - especially where people move around the class - can take
time and be chaotic.
The interactional dynamics of a lesson can thus be viewed as resulting from the
interplay between the teacher's and the learners' interactional styles, the moment-to-
moment demands of instruction, and the grouping arrangements that have been set up
to facilitate teaching and learning. Lessons thus have a constantly changing
interactional structure, which can either hinder or support effective language learning.

1.2.3. Pair Work

 Despite the need for whole-class teaching and individual work in language
classrooms, it has often been emphasized that without other kinds of interaction,
students are deprived of many useful and motivating opportunities for using and
learning the new language. Various alternatives have been proposed which emphasize
the use of pairs and small groups in the classroom.
The following factors influence the nature of pair work tasks:

Information flow. For pair work tasks to promote better interaction, both
students need to have different information that they are required to share in order to
solve a problem or complete a task. Tasks with this type of information flow have
been described as two-way tasks, while tasks in which one student has new informa-
tion and presents it to his or her partner have been described as one-way tasks.
Product focus. Tasks are often more motivating if the result of the negotiation
or interaction is some kind of product, such as a list, a map, a completed diagram, or
a chart.
Choice of partner. Many different kinds of pairings are possible: for example,
by mixed ability levels, shared ability levels.
Roles of partners. For some tasks both students may share a common role; for
other tasks, one partner may serve as a peer tutor.
In pair work students can practise language together, study a text,
research language or take part in information-gap activities. They can write
dialogues, predict the content of reading texts, or compare notes on what
they have listened to or seen..

Advantages of pair work:

• It dramatically increases the amount of speaking time any one student gets
in

the class.
• It allows students to work and interact independently without the
necessary guidance of the teacher, thus promoting learner independence.
• It allows teachers time to work with one or two pairs while the other
students continue working.
• It recognises the old maxim that 'two heads are better than one', and in
promoting cooperation helps the classroom to become a more relaxed and
friendly place. If we get students to make decisions in pairs (such as deciding
on the correct answers to questions about a reading text), we allow them to
share responsibility rather than having to bear the whole weight themselves.
• It is relatively quick and easy to organise.

Disadvantages of pair work:

• Pair work is frequently very noisy and some teachers and students dislike
this. Teachers in particular worry that they will lose control of their class.
• Students in pairs can often veer away from the point of an exercise, talking
about something else completely, often in their first language. The chances of
'misbehavior' are greater with pair work than in a whole-class setting.
• It is not always popular with students, many of whom feel they would
rather relate to the teacher as individuals than interact with another learner
who may be just as linguistically weak as they are.
• The actual choice of paired partner ели be problematic, especially if students
frequently find themselves working with someone they are not keen on.

Through interacting with other students in pairs or groups, students can be

given the opportunity to draw on their linguistic resources in a nonthreatening
situation and use them to complete different kinds of tasks. Indeed, it is through this
kind of interaction that researchers believe many aspects of both linguistic and
communicative competence are developed. "One learns how to do conversation, one
learns how to interact verbally, out of this interaction syntactic structures are
developed" (Hatch 1978: 404).
 1.2.4. Individual Work

Individual work, or "seatwork," is generally the second most frequently used

teaching pattern in classrooms. It includes such activities as completing worksheets,
reading a comprehension passage and answering questions, doing exercises from a
text or workbook, and composition and essay writing. Among the advantages of
individual work are:

• It provides learners with the opportunity to progress at their own speed and in
their own way.
• It provides learners with opportunities to practice and apply skills they have
learned.
• It enables teachers to assess student progress.
• It enables teachers to assign different activities to different learners based on
individual abilities and needs.
• It can be used to prepare learners for an up-coming activity.

Among the disadvantages are:

• It provides little opportunity for interaction, both with the teacher and with
other students.
• It is sometimes difficult to monitor what students are actually doing during
individual work.
• Students may complete a task at different times and run out of things to do, creating
a classroom management problem.
For individual work to be accomplished successfully, a number of
characteristics of successful individual work have been identified:
1) It should be planned so that it relates to other kinds of learning ar-
rangements, rather than being an isolated "filler" activity.
 2) Students should be given specific tasks with clear goals. There should be
monitoring and follow-up to determine if students understand the task or are
completing it accurately.
3) Tasks should be at the right level of difficulty.
4) Students should know what to do when completing an activity.
If we wish students to work on their own in class we can, for example,
allow them to read privately and then answer questions individually; we can
ask them to complete worksheets or writing tasks by themselves. We can give
them worksheets with different tasks and allow individuals to make their
own decisions about which tasks to do. We can hand out different
worksheets to different individuals depending upon their tastes and abilities.
We can allow students to research on their own or even choose what they
want to read or listen to - especially where this concerns extensive reading.

1.3. Problem Behavior in the Classroom

 After the family, the school environment is the most important influence in a
child’s life in promoting social, emotional and academic development. As children
start and progress through school they are continually called upon to adapt to new
expectations, and therefore a certain amount of anxiety is to be expected. However,
when a particular behavior results in undue stress for the child and elicits negative
reactions from others, the behavior represents a distress signal. When this occurs, a
thorough analysis of what the problem behavior actually means to the individual
child can lead to interventions that can change the behavior and result in a more
productive adaptation for the child.

