Classroom Management is Based On How Our Students Feel
We must make our classes interesting if we are to plug into the CI powerhouse and make it work for us. Here is the key sentence that we must keep in mind at all times if we are to make CI work for us:
Students must be interested in the comprehensible input that they hear and the only way that can happen is if they feel good when they are in the classroom. Why would someone want to listen to something in a setting in which they don’t feel comfortable?
So, whether or not our classrooms are well-managed depends entirely on how they feel! This statement does not apply to other subjects but it is completely true in our field. Academic gains follow, do not precede, how the students feel and how the classroom feels.
But there’s more: Good classroom management is a direct result of how a classroom is made to feel in the first days of class each year, and not vice versa. It’s not enough to think in the summer the general thought that this year you are going to build community. You have to have a method to have that community up and running by the end of the first week of the year – you must act then or not at all. So for that you need a plan.