When Children Love to Learn, Teaching is Easy.

Teaching is easy when children love to learn!

I have had many different classrooms in Asia when I was teaching ESL. When I first started teaching ESL, some classes turned out a disaster because of the attitude of some of the students. I let them control the atmosphere in the classroom. I soon learned that in order for the majority of the students to enjoy the class and actually learn something, I had to come up with some tactics to control the not so controllable students.

Physical discipline is totally out of the question!

Playing mind games and making them lose face is also out of the question because in the long run, the other students look at you and don’t respect you for MAKING the other ones lose face. Its a big circle.

So in order to take care of difficult children in a foreign country, you must have an arsenal of tactics you could use to control them.

One tactic I used successfully was to not include the difficult child or children in the activities that the others enjoyed. This could be something as simple as colouring to some physical games like Duck, Duck, Goose.

They soon realize that by not being included in all the fun, THEY are the ones missing out.

BUT DON’T LET THEM LEAVE THE CLASSROOM! Keep them in the classroom that way they might still benefit from the lesson by watching the others. Who knows, maybe (more than likely) they will behave in the next class in order to participate.

Another successful tactic is to not play the scheduled game that the children LOVE playing because some of the students are not behaving. Don’t mention names so as not to make them lose face. All the other students know who the trouble makers are. Just say something like “Today we will not be playing Duck Duck Goose because some of the class were not listening. Instead we will be doing review.” That will get their attention. Even though the game that was planned is for review purposes, the students don’t know that. All they know is that they missed out on playing a game.

There are many other ways to take control of your class and I will be posting other successful tactics on this site periodically.

Just remember, Teaching is fun when the children love to learn. So make your classroom fun and it will take care of itself.