Most teachers, in many different learning cultures, have moments when their
students fail to cooperate in some way, thus disrupting the learning which should be
taking place, sometimes getting significantly 'out of control'. Such moments of
disruption can be unsettling not just for teachers but also for students.
There are many reasons for problem behavior. It can stem from a student's
reactions to their teacher's behavior, from other factors inside the classroom, or from
outside factors:
- The family: students' experiences in their families have a profound influence
on their attitudes to learning and to authority. Sometimes indiscipline can be traced
back to a difficult home situation. Sometimes home attitudes to English, to learning
in general, or even to teachers themselves can predispose students to behave
problematically.
- Education: previous learning experiences of all kinds affect students'
behavior.
- Self-esteem: a lack of respect from teacher or peers - or being asked to do
something where they are almost certainly bound to fail - can make students feel
frustrated and upset. In such a situation disruptive behavior is an attractive option. It
can impress peers, and does, at least, force the teacher to take them seriously.
- Boredom: when students are engaged with a task or a topic they are unlikely
to behave disruptively. But if they lose that engagement they may misbehave.
 - External factors: some external factors may affect students’ behavior too. If
they are tired they will not be able to concentrate. If the classroom is too hot or too
cold this may result in students being too relaxed or too nervy.
- What the teacher does: a lot will depend on how we behave in class,
especially when problem behavior first takes place.

Preventive discipline refers to establishing control systems in the classroom

and avoiding the breakdown of controls. It involves a series of strategies to modify
the surface behavior of the students so they are engaged in appropriate classroom
tasks. It also involves preventing students from getting out of control by reacting to
small, manageable incidents before they become big and unmanageable. Preventive
discipline permits the teacher to cope with student adjustment problems in class while
helping students cope with their feelings.
The task is to establish ways of dealing with behavior that do not disrupt the
group but still may be helpful to the students. It involves making judgments as to
when to tolerate certain student behaviors (without approving them), when to
modify behaviors, and when to interfere with behaviors in order to allow learning to
take place. Indeed, a certain amount of common sense and emotional maturity on the
part of the teacher is important in managing and modifying behavior.
To prevent problem behavior good teachers tend to:
1) Ignore a lot of behavior that is designed to provoke — they do not get pulled
into an escalation of the conflict between teacher and student.
2) Set fair limits and then do not negotiate them — they do not argue or
rationalize their demands in the middle of a conflict.
3) Keep confrontation out of their dealings with students.
4) Give a choice (as much as possible) when speaking to a student who is
misbehaving. For example, "you may finish your work now of after school".
Language and tone of voice are very important.
5) Stay calm and do not show excessive anger.
 6) Not take students’ misbehavior personally — they try not to be hurt by
misbehavior and do not retaliate. They remain in control of their feelings.
7) Be supportive but firm and show respect for the students.
8) Be positive, notice and reward good behavior.
9) Have a constant awareness of what is going on in the room and can attend to
more than one thing at a time.
10) Maintain group focus in the classroom even while being able to
individualize.
11) Be organized, prepared and do not make students wait for their lessons or
materials. They have backup materials and activities in case a lesson doesn’t work.
12) Establish a positive learning climate. They are firm, decisive, kind, patient,
consistent.
13) Have a planned instructional approach. They know that students respond to
organization and structure, they use meaningful learning experiences and take into
account such aspects as time management, assignments, grouping students, classroom
atmosphere.
14) Have some flexibility in expectations — for example, if something
extraordinary happens and children want to discuss it, this is taken into consideration.
15) Show optimism regarding academic performance.
16) Build self-esteem and self-confidence in their students and show self-
confidence themselves.
17) Remember that change takes time.
Whatever the reason for problem behavior, it should not be ignored when it
happens. How a teacher reacts to it should depend upon the particular type of
disruption and the person exhibiting the behavior. Nevertheless it is advisable to have
some general guidelines in mind for such situations:

• Act immediately: it is vital to act immediately when there is a problem

since the longer a type of behavior is left unchecked, the more difficult it is to deal
with. Immediate action sometimes means no more than stopping talking, pausing, and
looking at the student in question. Sometimes, however, it may demand stronger
action.

• Focus on the behavior not the pupil: we should take care not to humiliate
an uncooperative pupil. It is the behavior that matters, not the pupil's character.
Though it may sometimes be tempting to make aggressive or deprecatory remarks, or
to compare the student adversely to other people, such reactions are almost certainly
counter-productive: not only are they likely to foster hostility on the part of the
student and/or damage their self-esteem, they may also be ineffective in managing the
situation.
The way in which we deal with problem behavior has an effect not just on the
problem student' but also on the class. We need to treat all students the same
(something that adults as well as younger students are conscious of, though it is
especially at younger ages that favoritism is resented - by the favorite as well as
everybody else); we must treat the individual fairly, not overreacting, nor making
light of disruption, particularly if we and the class had agreed earlier it was
unacceptable.
• Take things forward: where a simple look or brief comment is not
sufficient, we need to think carefully about how we respond. It is always
better to be positive rather than negative. It is usually more effective for a
teacher to say Let's do this, rather than saying Don't do that. Taking things
forward is better than stopping them in other words.
Educators disagree as to the extent to which misbehavior should be
ignored. Although it seems contrary to the teacher's normal tendency, some
researchers have found repeatedly that the best procedure is to ignore
undesirable behavior while paying attention to and reinforcing desirable
behavior. If this is the case, then teachers have been undermining their own
managerial purposes by scolding, shaming, threatening, or punishing
students for misbehavior.
 For situations in which it is decided that punishment is appropriate and
will be effective, teacher must decide on its form and severity. The teacher
should establish criteria for using Punishment is construed by behaviorists as
an unpleasant stimulus that an individual will try avoid. Common
punishments are soft reprimands (heard оr by the student concerned);
reprimands coupled with praise; social isolation (detention); point loss in
academics; and being reported to someone outside the classroom
(disciplinarian, principal, parent). Corporal punishment should not be used.
Problem behavior in the classroom is one of the most difficult aspects of
a teacher's job. The teacher should learn to cope with misbehavior, but don’t
get upset or feel inadequate about it; accept the students as they are, but
build on and accentuate their positive qualities.