Classroom Management
Essential Skills for Classroom Management
The Essential Skills for Classroom Management package outlines the minimum required expectations of a teacher in a Queensland state school for effective classroom management.
Behaviour management fits within a broad educational context. To specifically address student learning needs, teachers must understand behavioural development as well as the range of cognitive and physical differences that influence student learning styles and abilities. When students are provided with relevant curriculum and tasks that allow them to succeed, the need for management conversations in classrooms is reduced.
The core elements that allow for successful learning are:
- teachers setting clear expectations
- acknowledging appropriate behaviour, and
- timely correction of inappropriate behaviour
There are 10 Essential Skills that provide teachers with a framework for developing these core elements of effective teaching.
The 10 Essential Skills for Classroom Management are:
| Essential Skill | Description |
|---|---|
| 1. Establishing expectations | Making rules |
| 2. Giving instructions | Telling students what to do |
| 3. Waiting and scanning | Stopping to assess what is happening |
| 4. Cueing with parallel acknowledgment | Praising a particular student to prompt others |
| 5. Body language encouraging | Smiling, nodding, gesturing and moving near |
| 6. Descriptive encouraging | Praise describing behaviour |
| 7. Selective attending | Not obviously reacting to some bad behaviour |
| 8. Redirecting to the learning | Prompting on-task behaviour |
| 9. Giving a choice | Describing the student’s options and likely consequences of their behaviour |
| 10. Following through | Doing what you said you would |
Teachers need to establish order in their class, and then respond flexibly to student management issues. Once students have a positive concept of themselves as learners and have developed greater self control, the Essential Skills pertaining to the ‘language of correction’ are likely to be less frequently required.
Further information can be sourced from the Behaviour Support section from the Department of Education, Training and the Arts.